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.
Yakuake. Nothing major but a nice quality of life upgrade for terminal work.
I love how little of the projects mentioned here are truly Linux specific.
“Firefox” lol.
Anyways, MUSL.
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.
Isn’t it better to let them wither and die due to no clicks, rather than encourage them?
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.
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 Sadly the dev got burnt out, and it’s no longer maintained.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.
- MythTv
- LVM
- Xfce
- Transmission
- Doom
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.
KRunner, I think. I even removed the application menu from my panel and I have a keyboard macro for just opening KRunner
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.
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.
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.
The Linux Kernel.
LUKS. No need to re-encrypt my drives or do other maintenance. Set it and forget it.
As phil Collins would say… Su su su sudo
my desire to use Linux and continue learning
Vlc.








