My most useful applications

Emacs

 

Photo Management

 My criteria

1. Quickly sorting photos
2. Tagging is quick and flexible
3. Tags and comments saved to file metadata
4. Basic cropping and renaming simple and easy
5. Opens from File manager
6. Printing (Gthumbs is nominally best so far: prints multiple marked photos on a sheet)
7. Does not save in a non-standard way, or to some bizaare kind of database; uses file system paradigm; photos are saved as files that are easily copyable; files and storage paradigm are accessible from other photo management, etc., software

Photo Mgmt Packages I am evaluating

1. XnView: seems at first glance to do most of the above
2. GThumb lacks some functiionality, but best for printing several photos to one sheet.
3. nomacs: lots of bells, seems quck, interesting
4. NOT Apple products
5. Geeqie:
6. Ristretto (xfce4) 
7. Viewnior

File Management

1. Files:  Standard Gnome FM (was Nautilus)
2. Caja: Does dual pane; works well with Dropbox; not shown on other menus
3. PCManFM: has advantages, don't remember what
4. Thunar: (xfce4) seems mature, cool icon, many tweaks available
5. Dolphin: Does dual pane
6. Ranger: quick and interesting, but vim bindings
7. Emacs dired still is the goto for general wandering
8. MC

 Photo and Graphics Editing and viewing

1. The Gimp
2. Inkscape
3. Gv for postscript
4. 
   

My Toolbox

Many of these are reason enough to stay with Arch Linux.  It's a bit hairy in Ubuntu---without even getting into thoughts about the philosophy of the distro--to keep all of these up to date

1. cb2Bib: Bibtex refernce management a la extraordinaire
2. gri: graphing
3. Xtide
4. Xephem
5. TexLive (This can be installed from Arch AUR; upstream for other distros)
6. xfce4 Terminal and Konsole both allow random background colors for new windows.  I want more control, but it helps alot. 
7. dictd and whatever possible dictionaries.  Ubuntu/Debian gives the most complete selection of dictionaries.  
8. 
   

Window Managers etc

1. Gnome is ok, too much overhead, oversimplified.
2. KDE is hell, but has many of the best apps (highest overhead).  some apprent incompatibilities, on Gentoo, updates always were mangled when trying to update libraries for KDE that conflicted with other software in various ways.  
3. XFCE4: simple and fast, works ok
4. i3: Attractive, and gaps may be even better

Browsers and other Internet tools

1. Firefox: still too heavy and cumbersome.
2. Google Earth 
3. Dropbox
4. Transmission
5. Conkeror (nice (emacs key bindings). 

 SYSTEM Tools

1. Top
2. Htop w/ temperature sensor patch
3. psensors
4. some applets or indicators
5. GParted
6. pavucontrol / alsamixer 
7. NetworkManager / nm-applet or whatever
8. Youart rocks!  I also install Packer.  
9. Orage Calendar
10. evince 
11. okular is excellent for many purposes for PDFs, but I've encounted issues, maybe with printing?  In 2017, Evince (Document Viewer) is working fine.
12. Some random AUR gui tool
13.