1. "Xournal" is amazing, small install footprint, simple interface and can do everything you need with pdf's.

5. You should try [1] "Kdenlive", it has it's quirks (as all linux tools do) but it's probably the best open-source Linux video editor out there.

[1] https://kdenlive.org/en/

For video editing, Blender is the best FOSS tool I've tried.

But you now get Davinci Resolve for free on Linux. It blows the FOSS competition out of the water, being a software with probably millions of dev hours funded by Hollywood studios behind it. Blackmagic decided to go the way of providing the basic tool for free in order to build user base amongst hobby video editors, and it's not a bad move IMO.

Wow, thank you for that, I didn't know Resolve. I do use KDEnlive but I can't say I'm satisfied with it.

There's also Olive Editor [1], still in Alpha but shows potential.

[1] https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/

Lightworks also runs under Linux.

Resolve has a quite steep learning curve, at least it had for me without experience with other NLE. For my simple workflow it was too much and I backed-off.

Happy to see the recommendations here for video editors on Linux, will give some of them a try.

Sorry for piggy-backing on this thread, but is there a simple tool which will let me do a screen capture and annotate it. Something like ScreenFlow on Mac. I use Peek for screen-capture currently.

I wanted to annotate some text and OpenShot doesn't really work well for that as I can't place the text freely and am limited to a few templates.

OBS will probably be able to do what you want[1].

1 - https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio

I had too many headaches with Resolve 16.2 hanging on exports or UI stopping responding on Ubuntu 18.04, I hope it gets better. The camera stabilization filter is amazing.

Kdenlive does support MP4 as source assets, Resolve free only does ProRes MOVs and such. It's just an extra step with ffmpeg but still.

A little out of topic, but which tool would you recommend for just the basic video editing on Linux? Nothing fancy, just cutting and pasting videos together, possibly with some simple transitions? Thanks!

My wife (a music teacher) was a Mac only video editing person. She now uses Open Shot almost exclusively, even though for $40 I bought her Sony Vega (she was complaining about Open Shot at the time). I think Open Shot is a good gateway to Blender or other video editing tools. She does all her stay at home videos on Open Shot now because she can do it so quickly. I would say it took about a week to get really comfortable making simple videos.

Not OP, but I think OpenShot is made exactly for this kind of simpler editing. It's akin to Windows Movie Maker.

ffmpeg - you can do declarative editing combined with a Makefile. Clips can be previewed with `mpv --osd-fracitons` or equivalent.

Avaliability of Davinci on Linux is impressive. I hope other productivity products do the same thing.

The basic version is also free on Windows & Mac.

I have tried many video editors including OpenShot, Cinelerra and Blender to finally arrive to Kdenlive and stay with it! It is still in an active development and getting better and better! I also definitely recommend trying anyone Kdenlive.

"Quirks" is an understatement. Last I checked, you couldn't even have multiple timelines in the same project, every bit of editing had to be in the one same timeline.

This feels off topic. I agree with these suggestions and appreciate the suggestion for Xournal, will look into that.

But TFA focused on fundamental command line tools and shells, not office productivity apps.

There are thousands of articles on the classical command line tools grep, awk etc. With a subject "Linux Productivity Tools" I think this was both on topic and valuable.

+1 I find the discussion here more appropriate to the "Linux Productivity Tools" title than the original article.

Seconded.

Just an addition to point 1: There's also Xournal++ [0]; some parts are based on Xournal but it provides some additional functionality [1].

I switched from Xournal to Xournal++ four weeks ago and it's been a blessing.

[0] https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

[1] https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp#features

See also xournal++ - https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

1. Xournal to annotate PDFs (aka sign contracts without printing them and scanning them back).

Will check it out. For PDFs I mostly use Master PDF Editor

2. LibreOffice of course for most document related work

For me LibreOffice is a bad nightmare. I use the commercial Softmaker.

6. pdfsandwich and Tesseract OCR for OCR/turning PDFs into searchable files

Good luck with that. My results with Tesseract were always abysmal. I use ABBYY Finereader with wine. I would pay for a native Linux version. They have a Linux command line tool that has a biblical price tag.

12. Inkscape for messing around with vector graphics

Inkscape is good. I wish they would still develop Xara XL

What I am missing in your List:

Recoll. Find Stuff on your computer. One of my most important tools.

