20+ Best Linux Software

Every user of Linux has a set of her or his preferred, must-have apps. The variety depends on their habits, preferences, and most of the time on the distribution they utilize; this is because not all Linux distributions deliver the same applications by default.

Finding and trying out new applications is the most thrilling things about being a user of Linux, after all, virtually all of these apps are free to use. It is also interesting to get suggestions from other users. Thus, you get enough experience and knowledge to make your own list of Linux software. You will find lots of the same lists online. Some feature the more renowned, tried and true software, while others are likely to include new, yet, unfamiliar apps. This list is a combination of both, and the intention is to give a balanced overview of superior software for Linux while keeping you updated on the newest additions to the world of Linux.

2D Animation

Synfig Studio
  • Synfig Studio – Synfig Studio is a free animation software which works on multiple platforms. It features vector tweening, layers, filters, bone system, and advanced controls.

Email Reader

Thunderbird
  • Thunderbird – Thunderbird, made by the same developer of  Firefox, is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize. It is loaded with great features.

Video Player

Kodi
  • Kodi – If you are searching for a full-pledge media center for Linux, look no further than Kodi. Aside from being open source, this app also comes with a huge user base. It can handle music, videos, podcasts, pictures, as well as games from local and network media storage. What is more, you can also record television with it. Kodi can be personalized through skins as well as add-ons.
  • VLC Media Player – This media player is open source, fast, simple, powerful as well as super lightweight. It can play virtually any formats of media. It can stream online media as well and has nifty extensions for diverse tasks such as downloading subtitle straight from the player.

Digital Painting Tools

GIMP
  • Krita – A free painting app which can be utilized by amateur and professional artists, Krita is an open source sketching and painting platform that offers an option to the most expensive app of this type, it boasts performance and broad features. Due to its powerful capabilities and lineup tools, Krita has become a preferred app for texture renderers, illustrators, visual effects creators, and concept designers as well as 2D and 3D artists. This app also provides traditional and state of the art painting methods using creative tools which work on desktop as well as graphics tablets. Krita comes with many tools for blending, rendering, transforming, color mixing, layering, smoothing, mirroring and many others. This is also able to manipulate the photo and work with HDR pictures. This is made with over nine brush engines. Krita offers various kinds of brushes which artists can utilize depending on which one they find comfortable. The brushes are made to perform exceptional and special works and are utilized to please the specific needs of the user. What is more, with this app, you will be capable of creating your own brushes and tag them in an excellent tagging system.
  • GIMP – This is the alternative for Photoshop exclusively made for Linux. It’s open source, feature-rich and professional photo editing app. It is also filled with an array of tools for controlling images. The best thing about it is that there are various customization choices available and 3rd party plug-ins for boosting the experience.

Music Player

Lollypop
  • CMUS – If you love minimalism and want your terminal window, then this app is for you. CMU is an open source, fast, and lightweight as well as a robust terminal audio player for Linux. This app was released and distributed under GPL and works exclusively in a terminal based UI.  It is made to work on a text-only UI, which lessens the resources needed to run the app on old computer and systems wherein X window system, is not available. This comes with extra support for a lot of audio formats such as MPEG, MP3, ALAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, WavPack, FLAC, Wav, MOD, SHN as well as TTA. It starts fast and has lots of tracks. It has replaygain support features and offers continuous playback. It plays queue as well as brilliant compilations handling.
  • Rhythmbox – This music player is mainly designed for GNOME desktop setting. On the other hand, it works on many other settings too, and It does the basic tasks of a standard music player, which include CD burning and ripping, scribbling and many others. It supports iPod as well.
  • Lollypop – Lollypop is new and open source music player that comes with a stunning and easy to use interface. It provides an exceptional music organizer, party mode, online radio, and scrobbling support. Even if it’s a simple music player lack of advanced features, it’s worth giving a try.

Office Suite

WPS Office Free
  • WPS Office Free – Aside from being a good alternative to MS, it manages to replicate pretty much the whole appearance and base set of features. You can use this for free; this office suite takes account of presentation tool, word processor, spreadsheet and many others. It is compatible with MS document format. This has a superb choice of power tools, cloud support, and PDF conversion. It has a standard editing feature and helpful extras.
  • Libre Office – This is considered the most actively created open source office suite solely for Linux. It has six modules including Base, Math, Draw, Impress, Calc and Writer. Each one supports a broad array of file formats. It also supports 3rd party extensions. It’s the default office suite for lots of the Linux distributions.

Chat Client

Skype
  • Skype – Everybody knows that Skype is the most sought-after video chatting platform today. Recently, this app has released a new desktop client for Linux. Skype features all of the standard things, such as video and voice calling, bots, group chats, the capability to select between light and dark themes, screen sharing and many others.  Skype for Linux doesn’t support group video charts at present or outgoing screen sharing. But, Microsoft is planning to add these essential features to Skype in future versions.
  • Pidgin – This is the most chosen messenger of a lot of users of Linux, and this due to many good reasons. It supports many popular chat protocols such as Gtalk, Yahoo, IRC, XMPP ICQ and many others like social media site via official and third party plug-ins, this is one of the many reasons why many people love this app.  This also works on Windows and has a lot of exciting features including custom emoticons, filtering, buddy grouping, and various kinds of notifications, status messages and Now Playing.

Cloud Storage

Dropbox
  • Google Drive – This is the best free solution to store files on Cloud. The normal account gets 15GB of storage for free. It supports many major platforms, including mobile.
  • Mega – This app provides 50 Gigabyte of free storage. However, Mega has so many things to offer. The best thing about this is that it comes with an end to end encryption support for files. It has a solid Linux client known as Megasync.
  • Dropbox – This is considered one of the most famous cloud storage apps available. It provides you with 2 Gigabyte free storage, to begin with. It has a powerful and easy Linux client.

Torrent

  • Transmission – This app takes the simple approach. Transmission is an open source BitTorrent client that has minimal UI or user interface. It comes pre-installed with lots of Linux distributions.
  • Deluge – One of the best open source BitTorrent clients is Deluge. It comes with an amazing user interface. If you’re familiar with uTorrent, Deluge user interface will feel the same. It has different options for configuration and plug-ins support for different tasks.

Download Manager

  • XDM – XDM or Xtreme Download Manager in an open source and powerful tool designed with Java. It comes with all of the essential features of a download manager like smart scheduler, video grabber, as well as browser integration.
  • uGet – This is one of the best download managers available for Linux. Aside from open source, it also provides the whole thing you can look forward to a download manager. uGet provides sophisticated settings for managing downloads. This software can queue and continue the download, use many connections for downloading massive files, download files to various directories according to sorts and types and so on.

Web Browser

Firefox
  • Vivaldi – If you are looking for something different and unique, try Vivaldi. This web browser takes a new approach towards web browser. It is created on top of the Chromium project.  It is customizable and lightweight. Even if it new and lack of some essential features, Vivaldi is refreshing and does a good job.
  • Chrome – Chrome is a powerful and total solution for the internet. It has superb syncing features and provides a huge collection of extensions. If you used to Google eco-system, then Google Chrome is the best web browser for you. If you want a more open source solution, Chromium is worth trying out, which is the Google Chrome project is based on.
  • Firefox – If you’re not a fan of Chrome, then there is another option which is the Firefox. This web browser has been around for many years now and proven to be very stable and powerful web browser.

Conclusion

When looking for an app for Linux, it must be stable and robust. They have to be easy to access, and the installation process must be easy, and ideally, these will be cross-platform tools which work on other OS as well. Listed above are some of the best app for the Linux operating system that you can give a try.

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