Cooking Linux the right way: installing the right programs the right way
Preface
Again, I'm aiming at a "general desktop Linux user", which is non-existent by default, but if you use a computer, sooner or later you use the following:
- Some desktop environment
- A browser
- A messaging app
- A text editor
- Office apps to edit rich format texts, presentations, spreadsheets
- A backups program
- A minimal image editing program (crop and resize)
Video, photo, and audio editors are considered special for each case, so nothing to see here. :) The same for IDEs and games.
So, the questions you probably have are:
- What to install
- How to install
What to install
Regarding the desktop environments I use Gnome and I'd recommend it for the best desktop experience. The only exception could be a PC with limited resources and I'd rather use LXDE (LXQt) for that. Gnome is the one to support Wayland, and Wayland is great for the desktop vs. X Window system. The other Gnome 'pros' are:
- Great look and feel
- Adequate resource usage
- Lots of integrated tools and programs (notably screenshots, file manager, VPN client)
- Great controls for hardware (battery, Bluetooth, sound, and brightness)
- Accessibility options
- Gnome extensions!
It has a great terminal and a functional file manager, so the tuning you need here is gnome-tweaks and extensions. I'll cover Gnome setup in another article because it's where productivity matters.
Chrome became a de-facto standard for web browsing, so the same issue here: there are alternatives, but they all have some drawbacks in terms of speed and website compatibility. You could use Chromium to be Google-free, but then you need at least to add some password storage extension.
For messaging you could use Slack or Telegram. I'd not recommend web clients, as they are less functional. Some users may require the bad old Skype, it's OK.
For text editing the choice is wide, but to unleash the true Linux power (see the next article) you could install Vim and Emacs. They are great, I used both, although I'm writing this text inside Emacs. I had some problems with big texts in Geany, so I'd rather install some Electron-powered modern text editor if you edit plaintext-based files often. Even Visual Studio Code would do. :)
You are welcome to edit office documents in Google Docs, but if you need to edit something fast or view the document on the local disk it's handy to have something:
- WPS is recommended, I tested it and liked the most for compatibility
- OnlyOffice is limited if you use office features heavily
- LibreOffice sometimes does the things others can't, so I still have it
By the way, don't forget to install MS TTF core fonts to display presentations and rich format documents as it's intended to be.
For backups I use Deja Dup, it saved my digital life twice already: in cases of accidental folder deletion and HDD failure.
To edit images quickly (screenshots and memes) I use gThumb. Maybe there's a better alternative, I'm just quite satisfied with it.
You can also install VLC as it has all the codecs for playing video from the local drive, although most of the videos are online nowadays.
How to install
To install programs properly we need to put them into two baskets: (1) when new features are critical and (2) when they are not. For office applications and messaging I'd say that new features are critical because it's all about compatibility. So the approaches are different for each category: we install the first category using flatpak, as it's isolated and won't ruin the system; it's also updated well. And we use a standard package manager (apt for Debian-based systems and dnf for RedHat-based) for all the rest packages to minimize resource consumption.
Don't forget to add a flatpak catalog (or install flatpak first if it's not present). After that, we can install packages using instructions on flathub page. So, we install the following using flatpak:
- Slack
- Telegram
- WPS Office
- Skype (in case you need it)
- LibreOffice
- OnlyOffice
You can combine it in one command, just be sure to type the program names right. For the rest of the programs we do:
sudo [apt|dnf] install gnome-tweaks vim emacs deja-dup gthumb vlc
Chrome is easy to download and install from the official website. That's all for the programs installations, stay tuned for Gnome and core editors setup.