Yes, plasma 6.6.3. I already had the "power management" setting "Dim Automatically" as "Never", but it doesn't seem to work on the second screen, as seen below:

You will find those settings in power management if I rememver correctly. Is it plasma 6?

upx - compress binary files

Just to be clear, the parent poster means "binary as in executable binaries", rather than "binary as in non-text".

mlocate

This was replaced by plocate some time back in Debian, which IIRC was generally faster. Some distros used a compatibility package for some time; you may actually have plocate installed yourself.

Thank you for that! IIRC, it was one of the settings I took from bash-sensible. I can say that it definitely improved after just a couple of changes to ~/.bashrc. Add in ble.sh and it suddenly seemed somewhat modern instead of archaic.

Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what broke the camel's back. However, FWIW, contrary to how I recall my experiences with bash and zsh, I don't feel any frustration while using using fish. So it's definitely doing something for me 😉.

Thank you so much for the elaborate answer! Have a good one!

But bash left a lot to be desired in that regard; its history simply didn’t record everything.

Bash doesn't merge history from multiple bash instances into your ~/.bash_history by default. If you want that to persist:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/preserve-bash-history-in-multiple-terminal-windows

Add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

# When the shell exits, append to the history file instead of overwriting it
shopt -s histappend

Potentially I honestly don't follow it enough. They might use Debian testing or some for newer packages.

lsd is written in Rust, which I personally have no problem with but there are people that do

Huh? Do you mean to say it's non-GPL? Some people have been going around rewriting GPL C/C++ utilities in Rust, but publishing them under non-GPL licenses, and that has been controversial. I don't think I've seen people having a problem with Rust specifically.

Tmux!

Sure. I use NVChad for web development/simple HTML since it's preconfigured perfectly for that stuff right out of the box. for example hex color codes it shows a visual representation of the colour which is awesome when using tailwind or just regular css. It's simple to set up right away so I can easily install it quickly on any machine and be good to go.

DOOM Emacs I use for larger projects/builds, compiling stuff, working with configurations (I primarily use NixOS) as I find it works better with that stuff. having a built in terminal is also very nice as well as a built in email client and the built in file manager makes managing projects much easier combined with the added built in git. Also with DOOM Emacs if I create a new file for something it will have stuff preconfigured, kinda like a bootstrap, for various things.

The difference is LMDE uses debian and its packages as a base while the “cinnamon” edition uses Ubuntu as a base.

Does that mean that the packages available to LMDE are older?

Seems like they've made cockpit easier to use on openSUSE.
https://news.opensuse.org/2026/03/18/new-launcher-aims-to-simplify-cockpit-installations/

On Fedora installing and autostarting is as simple as:
sudo dnf install cockpit
sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

And to allow it through the firewall, if active:
sudo firewall-cmd --add-service=cockpit --permanent

Then it will be available on https://localhost:9090/ (with a certificate warning)

DOOM Emacs

NVChad

You might be the first person I've found on Lemmy that actively uses both DOOM Emacs and a Neovim distribution. Could you perhaps do a deeper dive on your work flow? Thanks in advance!

As I suppose the other user already went over your main query, I'll instead focus on what might have felt rather innocuous.

my default shell is fish

I subscribe to the school of thought that one should not change their default shell^[I suppose it could be fine~ish as long as it's POSIX compliant AND compatible with bash. Which, unfortunately, fish happens to be neither of the two.] through invoking chsh (or whatever other method that applies changes to /etc/passwd). This article does an excellent job at laying down the reasoning (and the recommended alternative). FWIW, the alternative's day-to-day experience provides all of the pros without any of the cons.

Seconded on ferdium, it's nice to have all my emails and messages in one place. That said, it can def be a bit of a memory hog.

Disclaimer: I tried searching for something like “useful programs”, “useful packages”, “useful tools”, “recommended packages”, etc. Don’t see any posts like that, if this is a duplicate, then it’s not intentional and my search skills have failed me.

btop

!commandline@programming.dev is basically this for terminal programs like btop.

• I use ferdium to concentrate all my communication accounts into a single place and not get lost
• Syncthing is really nice to keep my files readily available between devices
• Zotero is amazing if you do academic research. I can't imagine making references without it
• distrobox allows me to run things that aren't available or that would conflict with my distro's repos
• frog saves me a lot when I have to copy text from an image. It's a simple and easy to use ocr tool that can quickly get text from screenshots or image files
• personaldnsfilter allows me to block ads on the phone, system-wide
• changedetection.io checks a few sites for me automatically
• Well caibrated guesslron and openoise are handy measuring tools
• Just knew about paperknife recently, and it has been useful to process pdfs on the phone
• Plainapp is really useful to share files from the phone with other devices

Those are the ones that came to my mind

I use it also.

I syncthing the database between phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, and home server.

Has worked beautifully for years now. Seamless.

• Zoxide: it's cd with superpowers and memory
• Ripgrep: it's faster grep with superpowers
• Atuin: global, fast, searchable terminal history

For audio work, I use 4 programs: LMMS, yt-dlp, demucs, and audacity

My workflow usually goes yt-dlp to download audio/samples, then either audacity and demucs. Audacity I use for splicing the clips I need, and if its necessary, I use demucs to split stems either on the full song before splicing clips with audacity or splitting stems after getting the clips I want. I then use LMMS to sample and layer drums and other samples usually.

Thanks. Yeah, I do add or edit the entries on all my devices and I need them to sync fast. :) I used KeePass many, many years ago but at the time I only used it on my PC. That might have been before smartphone era, so my needs were different.

Thanks. So I guess if Bash is my default shell then fish <command> also works by analogy.

Great list! And just to add a bit:

yt-dlp is indeed insanely powerful, and works for way more than just YouTube, for both audio(music) and video. Supported sites

LocalSend is supported on all platforms, and is perfect for situations where you traditionally use a USB to move files.

It's probably not a case for everyone due to the obvious limitations, but I primarily use KeepassXC from my main workstation. I have backup scripts that periodically run for my user on said workstation that capture my Keepass database among other user files and backup to external storage, cloud storage as dictated.

For my laptops, mobile devices; I periodically push the database from either the main workstation or pull from a backup to these devices. I do not write new entries from these devices in order to avoid having to handle writeback to the main instance of my Keepass db. This can be done, but inherently starts to hinge on needing network access all the time to ensure an up-to-date copy of the DB is present as well as being explicitly a single-user db to prevent a syncing protocol from accidentally writing over new entries from any given device. Obviously, if network sync and the potential for multi-user is important to you, continue using Bitwarden. It is a perfectly fine solution.

yeah Fish along with DOOM Emacs are the first two things I install on my machine.

I used to use zsh with oh my zsh and various plugins and it would totally slow down my nixos system so then I decided to give fish a try and surprise surprise it had all the stuff I had to add on to zsh already baked in.

easily the best shell out there.