What to get after installing Linux

[FatDroid]

Hello, apologies if this isn't in the right place, wasn't really sure where to post this.

I'm looking suggestions for things to do and things to install after getting Arch running on an old laptop.
I'm not new to Linux in general, Kali is installed on another laptop, Ive spent a fair bit of time using Mint on a couple of other machines and I'm also weighing up options for distros to put on my gaming PC to get away from Windows. Ive never really stuck on one distro longer than a few months at but this is my favourite by far, I'm keeping it which is part of the reason for me asking.

Even with my previous experience using Linux I'm unsure on what is some good software to install, just the general stuff that can make day to day easier. This laptop is just going to be used for simple stuff such as browsing the web, YT, playing DVD's, text entry and so on, nothing like gaming or video editing or other heavy duty work.

As mentioned above I aren't looking for anything other than suggestions, but I could do with a good text editor capable of writing code that is not VS Code, some good system backup software, and anything else worth getting that would be beneficial.

Thanks for any suggestions, its much appreciated. Ill also include the specs of this thing to give a general idea of what will be too much for it to handle/give everyone a laugh.

Toshiba Satellite C660
Celeron T3500 @ 2.1ghz dual core
120gb SSD
3gb ram

 

[MattWinter]

I use my machines for school, so some of the first things I install are things like:
NeoVim, Git, Python, Miniconda, Brave, Raindrop.io plug-in, CMUS, and a good pdf reader.

Then I'll configure NeoVim with kickstart.

 

[f33dm3bits]

Go through the following section in the Archwiki it has a lot of information on General Recommendations after installation.

General recommendations - ArchWiki

wiki.archlinux.org

 

[kc1di]

of course everyone is different. I prefer vivaldi browser so normally install that right away. I use KDE destop and debian. I usually will install inxi if it's not already install I'm not sure what is in the Arch repro but I usually install vim if it's not there. Gimp Simple-scan, linssid. And a few others. But it will depend on what you want to do. I'm a Ham Radio op also so install quite a few radio related packages.

 

[f33dm3bits]

of course everyone is different.

And as @kc1di what you program and tools your use comes down to personal preferences.

 

[arochester]

I'm looking suggestions for things to do and things to install after getting Arch running on an old laptop.

I would just use it. If you think you need something else, add it. If you don't need it, don’t add it - or remove it.

It's your choice. Don't get pushed into places you don't want or need to go.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

Welcome to the forums.

This bears repeating for people new to Arch Linux. Be careful with the Arch Linux User Repository! (AUR) It could make the OS behave like an "unstable" branch if bad decisions are made. Try to stay with packages rated as high as possible on the listing site which is:

AUR (en) - Packages

aur.archlinux.org

If you open this page now you will see that yay, the AUR helper, has the highest popularity.

This thing about "AUR helpers" is another dimension which could get an user tangled in a web.

Only if you feel you need something from the AUR such as Brave Browser (the only thing I ever acquired for Manjaro) then go ahead and have at it. Because sometimes it has to be built and it could fail, or it could take a long time, or it could take in outdated versions of libraries and whatnot. This could happen on any distro base, however.

Brave Browser takes a long time to acquire and update on my computer, which has specifications comparable to that of the OP (I have 4GB RAM and my Intel processor isn't Celeron). It doesn't have to be built, because there's a "binary blob" involved, but it's ridiculous what is done only to get a desktop icon to launch it. But this is only my personal experience.

What I have explained is written better here:

[Need-To-Know] About Manjaro and AUR

Manjaro and AUR This is a superficial review of elements of Linux history spiced with some personal memories and my experience with Arch Linux and Manjaro. A followup on previous topics AUR - please restrain yourself Responsible use of AUR TL:DR custom packages - unsupported - you are on...

forum.manjaro.org

Yes I know, it focuses on Manjaro but this could apply in general to Arch and others based on it.

 

[f33dm3bits]

 

[FatDroid]

Thanks to everyone who has replied, I'll look at everything that has been suggested and see how it goes from there. I dont want to end up with 9 billion programs installed when I dont need them, this will all be super helpful in making a good, stable and also usable OS.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

@FatDroid sorry for this question, but what f33dm3bits posted latest put something across my mind.

Have you installed Arch Linux yet, or are you in the process of installing it?

If not then... (sigh) I hope you don't give up as easily as I did. The video thumbnail just above has KDE Plasma desktop. Sadly after you install plain Arch Linux successfully you will not get any desktop! If you want any desktop (say you don't like KDE, but prefer GNOME), or if you prefer a lighter window manager like "i3" or OpenBox, you will have to install and set it up yourself. But I believe you have already known all of this.

