What's your favourite "just works, day after day" Linux software?
The sort of program that once set up, just ticks along without fuss or bother forever.
For me, as I'm replacing the vms today which I set up five years ago and haven't needed to touch since;
- HAProxy
- KeepaliveD
Not easy to learn, but once they're running, they both go on forever.
108 replies
Debian and basically everything in its repos. Might be somewhat old, but it is really fucking stable
My small selfhosted system appreciates this very much. Having Debian as my base OS makes everything easier.
Total agreement. So many unsung heroes involved in Debian. Work has agreed with me - today's job involved migrating those load balancers to Debian underneath.
That's my dream
It's a blessing and a curse how stable it is. I think less bleeding edge is better but when shit like audio and GPU are fucked they're pretty much always fucked until dist-upgrade time.
KCalc. Man, it just computes! It can add, subtract, and even multiply. It's never given a wrong answer.
Someone has clearly never tried Qalculate!
Just because one thing is better than another doesn't mean the other isn't good!
But thank you for the tip. I actually don't like KCalc. My post was a joke because I thought the question was kinda dumb.
Linux
It 'was' uCollage, but whiny, obnoxious, ungrateful LiGNUts ruined it like many other unpaid softwares by driving a critical developer (Ueberzug) to quit or sellout.
Many LiGNUts probably work for Microsoft, because Microsoft gains when they cause issues, and mislead and lie to people.
grep
coreutils
yes this is a jab at rust-coreutils
So many. So many little utilities that just work. To mention a couple I think no one will mention because they are not sexy: Okular and Ark
Big fan of the KDE suite of software. I've tried alternatives, but always come back to plasma and associated software
Okular works so well at this point that I use it to annotate all my PDFs if I don't explicitly need free-hand drawing (and xournalpp otherwise).
Ark is the best. It can open any type of zipped/compressed file, and it puts even 7zip to shame.
I've found a few things it won't open that 7-Zip will, but they've been very few and far between.
VLC
Cant get VLC working properly on my linux and I miss having it. Ive been thinking about switching to LMDE because of it.
I think ffmpeg imploded or something? And maybe VLC is maintaining their own fork? But it got split into a bunch of pieces or something, I don't know, but maybe installing one of the alternate sources of the ffmpeg packages might work for you.
Consider alternative ways to get it, e.g. static binary, other package managers e.g. am, AppImage, etc.
Yeah, I only tried what I assume was the snap version, and then APT which I suspect redirects to installing the snap version (maybe not though since this is mint and not direct ubuntu?) In any case I have a few more tendencies towards LMDE which will probably make me end up there eventually.
Syncthing. Absolutely ace bit of software. I remember it being a little questionable in 2013, but today it performs exactly the same task, just more reliably. Love it.
Good shout! I use syncthing myself to sync all my useful stuff between multiple devices seamlessly.
Based on my experiences running multiple servers and pcs on multiple distros for more than a decade, almost all problems originate between the keyboard and the chair attached to the machine running Linux.
Misconfiguration is usually the culprit.
Oh and important note: I run Arch BTW
Systemd
*grabs popcorn*
Just it always makes you wait for ~3 min and shows: ... wait for something to be Configured (25s / no limit). :-)
If that happens to you, maybe you should open the logs and figure out why it is happening.
The other thing has logs too...
nano 😎
nano
Emacs
That was what I was going to say; 100%.
I have mixed feels. It can work day after day but in practice it doesn't. That's on me 😂
My beloved
The Linux Kernel.
Caddy
Caddy is superb
Love caddy
Vlc.
I'm on arch and everything I need just works, no fuss. Webstorm, steam, bitwarden, notesnook, mullvad, anything I need just works really. Of course as with any OS there are things that are pain in the ass but that is everywhere no exceptions.
tmux, weechat, helix
Many have already mentioned tools that I also use and appreciate immensely.
My pick is Steam. I've picked up on gaming in the past 2 years and it's very stable right now. Every game that I have interest in just works, I can install games, including early access or demos without looking at the compatibility or the release date. The download speeds of games are high (imho at least where I'm located, and compared with a PS5). My partner is a heavy gamer and has to yet find a game that doesn't work on her machine.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + sponsorblock. Set it and forget it.
I haven't seen an advertisement or a sponsored segment on my desktop in over a decade, and same with my phone for several years. I'm astonished how willing most people are to put up with a constant barrage of ads coming from devices they own
can i interest you in an AdNauseam instead? It blocks ads, but it also "clicks" the links to poison the data.
That's literally what I was about to mention as well. I would just suggest that you change the clicking frequency from the default, which is every single ad, to just moderate, so that they don't detect that you're clearly sabotaging the system and may otherwise discount your clicks.
But yeah, be sure to mention that AdNauseam is a uBO fork. There's literally no reason not to move to it.
Isn't it better to let them wither and die due to no clicks, rather than encourage them?
bash. Konsole. vim (-neo or otherwise up to the point it became AI infested). ssh. steam. git i could go on for quite a while
The program sl, works every time
Nah man, piece of shit software; Sometimes it just lists some random directory contents.
the random directories you see are shown as a punishment when you mix up the letters, yk
Nano
xterm, xv, mc, tmux, gimp, seamonkey
Anything from Debian. I even run Debian-Testing, and it's rock solid. Also, Linux mint, on my other partition.
I tried neovim for a while and I went back to vim for that reason: setup once, then forget about it.
