Good afternoon,

I thought here I would go ahead and list the software I use on a regular basis, and why I personally use it. Maybe you use the same software as well, though I'd love to hear your thoughts on it:

Linux Mint: This is my OS of choice. There are two versions of it, an Ubuntu-base (the regular version), and a Debian Edition (Also known as LMDE), which is a community made distribution of GNU/Linux based out of Ireland and France. It does use the repos for Ubuntu or Debian Stable depending on the version you grab, but the software is out of date, unless you get the latest version (22 for the regular, 6 for LMDE). For LMDE, however, you might be able to use the Debian Testing repos. I'd have to experiment with that on a VM.

i3: A keyboard-driven automatic window sizing desktop environment (Dynamic tiling window manager), rather than point-and-click environment (Desktop), designed for beginners into tiling window managers. This is a good option for those learning how they work, with a beginner-friendly syntax used in a configuration file that is relatively easy to understand. It has plugins available to make i3 that much more extensible, like i3blocks (a status bar for i3), autotiling (a method to tile i3 a certain way) and bumblebee-status (Another status bar for i3). I have my config on Codeberg repositories.

Codeberg: A Free Software alternative to Mirosoft-compromised GitHub, based upon Forjego. It is essentially a European GitHub, without all of the nonsense of proprietary software, which makes people like me happy. This is where I store the repos for things I work on, like configs, Minecraft shader settings (yes, I have a repo for that), and my GNU/Linux dotfiles.

Anything based on Firefox: Do NOT use Chromium-based browsers (I'm fine with Electron, however)! Not one. Why I wrote it like this is because Chromium is Google compromised, so I use Firefox-based browsers, and not Firefox itself (for Mozilla is ironically an ad company now). Things like Librewolf, Mercury, Pulse Browser, Dot (when built from source), Floorp, IceCat and Waterfox are some good options for web browsers. Despite that nonsense, the Firefox base has some of the best methods when done right to protect yourself against Big Tech's prying eyes, depending on your threat model.

Kdenlive: This is my video editor of choice, as I use it to edit videos for both my personal channel and CoculesNation. While it is made by KDE, I use the AppImage so I don't clutter up my OS with Qt, since I already have Qt5 installed. Despite that, it's a video editor that gets the job done for me, and is Free Software (under MIT if I'm not mistaken). The editing capabilities could be certainly utilized for a professional setting if you know what your doing as well, but I like to keep things simple when I edit videos.

GIMP: This is the best alternative to Photoshop out there, alongside Inkscape (which is designed for vector rather than raster). It has much the same things as Photoshop, only without it being cloud-based with proprietary code to snatch everything on your drives for ML models learn from. A lot of people have been ditching Adobe for this roofie recently, and GIMP is a solid choice.

OBS Studio: Open Broadcasting Software, the premiere screen recorder, if it weren't for the resource shenanigans of the iOS companion app to use my tablet (and sometimes my phone) as a webcam. Pretty good stuff too for it being GPL-2 licensed.

Ardour: The DAW I use for my music, though it's an older version in 7.5 (though I'd like to get the binaries for the 8.x releases soon). It's one of the best DAWs I've ever used, though I'm experimenting with some others (maybe LMMS, of which is like FL Studio soon) to see if I like one better. I had tried MusE and Qtractor, but nothing beats Ardour in my opinion, which is definitely for professionals. Yes, you have to pay for the official binaries (as the GPL allows for that), but you can easily get it elsewhere, unless you want to support the developers directly.

Lutris: This is the launcher for games that are not on Steam, but rather, services like GOG or Itch, and even games you installed locally that aren't on Steam. It's designed for game preservationists in mind. Fun fact: One of the developers (Thomas "GloriousEggroll" Crider) also works for RedHat as a Fedora engineer, and made his own version of the Valve version of WINE, Proton; heck, even his own OS, being Nobara Project.

WINE: WINE is Not an Emulator; a compatibility layer designed to run Windows applications on GNU/Linux, which works well 90% of the time. Some apps need certain Windows DLL's, and that's where Winetricks comes in, which is designed to make that easy for someone to get certain Windows DLL's for a WINE sandbox.

That's a lot to take in, but I may have some more in the future if interest is garnered. Otherwise, have a good rest of your day!