Useful Software
A common theme in this catalogue of software is that most entries here are good looking, lightweight, and easy to install (with Docker). Please send me any suggestions for additions should you have any!
Ubuntu Customizations
For my personal desktop, I run the latest distribution of Ubuntu, which at the time of writing is 19.10. On here, I have some minor customizations that vastly improve my QoL:
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Plank - An amazing dock solution that is dead simple and aesthetically pleasing
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Conky - System monitor program that is complicated to configure but reliable and simple when its up and running
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PopOS GNOME Shell Theme - All the beauty of PopOS along with the vanilla experience of good ol’ Ubuntu
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Papirus Icon Pack - Ubuntu icons are getting better but Papirus still has my heart
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Dotfiles - Dotfiles that I use for customization across my machines
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Arronax - Program for creating and modifying .desktop files
NOTE: Recently, I have tried most of the vanilla options on Ubuntu 19.10 and have been very pleased with the default gnome-shell theme. Therefore, I have elected to only use the Papirus Icon Pack as a customization.
Privacy Tools
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Wireguard - Its supported on nearly every platform, its dead easy to configure, and its blazing fast (Plus its not OpenVPN)
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Shadowsocks - Good for when you want to proxy but don’t need a full VPN
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Tor Browser - For the paranoid in all of us
InfoSec
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Burpsuite - Swiss Army Knife of web traffic middleware
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HxD (Hex Editor) - Plain ol’ hex editor
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Wireshark - Makes you feel like a hacker while you view network traffic whizzing by
Development Tools
For development, here are the bare essentials for any system:
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Visual Studio Code - The result of Microsoft making an actually good program
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Docker - Docker > VMs
Windows Specific Applications
Windows doesn’t come with all the features that Ubuntu comes with, so I add some additional tools to make it feel more like home:
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PuTTY - I find this to be the best SSH client for Windows
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Ubuntu for Windows - Good for when you don’t want to run a full Ubuntu VM to get some dev work done on Windows (is also compatible with VS Code)
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Notepad++ - A nice barebones text editor for Windows
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VMware Workstation - I prefer virt-manager but this is what you get with Windows…
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WinSCP - Nice simple SFTP client for Windows
DevOps
Cricket
Self-Hosted Solutions
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Hugo - I’ve tried things like Ghost but I like this for it’s simplicity and lightweightness
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Filebrowser - Beautiful and lightweight web-based filebrowser
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Homer - A really nice way to organize web apps into a digestible dashboard
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Trilium Notes - Good way to get away from Google Keep, Evernote, and OneNote
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Gitea - Github ripoff that works very nicely for self-hosted Git
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Draw.io - Online diagram creation app. You can use their hosted instance or host your own
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Cyberchef - Data encoding and decoding tool that runs in your browser
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h5ai - A theme and enhancer for an Apache2 file index
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Syncthing - Easy file syncronization tool
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Caddy - Reverse proxy and automatic HTTPS. What more can you ask for?
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MotionEye - A simple web interface for network cameras
ISOs
This is less of a list of applications and more of a list of application collections. Nevertheless…
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Tails - Privacy oriented Linux distribution based on Debian and Tor
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Kali Linux - You probably know about this; great infosec Linux distro
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UBCD - Good for debugging and data recovery
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MotionEyeOS - Super awesome way to turn a $20 Raspberry Pi Zero W + Camera module into a network camera. Might make a post about this…
Miscellaneous
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Firefox - Firefox > Chrome ( but Chrome is less ugly :’( )
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Enpass - Password manager
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HFS - HTTP file server for Windows. Good for sharing files on a local network quickly
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- Tool for burning images to SD cards and USBs
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PDF Manipulator - Swiss Army Knife for manipulating PDFs