Try scantools instead of pdfsandwich for creating searchable OCR'd PDFs:

https://cplx.vm.uni-freiburg.de/scantools/

Easy to install and use and works great.

This is an excellent list. I just want to add that jetbrains products (intellij, webstorm, etc) all run perfectly well on Ubuntu (and probably other distros?), with regular releases using their toolbox app.

Not affiliated in anyway. Just a very happy customer, but want to plug PDF Studio [1]. I've used Atril, Evince, Adobe, PDFXChange (through WINE) and this PDF Studio (not FOSS) is worth every penny. It even interfaces with docusign (but you don't need it since you can import real digital signature) their support is amazing, and linux is first class there.

[1] https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/

As for PDF editing there is Scribus, which is fully free open-source (FLOSS).[0]

Scribus also available for Linux as AppImage.[1]

[0] https://www.scribus.net

[1] https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/AppImages

For those asking about video editing, don't forget about Shotcut. I keep an eye on most gpl projects in github and I see consistent updates and communication from them, on top of it really advancing in features lately. Shout out to the shotcut team.

https://github.com/mltframework/shotcut

Can definitely vouch for Shotcut. I tried everything I could find a year or so ago, and Shotcut was by far the nicest to work with.

I'd be using LaTeX for professional looking documents.

LaTeX is great for professional-looking typesetting, and it has the power to do just about any layout tricks you want, but, in practice, you'll be fighting an uphill battle if you try to trick it into doing something that someone out there hasn't already written a package for.

(I say this as a professional mathematician, who lives his life in LaTeX. It's fantastic for writing math, and trusting that all the kerning etc. will be handled properly. However, when I want any formatting tricks, even after 25 years I still have to turn to my local TeX guru, who more often than not says "you don't really want to do that with TeX.")

Not sure what formatting tricks you mean, but that doesn't seem quite fair. When I want to do anything unusual, I google my problem and almost always there's a question on Tex stack exchange (which is blessed with the participation of most of the experts in the subject) with answers giving several easy ways to do it, using packages I already have on my computer! And it's easy to make your own commands when existing ones don't do the job.

The canonical one is forcing image placements. Sure you can Google and get a result, but all of them are prefixed with "if you _realy_ wany to do this here's my preferred workaround, but you should let Tex do the type setting".

> When I want to do anything unusual, I google my problem and almost always there's a question on Tex stack exchange (which is blessed with the participation of most of the experts in the subject) with answers giving several easy ways to do it, using packages I already have on my computer!

Yes, exactly! As I said:

> if you try to trick it into doing something that someone out there hasn't already written a package for.

There's an incredible package library out there, rivalling CPAN, and I love TeX and won't speak against it; but, if you try to step outside the package library (or even if you try to compose packages in sensible-seeming ways), as is very easy to do if you try to view TeX as a general-purpose typesetter, it rapidly becomes clear that there's a lot of magic going on that those packages hide away (more or less neatly, depending on their maturity), and that is hard to reproduce on your own, or add to.

I would say the vast majority of business documents, proposals, contracts, etc are collaborative editing with others. I didn't mention it but basically Google Docs and Sheets rules the world with these given we have a 50 user grandfathered account. For contracts, end result is exported to PDF and signed with Xournal and sent to the client for countersignature.

I meant to use LaTeX beamer to build these slides but couldn't figure an easy way to make the "Anatomy" figures eg. on slides 8,14,15 etc.

Tikz maybe?

Could try out Blender for your video editing. It also appears that DaVinci Resolve has support for Linux.

DaVinci Resolve has pretty unfortunate restrictions on what graphics card drivers you can use on Linux

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DaVinci_Resolve

Brilliant! I found this as well https://www.fosslinux.com/24381/how-to-install-davinci-resol....

Does anyone know of some modern blender tutorials aimed specifically at video editing?

if possible, including capturing footage form the screen (screen casts).

This us a great addon I discovered recently, but nevertheless they have an introductory video about the Blender editor: https://github.com/GDQuest/blender-power-sequencer/blob/1.5....

I'm showing my bias but my good friend Andrew runs Blender Guru on YouTube. Admittedly he covers everything from beginner to advanced so I don't know where your skill level sits, but Andrew has a lot of content.

I had totally forgotten about Blender since I never really understood 3D animation. But great idea. Thanks for both suggestions.

