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

The Linux Kernel.

my desire to use Linux and continue learning

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.

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.

As phil Collins would say… Su su su sudo

Okular

LUKS. No need to re-encrypt my drives or do other maintenance. Set it and forget it.

All of them.

bashmount

Caddy

grep

VLC

Emacs

Anything from Debian. I even run Debian-Testing, and it’s rock solid. Also, Linux mint, on my other partition.