Here’s our recommended GNOME shell extensions. Most of the extensions are not officially supported by GNOME. But they all take the desktop to the next level, either by adding useful functionality, improving your workflow, or simply offering a touch of panache to the desktop. All the extensions all compatible with the latest release of GNOME. Naturally there’s only open source goodness on offer.
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This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities.
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f3 is a set of 5 open source utilities that detect and repair counterfeit flash storage. It achieves this by testing the flash cards’ capacity and performance.
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aux.app plays music from YouTube, SoundCloud and Deezer. It’s built with web technologies including Electron. How does it fare?
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Shortwave (previously known as Gradio) is open source goodness that lets you find and listen to 20,000 radio stations over the net.
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Crow Translate bills itself as a cross-platform, lightweight, translator supporting 117 different languages.
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odio is a free (no-charge) radio streaming software with more than 20,000 radio stations from around the world.
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nmon is short for Nigel’s performance Monitor for Linux. It’s a very versatile tool that can be shaped to your exact requirements. It fully warrants its place in our Essential System Tools feature.
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MellowPlayer integrates a whole raft of music streaming services. It’s Qt-based software.
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Krusader is an advanced, twin-panel (commander-style) file manager designed for KDE Plasma. Krusader also runs on other popular Linux desktop environments such as GNOME.
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Kaku bills itself as the next generation music client. Let’s see what this means. Does this music player float our boat?
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Strawberry is an audio player and music collection organizer. It was originally forked from Clementine. The main goal was to create a player for playing local music files that looked a bit more like Amarok with advanced soundcard options. The music player is designed for music collectors, audio enthusiasts and audiophiles.
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fdupes finds duplicate files in the given set of directories and sub-directories. It recognizes duplicates by comparing MD5 signature of files followed by a byte-to-byte comparison. The utility offers a lot of options to list, delete and replace files.
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Clonezilla is a free and open source ncurses partition and disk imaging/cloning program. The software offers system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.
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Headset is a music player for the desktop that connects with the huge catalogue of music available from YouTube. Users can search through this collection of music, play what they find and save tracks/playlists. Headset can also read popular music subreddits and play the tracks in sequence.
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GParted is used for creating, deleting, resizing, moving, checking, and copying disk partitions and their file systems. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganizing disk usage, copying data residing on hard disks, and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging).
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moneyGuru is an open source personal finance management application. With this software, you can evaluate your financial situation and then make informed financial decisions. It has the double-entry accounting system.
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This is the twelfth in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For this article, we’ll look at Timeshift.
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DataExplore is an open source desktop application for data analysis and plotting intended for use in both research and education. It’s targeted at non-programmers who want to perform fairly advanced table manipulation methods. It also offers fast, dynamic plot creation from selected data suitable for publication. A variety of table analysis tools are provided.
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Our article “Best Linux Desktop Environments: Strong and Stable” surveyed 9 strong and stable Linux desktop environments (DEs). Due to popular demand, this article extends that survey with 3 other desktops: Pantheon, Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), and LXDE. We examine their features, user experience, resources footprint, extensibility, and documentation, and compare them to the 9 desktops covered in the original article.
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