> 5. Technically I've tried video editing with OpenShot, but do find myself back at Final Cut Pro X on my now 6 year old Macbook Pro for that for now

I wish that there was a better video editing alternative for a non-mac... Openshot and the others I tried crash too much (Openshot crashed for me today while trying to do simple trim)

The only one that I could always make work is Kdenlive. That said I never tried DaVinci Resolve as it's a bit beyond my use-cases, but I've heard good things about it.

Have you tried Davinci Resolve? It is one of the top 3 video editing suites, and it actually even runs on Linux native! It is even supported on redhat (but works on others too). Very stable as well (unlike Adobe's jokes).

I agree with you regarding crashes. Kdenlive has been much more stable for me but I don't really like it. Can't say exactly why but it just feels clunky.

I've not had an issue with openshot personally, though I haven't had to much more than trimming.

I use arch linux, so whatever the latest version released on that.

The new 2.5.1 version on OpenShot is a big stability improvement over 2.4 (which is the current repo version)

2.5.1 is the version of openshot-qt that I was using

For 5, good alternatives: Shotcut and Kdenlive.

and 13. Krita for digital painting

I'll also add Olive[1] as an alternative video editor. I tried shotcut this weekend for just a simple clip/split mashup of videos and it was so slow and cumbersome. Olive on the other hand was extremely responsive.

[1] https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/

Thanks for this list! Wish I knew about Xournal earlier this year.

Care to share any details about pdfsandwich and tesseract? As in, do you have some scripts to glue it all together?

Xournal++ is also worth a look. It's a fork that includes a few features I missed in the original, otherwise it's almost exactly the same.

Great list!

> 5. Technically I've tried video editing with OpenShot, but do find myself back at Final Cut Pro X on my now 6 year old Macbook Pro for that for now

Have you tried Kdenlive lately?

Thank you for the suggestion. I'll have to try it out.

I second that suggestion :)

In your opinion, what's the best GUI for QEMU/KVM?

I'm a big fan of GNOME Boxes. The developers put a lot of care into the UI design and into choosing sensible defaults so most things work well out of the box. However, there are some kinds of advanced tasks that can only be done via virt-manager. I doesn't happen very often for me but when it happens it can be useful to know how to use virt-manager to configure the VMs that GNOME Boxes created.

https://blog.agchapman.com/configuring-gnome-boxes-vms-using...

Virt-manager

+1 for virt-manager.

But you know what bothers me? Virt-manager is mature and feature-complete, and RedHat has discontinued it in favour of cockpit.

Cockpit is cool and I like it, but it's not as complete as virt-manager.

In certain forms, text need to be filled in a series of square boxes. If there is an option to adjust character spacing, you can in fact fill such fields too using a monsospace font. But I am yet to come across an open source (or even free) tool (for annotating PDFs) which can adjust character spacing too. Can Xournal++ do it? If not, are there any other open source or free tools that can manage it?

If all else fails, convert to SVG in Inkscape and edit it there. Export back to PDF when you're done.

Yes, only that it has to be done page by page and then you have to merge the pages back.

For OCR I use OCRmyPDF[0] on my Mac (also available for Linux and Windows). It does a very good job, is pretty fast, can even OCR images by converting them to PDF and you can use different languages. It also reduces the file size significantly. I really like it.

[0]https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF

> 8. Tons and tons and tons of command line stuff that Linux is well known for

And this is what covered by "Linux Productivity Tools" slides.

I use Ledger for double entry accounting.

https://www.ledger-cli.org/

Ohh this seems SO much nicer than Gnucash! Thank you!

Kinda like this guy except I use google apps for documents and sheets, VSCode for an IDE and...

I boot Win10 for Steam games, Fusion360 and AutoCAD.

There's so many games on Steam that run native on Steam or really well via Proton. I abandoned Windows a few years ago with video games being my last hold-out. If it doesn't work under Proton or isn't native, the game is a hard pass for me.

To each his own. Windows isn't that awful these days and wrestling with Nvidia drivers on Linux is a PITA and entirely Nvidia's fault.

Their drivers on Windows aren't that great, either.

> 5. Technically I've tried video editing with OpenShot, but do find myself back at Final Cut Pro X on my now 6 year old Macbook Pro for that for now

Checkout Olive video editor.[0]

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive

Thanks for the list. Btw LibreOffice Draw can also edit PDFs [1]

[1] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/13/using-libreoffice-as-a-pdf...

