List of apps that I use a lot and ways to get their functionality on Linux so I can bail out of Windows as smoothly as possible

TL;DR: Everything other than Honkai Impact 3rd works perfectly fine or has perfectly adequate alternatives, and I decided to just stay on Windows until HI3 starts playing nice with Wine (or even gets a proper Linux client!) or I stop playing it.

Browser
- Currently using Firefox
- Will stick with FF
  - Truly indie alternatives: Ladybird, Basilisk, anything involving Servo
PIM
- Currently using Thunderbird
  - Successfully dumped Outlook and calendar.google.com!
- Lots of alternatives because email isn't an utter clusterfuck like web 2.0
  - Evolution, for instance
    - ~~More than TB~~ TB did grow on me fast and I'd like to stick with it (and then I didn't like version 115 so Evolution and Kontact are back on the table if I don't like the latest TB when 102 breaks)
    - More like old Outlook, I think?
  - If FF dies and I switch to Vivaldi I'll try to use it as my PIM too, unless TB somehow lives on
- ~~To-do: Actually learn to use my PIM, details in pim.md~~ done enough, I think - man I love TB
  - I wonder if there's a proxy that converts Google's own APIs to standard APIs (like properly implemented IMAP and CalDAV and stuff) that would make PIMs play nicer with G stuff?
    - I wonder how hard it'd be to make one, on a scale of "connect perfect Google SDK to perfect standard API library" to "reinvent TCP"?
Office suite
- Currently using MS Office
- Have to switch to LibreOffice
  - Problem: Writer has some weird-ass math input system that's nothing like Word's beautiful WYSIWYG MathJax emulator thingamajig
    - Workaround: Use a Markdown editor with MJ support (e.g. Joplin) for documents containing lots of math
    - ~~Workaround 2: Learn LaTeX and ascend above the pathetic world of word processors~~
      - Too tedious for class notes and stuff
    - Not-a-workaround: Get Word to run on Wine
    - Actual solution: Git gud at Writer
      - https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/texmaths-1
Chat
- Could use Discord, Chatterino, Slack, MS Teams
- Chatterino is libre, it has to work
- Discord ostensibly works but uses a very old Electron which breaks Wayland
  - Hence, Firefox
- Slack and Teams are work apps, so making them play nice with whatever OS my work computer runs is the IT department's problem
  - (Slack does work great, both in Firefox and as an Electron "app", and AFAIK Teams has a webapp that nominally does the thing)
- Konversation if Chatterino doesn't work well as a normal IRC client (should test it on #osu someday)
- Something for Matrix?
Text/code editor ~~and IDE~~
- Currently using Notepad, unmicrosofted-vscode (and Notepad++ sometimes)
- KWrite replaces Notepad and Notepad++
- Need to learn Emacs to replace both and possibly other things
Cloud storage
- Using/might use OneDrive, Google Drive
- Rclone supports both and then some more
Audio player
- Currently using foobar2000
- Need something that lets me give the currently playing song to OBS
  - Two ways: a Text Source pointing to a temp file the player writes to, or something involving the websocket API
    - fb2k only does the former (formerly via Now Playing Simple and currently via a JScript contraption) unless I learn the SDK (which I don't feel like doing) or find a JScript websocket library
- Will try switching to Quod Libet
  - Python plugins!
Video player
- Currently using vanilla mpv
- Will stick with mpv
  - Could set up uosc or switch to a nicer frontend like Celluloid
- VLC is perfectly viable, of course, in case I get sick of mpv
- Does KDE have an mpv frontend or some other user-friendly FFmpeg-based player that's lighter than VLC?
Image editor
- Currently using GIMP and Paint
- KolourPaint replaces Paint, GIMP stays
  - Is there a Paint-like that looks more like 7/10/11 Paint than XP Paint, and if not, does the former work on Wine? Paint got nonsensically good lately and I'm down to stick with it
- Let's install Krita too, whatever
  - Might be what I want KolourPaint to be
Audio editor
- Currently using Audacity
- Will stay on Audacity
Video editor
- Currently using Shotcut
- May switch to Blender
Games and stuff
- See games.md. Basically:
  - A fucking gacha game may or may not be preventing me from jumping ship to Linux
    - My HI3 brainworms went missing, so this might not be as big a problem as it was when W11 came out
    - Almost everything other than HI3 (most importantly Warframe and osu!) does play nice
  - Lutris seems essential
  - Most utilities seem to play nice, either natively (OBS, Steam) or on Wine
    - Android emulation is a point of concern
Backup
- Currently using Duplicati - robust but slow? (especially when restoring)
  - Important to note: allows backups that are incremental and encrypted and compressed and multi-version
- Need to wholly rethink how backups work
  - Windows is a clusterfuck wherein copying $HOME somewhere and calling it a backup is literally not a thing (put your 2000s casual game's save data in C:\ProgramData and use AppData for both per-user installations and actual app data, what could go wrong?)
  - On Linux this is possible and entirely feasible, but requires setting things up carefully (e.g. no manual mucking with anything outside of ~)
    - Then backups become simple, but how make incremental+encrypted+compressed+multi-version backup?
      - cp ~ /some/backup/dir is none of those things
      - rsync is incremental
      - rsync+VeraCrypt is incremental (maybe)+encrypted
      - Could pile on more stuff but then I could as well use a real backup tool
  - Might just keep using Duplicati or switch to KBackup instead of rsync or something. Still want "copy ~ wholesale = backup" to hold because it simplifies the config
    - Plus a smol script to push the backup to some cloud drive?
    - What do about software installed in ~ (chiefly steamapps and Wine)?
      - What if, instead of worrying about optimizing the backup size, I just got a bigger SSD.
  - Holy grail: an installation script that automatically installs my chosen distro and restores my backup and all my apps
Misc utilities to figure out on the fly
- File archiver: Not PeaZip probably
- Drive usage visualizer: QDirStat
- BitTorrent client: qBittorrent or Transmission
- Some kind of audio/video tag editor, like Kid3
- Some kind of screenshot taker, like ksnip
- Video downloader: yt-dlp
- Some kind of desktop widget engine, like Eww?
  - Plasma has its own apparently
- ~~GNU Stow for handling dotfiles~~ xd what if I made my ~ a Git repo that only tracks dotfiles?
Things that I don't get to choose on Windows
- DE/WM: KDE Plasma
  - The Firefox of desktop environments
  - Seems to play nice with Wayland (but can't use a wlroots compositor 😔)
  - Possible alternatives: L"X"Qt, Sway
- Display protocol: Wayland
  - I heard horrifying things about X and don't want it on my PC
  - May get cucked by Nvidia
- Audio driver thing: PipeWire
  - PulseAudio is just obsolete
- qpwgraph
  - Necessary for making PW work
- And the distro?
  - Will try Debian, Arch, Mint, and Fedora (or Nobara) in that order, settling with the first one that works
    - All are sensible distros for normal people (Arch less so maybe, but then I'm not normal people)
    - Fedora should make a good last resort that Just Werks™ and isn't Ubuntu

dorukayhan/apps.md

StarWolf3000 commented Jun 7, 2025

Uh oh!