Top 10 Apps/Utilities to Increase Productivity on Linux

[Jashaswimalya Acharjee]

Hope everyone is well & Healthy in these tough times.

In this Lockdown Period, due to covid-19, many of us are switching more towards Virtual World. Among all the digital clutter floating around us, it is really hard for everyone to organize their stuff and properly plan out things and for us Linux-Geeks, around 90% of our work revolves around our beloved Terminals and Keyboards.( I love keyboards ... !!)

So here are few of the daily Productivity apps which you can try:

1. Cmus -> A Terminal Based Music Player. One of the fastest and best Lean Music Players of all time.
2. Vi/Vim and/or Emacs -> Now for the editor, let's just leave the editor wars aside, Both of Emacs and Vi/Vim is great and are very much feature rich. Emacs is more bloated than Vi/Vim. Heck even Emacs can be turned into a Window Manager, as you can do pretty much anything from within Emacs.
3. Planner -> Yes, Planner as the name suggests is an app or utility to Plan your tasks according to schedule. It has many nifty little features all around it so do give it a shot, and yes it has a GUI. It is also a Flatpak app and can be downloaded through Flathub if your distro doesn't have it in its repos.
4. Ciano -> Again another GUI app, Beautiful UI, with one purpose to convert multimedia files from one format to another.
5. ZSH/FISH -> ZSH and FISH are custom POSIX shells for a typical LINUX/UNIX systems. By Default BASH is the primary shell on a large number of systems, but lacks many "Essential" perks which ZSH/FISH shells provide. Such as auto-competion, custom designs of the shell prompts and all sorts of added functionalities.
6. Ranger -> So far This is the most minimalistic Terminal File Manager which I have tried. Vifm is also another best alternative.
7. OBS Studio -> For recording and streaming video and/or audio, one of the best OSS utilities out there is OBS Studio. Initial setup can be quit hard for beginners but its by far the best utility out there.
8. Kdenlive -> For all your video-editing needs, KDENLIVE is the one utility which you require.
9. KDE Connect/GS Connect -> It is the ultimate app/utility which brings Apple's Airdrop like feature as well as Cross-Clipboard sharing between your android Device and PC. It has been a life saver copying and pasting stuff to-&-fro Android Phones and PC. Now one limitation, it only works if both the devices are connected to the same Wifi network, bluetooth connectivity is still in Beta stage.
10. qBittorrent -> For downloading files over torrent/P2P.
    

(Some of them may not be available for all distro's package managers, if not then go to their official page and build from source.)

And as always RTFM (Read the Fun Manual) Before asking queries.