I'm in a very similar position and have had much the same positive experience you've had. I use most of the tools you listed plus a few others like Gitkraken (git gui), Blender (3d effects, logo, video overlays) and ffmpeg (occasional video optimization or editing).

Instead of Gitkraken I recommend GitG. Gitkraken is both sluggish and absolutely guzzles memory, which isn’t unsurprising considering its another Electron application.

I prefer tig which is ncurses based

Great list additions! Thank you.

Although it's difficult to use, I've found Natron for video editing to be not terrible, https://natrongithub.github.io/

It's like suggesting Nuke to do video editing, while possible, not the easiest and most likely you need previous experience with the software.

I use scantools for creating searchable PDFs:

https://cplx.vm.uni-freiburg.de/scantools/

Thank you for Xournal. I used LibreOffice for that but it added artifacts to my images (like a vertical black line to one if rendered as a PDF but not if rendered as a TIFF).

SolveSpace for engineering-oriented parametric CAD needs

I've been using Flowblade for video editing lately, and have been very impressed (granted, my needs are pretty simple).

Nice list! Thanks

This sort of sounds like a vegan/vegetarian telling me that the veggie chicken tenders taste a lot like regular chicken tenders.

Maybe I should have just downvoted and left it at that, but it's late at night, so here goes.

How exactly do you think a comment like this contributes to the discussion? Someone posted a list of tools they use. You reply with this. The world would be better off without this type of information-free negativity.

Twenty-five-year Linux user and lover here, and heck, I got a good chuckle out of the guy's comment.

Chuckles don't meet The Bar. /s

eat chicken of the woods

this analogy works on a deeper level than you think because you can make some really great vegan meat replacements although the majority of people just stubbornly refuses to believe we're there yet

vegetarian meat (usualy from industrial satay, made with dissolved soy in whatever chemical bath) is what drives me away from pretty much every vegetarian/vegan place.

this is why opensource that is just a cargo cult to copying even the bad decisions of commercial software harms more than help.

id be fine tasting a nice indian meal made with vegetables. but instead I get gnome changing the side of the window close buttons (while at the same time removing the options dialog to change it back) just because the designer du jour liked copying osx instead of windows. it's fake-meat all over again.

This makes no sense. Gnome has its buttons on the same side as Windows. You are probably thinking about ubuntu which patched gnome to move the buttons to the left.

And even ignoring that detail, the side the window buttons are on is entirely made up. Windows isn't the real OS with OSX as the fake windows clone. The gnome philosophy is to support a minimal number of configurations but to make sure they are all tested and work perfect. Other DEs allow full customizability but I have found them to be buggy.

How many desktop environments actually let you switch the window button side? I haven't seen one, and if you know one, why are you using gnome instead of it?

> How many desktop environments actually let you switch the window button side?

KDE does. And Gnome used to.

So use KDE then? Last time I tried it I found it to lack the polish that gnome has.

Give KDE a try. Gnome has steadily dumbed down and removed features; KDE is delightfully customizeable and very, very polished in current form.

This. After the KDE 4 debacle, I gave up on KDE because they cut all the functionality I relied on. However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how functional the newer KDE5/Plasma desktop is, especially once you change a handful of really ugly defaults (mouse cursors, window switcher and a couple other similar things)

That, imho, is the major boat anchor holding KDE down: the ugly defaults. If they would take a moment to apply tasteful default settings it would make a huge difference in the marketing value.

In the end, though, KDE is "just like Linux" in the philosophy of "you don't like it? change it!"

Out of the box, though, KDE Neon or Magneia are nice enough. The new Breeze theme is much better than Oxygen. What concerns me a lot more is that major features like Activities don’t “just work” on major Linux distributions (e.g. on Debian testing, on my desktop, trying to create a new activity just sort of hangs and causes a daemon’s cpu usage to spike to 100%

Interesting conundrum, with KDE I'm fighting the abundance of features not to break things but with GNOME I'm fighting the absence of features in order to make it productive.

Gnome still does:

Gnome tweaks -> Window titlebars

keep in mind that the tweaks app was a very voiced project against the gnome team. it kept fixing what they broke. it was mostly a f* you message ...that everyone must use daily, which say a lot about the message.

I can't remember the last time I clicked on a close/minimize/maximize button. May be when I was in middle school 20 years ago.

Not all meat substitutes are "industrial" after all they've been around about 2000 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_meat!