this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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Disclaimer: I tried searching for something like "useful programs", "useful packages", "useful tools", "recommended packages", etc. Don't see any posts like that, if this is a duplicate, then it's not intentional and my search skills have failed me.

Anyway, I was watching a YT video today and the guy launched a cool program in his terminal, I paused to see what he was running. It was btop, of course being new I never heard about it. Then I thought -- how many cool tools/packages are there, which people use, but I am not aware of?

So what do you like? What do you install on a fresh install? What are the most useful tools in your belt? What can't you live without on Linux?

Perhaps I'll find something useful :)

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[–] OUwUO@programming.dev 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

fish - Ever since I've made the switch to Linux, the terminal has been part of the experience. And, honestly, I wouldn't want it any other way. Besides its efficiency, I also very much enjoy how it automatically keeps track of everything I do within. I don't get that functionality whenever I do something within a GUI. But bash left a lot to be desired in that regard; its history simply didn't record everything. It was also pretty bare-bones; no syntax highlighting, no auto suggestions etc. Thus, after trying to bend bash (and later zsh) to my will and ultimately being dissatisfied with the janky mess I was left with, I finally gave in to at least give fish a honest try. The rest is history. Heck, it's the very first thing I install on a machine.

[–] rozodru@piefed.world 3 points 9 hours ago

yeah Fish along with DOOM Emacs are the first two things I install on my machine.

I used to use zsh with oh my zsh and various plugins and it would totally slow down my nixos system so then I decided to give fish a try and surprise surprise it had all the stuff I had to add on to zsh already baked in.

easily the best shell out there.

[–] steel_for_humans@piefed.social 3 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I saw fish recommended for new users in openSUSE's documentation. I want to try that. There is a way to switch to Bash for a particular script, right? I know that file-based scripts have the shebang line, so that's a non-issue, but what if I have a Bash command I copied from the Internet and my default shell is fish?

[–] OUwUO@programming.dev 2 points 1 hour ago

As I suppose the other user already went over your main query, I'll instead focus on what might have felt rather innocuous.

my default shell is fish

I subscribe to the school of thought that one should not change their default shell^[I suppose it could be fine~ish as long as it's POSIX compliant AND compatible with bash. Which, unfortunately, fish happens to be neither of the two.] through invoking chsh (or whatever other method that applies changes to /etc/passwd). This article does an excellent job at laying down the reasoning (and the recommended alternative). FWIW, the alternative's day-to-day experience provides all of the pros without any of the cons.

[–] Feyd@programming.dev 1 points 9 hours ago

Just prepend the command with "bash". If the script changes environment variables and you need that to happen in your fish environment there is https://github.com/edc/bass