Member Tips and Tricks: Top Linux Utilities

John Nelson

Editor’s note: John Nelson has provided this list of common applications and utilities that you can download and use in your Linux distribution of choice. Some distributions will come with many of these already pre-installed. For any that aren’t already installed look in the software manager/package manager and you will most likely find them. Many of these utilities are also available on Windows, and work just as well there too – an easy way for Windows users to download them is to use Ninite.

Office:

LibreOffice Office apps compatible with Microsoft Office files

Fonts / Ttf-mscorefonts-installer Fonts available via Software Manager, however common MS fonts package should be installed via the Terminal so that the MS Eula can be accepted. To input:  sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Kate Text editor (ex-Office cat)

Calibre e-Book reader/converter  (Ref home/user/calibre library)

pdf / Printer-driver-cups-pdf Create PDFs (files stored in folder ‘PDF’)

Gramps Genealogy – Family Tree creator

Internet:

Firefox Browser – suggest DuckDuckGo as search engine

Chromium Chrome based on this and it uses Chrome addons. Have installed this just in case needed to use Google Meet but have been able to use Firefox OK in Zoom & Google Meet.

Graphics:

Pinta Paint/drawing (Sim to Paint.Net, paste PrtScn grabs into this)

Gthumb Image viewer, organiser, some editing

Gimp Graphics/Paint – Powerful

Converseen Image converter & resizer

Krita Graphics/Paint – Good, easy to use

darktable Pro-type image editor, incl Raw photos

Utilities:

Zip / P7zip,  P7zip-full,  P7zip-rar For zipping & unzipping files

unrar For expanding .rar and .zip files

Krusader Ex-Accessories (new tools to /usr/bin) (Sim to Total Commander)

K3b CD/DVD burning app (needs MP3 codecs)

Qbittorent For downloading torrent files

Media info-gui Codec identfier

Etcher Create bootable USB from iso file

Clonezilla Disk imaging/cloning

Multimedia (Audio/Video):

Audacity Audio editor

VLC Audio & Video player incl DVDs

Ubuntu-restricted-extras Incl MP3 codecs, MS fonts (need for iView)

Handbrake   (not the CLI version) Video converter (incl DVD to single video file)

ffmpeg Audio & video encoder/decoder (for apps to use)

fre:ac CD ripper, uses online CD freedb

Kdenlive Video editor  (Some alternatives: OpenShot, Shotcut)