I have plugins that haven't been touch for 5 years+ and they are working as intended.
Rock solid.
nvim is great and convenient in many ways, and a vast improvement over vim, and yet vim is so amazing on its own that I can't even be arsed to add an extra letter to the command like 70% of the time.
alias vim=nvim
Ohhh, gotta see if my system lets me do that one 😂
I bounced off neovim because I am always on fresh boxes with minimal access to the internet. Helix is everything included and I can install with a single file.
The OS itself, Debian. If I have to pick a component, Mate Panel. Compared to the Windows 11 start menu, it's useful, customizableand has no ads. My IT department at work can't even figure out how to remove the Windows 11 start menu ads from my computer.
I'll give a shoutout to the rEFInd boot manager. If anyone has ever had trouble with Grub, rEFInd continues to work for years across multiple machines. I have never had a problem with it.
Good shout. Not something I've heard of before and I've certainly had my share of problems with grub2, even recently.
I wish the btrfs snapshot support were better for rEFInd
tree, locate, nvim, flatpak, htop, bmon, etc.
Supernotes.app
Linux Mint
Rockbox
Sayonara music player
Syncthing
I desperately wish my Rockbox consistently worked without crashing or freezing once a week.
Nano
Cron
As phil Collins would say... Su su su sudo
Nginx.
It runs everything at home and at work.
Debian!
mpv
zsh
Arch
Okular
mpv, openbox
Sabnzbd
Prosody for me. I set it up over 2 years ago, and the only time I touched it was when updating to the latest Debian stable and enabling some new features in the config files. It's been rock-solid and just worked without complaint.
my desire to use Linux and continue learning
Bottles.
Without it, I wouldn't be able to run addictive keys on Linux. I paid for the software back when I used Windows and since I'm able to use addictive keys on Linux, haven't bothered trying to find an alternative.
That said, its the only use case I've had with bottles that just works. Other programs ive tried are more hit or miss.
mc and vim
Debian, uptime right now on my server is 59 days and that's just because that was when we had a power outage longer than the UPS could keep up with
A couple of decades back I was a Systems Manager at a small campus, and personally admin'd one of the servers. There was a server in the room that had a 3 year uptime when I left. May have been running longer after that.
What UPS do you have?
Just some small consumer grade APC that I got like ten years ago. It's basically good enough to withstand quick blips but I have it set to send a shutdown command to the server when the batteries fall below 90% because they last about as long as it takes to cleanly power down the machine.
Guix
vim, awesomewm, mbsync (isync),
As for recent discoveries: dwl — I was surprised on how robust it is, and how well it works.
Vim because its everywhere and is super powerful. It can even be used for some light scripting. GCC to make my own programs. Python as well, same thing and also portable. All the programs that come with mint and become part of the background like the terminal emulator. All of it, pretty awesome. Jellyfin has been a mainstay as well.
I set up a couple of pi-zeros to monitor our heating and other stuff, it runs lightpd and have been running for several years uninterrupted.
They are only accessible on the local network, so I don't even bother to run updates :-)
Dino, my favourite chat client, it just works.
I love how little of the projects mentioned here are truly Linux specific.
"Firefox" lol.
Anyways, MUSL.
Probably something that is so basic or integrated into the distros I use that I forget about it because every time I use it, it just works.
Helix editor. I love terminal UI apps.
Depends what "fuss or bother forever" means. Background tools run without interaction, and therefore aren't bothering. But any application with interaction is basically "fussing". The simpler the programs and its scope, less chance of problems are expected. Also updating with an Arch system BTW can cause an issue, that is not even related directly to the program itself. Oh and I'm known to make simple questions complicated...
As a daily user of Firefox and Thunderbird, they just works. I also use the KDE standard terminal "Konsole" and don't remember having a problem. I do screenshots (maybe not everyday, but often) here and there using KDEs "Spectacle". It works as expected. The simple terminal tool
fastfetchto display system information works always. After installingsearxng-git, to run the search engine server locally, it basically always works without fuss. I just have to update it from time to time manually, as it updates from Git source directly.Backup scripts using borg
awk
all rock solid af
monit, postfix, gearman, dhcpd, bind
I will second KeealiveD.
Pihole has been robust even the upgrades.
Docker has been perfect for years.
RaspberryPi os has been superb.
Caddy
Elementary OS
bashmount
All of them.
I'm gonna say ErsatzTV. I have had it running for years, and it just... keep going. Sadly the dev got burnt out, and it's no longer maintained. but you should not expose it to the internet. You don't need to expose Ersatz to the internet to make use of it. It's just an admin panel [with no password]. Anyway, it just works. It has a little learning curve to start with, as there's a minimum of four things you need to do to get a channel up and running, but once you know it, it's easy peasy.
KRunner, I think. I even removed the application menu from my panel and I have a keyboard macro for just opening KRunner
pretty much everything i am or have been using in the last (*checks calendar) 29 years. my debian server setups, frankly by now (despite all the hate) my rock solid manjaro from the last ~8years, my raspbians... hard to pinpoint one particular piece of sw that works better than the others. but what comes to mind now: i have a mostly command line based workflow to create a yearly photo book out of family pictures from that year, using exiv2, imagemagick, and some basic bash stuff. this has been in use for 5 years now, i haven't changed it and it's quicker than any grahical thing that could replace it. ai could probably improve or automate it more but by now I'm so used to it that i cannot be bothered to start with it.