When I inevitably mess up something on my Linux set-up (again) and want to get my system back the way it looked and felt, with most of the tools I regularly use, this is the page I will look at for reference.

Appearance and themes

• Numix-circle: nice circular icons with a flat theme.
• Bibati_Ice: a white mouse cursor theme.
• Qogir-gnome: a gtk theme for Gnome that minimises visual clutter and keeps the general appearance dark and easy on the eyes.
• Dash to dock: essential for creating a pleasant, useful dock that auto-hides when not in use.
• Frippery Move Clock: places the clock on the right-hand side of the task-bar, leaving the middle clear. Use with Panel osd.
• Panel osd: customises where the notifications appear in Gnome. Use with Frippery Move Clock.
• Transparent window moving: makes windows transparent when you move them around.

Applications

This is just a list of my favourite applications that I use regularly, in no particular order.

Programming

• Terminator: a great terminal with loads of customisation.
• Sublime Text: a lightweight, general-purpose text editor with endless customisation and strong plugin support.
• PyCharm: excellent python IDE for powerful python development.
• Clion: same interface as PyCharm, but for C++.
• RStudio: the best editor for scripting and package development in R.
• Gitkraken: useful for those times when I need to do something more complex than simple commits and merges.

Utilities

• Gnome Tweaks: provides much more powerful customisation for Gnome. Pretty much essential.
• Mailspring: my current favourite email client with integration for gmail, Office365 and more.
• Oracle VM VirtualBox: simple to use and powerful virtual machine hosting for cross-platform development.
• Filezilla: a powerful FTP client.
• Chrome: the best (albeit RAM-hungry) web browser.
• Firefox: powerful and stable, the only real option if you want to de-google your life without sacrificing too much (sorry Opera fans).

­Media

• Darktable: great app for powerful photo editing.
• Clementine: great music player with decent library features.
• Spotify: you either have to cough up, or listen to ads, but it does have a lot of music. The app is really good too.
• VLC: the best tool for video playing.
• GIMP: a fantastic, free image editor.
• Inkscape: a professional vector graphics editor.

­Tools

Apps that perform a single, specific task.

• Artha: a dictionary app that can be confirmed with a hotkey to work with Gnome notifications from any app.
• Caffeine: a small app that prevents your computer from sleeping from the task-bar.
• Docker integration: place an icon in the task bar for docker integration.
• Steal my focus: removes the annoying “Window is ready” popup in Gnome and just brings the window into focus .
• User themes: allow for shell themes to be loaded from the user directory.
• Oh My Zsh (for zsh): much better terminal interactions (I use the “agnoster” theme)
• Auto move windows: moves windows to a specified workspace for particular apps.

This list is obviously entirely my own preferences and by no means a full review of all available tools. I am running Opensuse Leap 15.0 with Gnome 3.26.