This is just more reading into the Arch Linux Wiki.

If this sounds too much then you could try a distro based on Arch Linux such as Garuda, Manjaro or EndeavourOS. Garuda is great for mistake-prone people but requires at least 30GB for the main partition to format as "btrfs" for system snapshots. Everytime an update is done with "pacman" or whatever a snapshot is created. If suddenly you can't boot into the system, you could try again I suppose from GRUB and select a snapshot which could get things going again. EndeavourOS is more "stripped down" and just as technical but many people have been surprised with it, that many of their fears were unjustified that "Arch is too hard" where it doesn't have to be.

If you insist on installing "the father" and haven't done so yet, these are more things to keep in mind. I'm not trying to discourage you from it, but installing Arch is not as easy as doing so with Fedora, Ubuntu or such other distro. Arch should be more popular than actually but a lot of credit is being stolen by others based on it.

 

[MikeWalsh]

@FatDroid :-

I'll second @arochester . Just install it and use it.....and only add whatever you feel you need/want.

For a good text-editor, take a look at Geany. It's not only a text-editor, it's a complete, lightweight, self-contained IDE, too. It's been the default text-editor/IDE in 'Puppy' for years, and many of us don't feel the need to even bother with anything else.

(I agree with you; there IS life beyond VSCode.....though multitudes would never believe you!)


Mike.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

Eventually the topic indicated in the following web address will be closed because it got one post from somebody who refused to start his/her own topic about it, and otherwise the discussion was left back 2 years...

(*) https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/why-use-endeavouros-now-that-arch-has-an-installer/13485/136

This is but one of the many ways somebody could be fooled by Arch Linux. Yes Arch Linux has an "installer" but it's a Python script that refused to work well for me, expected me to clear the whole internal HDD so it did its business.

 

[f33dm3bits]

This is but one of the many ways somebody could be fooled by Arch Linux. Yes Arch Linux has an "installer" but it's a Python script that refused to work well for me, expected me to clear the whole internal HDD so it did its business.

I have ran Arch Linux in the past but currently I am using EndeavorOS. I have recently tried the archinstall script several times in a vm and I have found that if you customize your partition and filesystem setup the installer will crash and that it will only succeed if you accept the default partition and filesystem setups.

 

[SciTecDC]

For a good text-editor, take a look at Geany. It's not only a text-editor, it's a complete, lightweight, self-contained IDE, too. It's been the default text-editor/IDE in 'Puppy' for years, and many of us don't feel the need to even bother with anything else.

I've known this editor for a long time without ever having installed it, but it's certainly a good tool for coding. It supports more than 50 programming languages and takes up no more than 12 MiB of memory.
On the other hand, I prefer jEdit because it requires a total of 11 MiB of memory and supports over 200 programming languages. In addition, there are more than 200 plug-ins that allow you to set up a fully-fledged IDE. That would at least be another suggestion!

 

[FatDroid]

@FatDroid sorry for this question, but what f33dm3bits posted latest put something across my mind.

Have you installed Arch Linux yet, or are you in the process of installing it?

If not then... (sigh) I hope you don't give up as easily as I did. The video thumbnail just above has KDE Plasma desktop. Sadly after you install plain Arch Linux successfully you will not get any desktop! If you want any desktop (say you don't like KDE, but prefer GNOME), or if you prefer a lighter window manager like "i3" or OpenBox, you will have to install and set it up yourself. But I believe you have already known all of this.

This is just more reading into the Arch Linux Wiki.

If this sounds too much then you could try a distro based on Arch Linux such as Garuda, Manjaro or EndeavourOS. Garuda is great for mistake-prone people but requires at least 30GB for the main partition to format as "btrfs" for system snapshots. Everytime an update is done with "pacman" or whatever a snapshot is created. If suddenly you can't boot into the system, you could try again I suppose from GRUB and select a snapshot which could get things going again. EndeavourOS is more "stripped down" and just as technical but many people have been surprised with it, that many of their fears were unjustified that "Arch is too hard" where it doesn't have to be.

If you insist on installing "the father" and haven't done so yet, these are more things to keep in mind. I'm not trying to discourage you from it, but installing Arch is not as easy as doing so with Fedora, Ubuntu or such other distro. Arch should be more popular than actually but a lot of credit is being stolen by others based on it.

Hello, sorry for the late reply.

Yeah, I have installed it along with KDE desktop. I'm fairly sure that video above is one Ive seen, Ive definitely seen one from a channel called "Average Linux User" I think it was, and that showed me a few good things and it was also another part of the reason I wanted to ask this question in the first place.

I agree, installing Arch isnt as easy as installing Fedora or whatever else, but its far more rewarding haha

 

[FatDroid]

@FatDroid :-

I'll second @arochester . Just install it and use it.....and only add whatever you feel you need/want.

For a good text-editor, take a look at Geany. It's not only a text-editor, it's a complete, lightweight, self-contained IDE, too. It's been the default text-editor/IDE in 'Puppy' for years, and many of us don't feel the need to even bother with anything else.

(I agree with you; there IS life beyond VSCode.....though multitudes would never believe you!)


Mike.

I definitely agree with only installing what is needed, cant do with having a drive full of programs that don't get used! This is how I keep all my computers, but I want to make the most out of this install and getting suggestions for the programs that others see as a necessity might give me ideas on things I'd otherwise ignore.

Geany is a new name to me, this will be one thing for me to look at so thanks for that.
I wasnt sure what people would have to say to the idea of using something other than VSCode as it seems to be one of them things that has a cult following online and it is a good piece of software, theres no denying that, but this doesn't mean there is nothing better to use

 

[Brickwizard]

The only thing I set up/initiate is timeshift [or similar] it can save an awful lot of heartache. Anything else is as and when needed

 

[MikeWalsh]

@FatDroid :-

Geany is a new name to me, this will be one thing for me to look at so thanks for that.
I wasnt sure what people would have to say to the idea of using something other than VSCode as it seems to be one of them things that has a cult following online and it is a good piece of software, theres no denying that, but this doesn't mean there is nothing better to use

Well, it's a Windows thing, of course.

I mean, there's Bash (for starters). Then there's Ruby; Python; Perl; PHP; Gambas (just ones I know or have heard of).......and that's barely scratching the tip of the iceberg. I'm certain others can mention many more.

Most folks only know VSCode because VirtualStudio is the Microsoft preferred/recommended way for developers to build apps for their platform......and most folks USE Windows.

(shrug)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

I've been packaging up stuff for the Puppy community for years. More recently, I've been turning my hand to creating small apps/utilities from the ground up.

MultiCam - a utility for managing playback/streaming & recording from multiple webcams+-

DriveSpeed! - a utility for testing read/write and I/O speeds on storage drives of any sort, making use of the

status=progress

...function of 'dd' (the infamous 'disk destroyer' ):-

....and then there's QuickAudioSwap - this is more of a personal one for my own use, though I've shared it with a few others who expressed interest - which allows swapping between multiple audio cards without need of a re-boot (which always used to be the case with Puppy, 'cos we use ALSA direct much of the time). Only very recently has Puppy begun to make use of PulseAudio, but it's still not very popular with the community...

Also lets me reset recording levels on my webcams, plus a few other things.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

All written in Bash, making use of existing system components. GUIs are created with YAD - YetAnotherDialog - a fork of the older Zenity. I'm sorry, but I like my GUIs (not very 'geek-like', I know!); a hang-over from nearly a quarter-century of using Windows, I'm afraid.....although once you start getting used to how YAD's syntax works, building 'em can become rather addictive!

Just a sample of some of the stuff I waste my time on..!


Mike.

 

[f33dm3bits]

I agree, installing Arch isnt as easy as installing Fedora or whatever else, but its far more rewarding haha

I ran Arch for several years, then switched to Fedora and ran that for about two years. I recently switched to EndeavourOS since it has all the benefits of Arch and a rolling release distribution, without having to deal with the manual installation which I have done more than enough in the past and I don't really feel like doing and the archinstall script is just crap compared the Calamares installer because the installation crashes when you do a custom partitioning and filesystem setup.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

Geany is a new name to me, this will be one thing for me to look at so thanks for that.

Geany is a great editor, but since you already have Arch Linux with KDE you could install Kate which is one of the KDE applications, if it wasn't pulled in already. (KWrite is essentially the same as Kate but with somewhat less features.) Both editors are stacked with features. One thing about Kate is the ability to select by columns and write text in that weird way. I would have wanted it to go further like numbering the lines.

With both editors, you could set things up with a "bash" script or something else which takes as input the text selected in the editor, and it replaces the selected with what was processed by the script. All you have to do is write something that reads from "stdin" system file handle, transform that text and then write it out into "stdout" system file handle.

I know in Geany it could be set up rather easily and to be summoned by a keystroke shortcut. I have used Kate a lot LOL but I'm not familiar with the process there but it should be alike.