My personal recommendations for software people should try and use:

My AI-specific recommendations on the separate Recommended AI Tools page.

Note that the below lists are generated with the help of AI to summarize what I have installed or have in my provisioning scripts.

My List

  • Ghostty: Fast terminal, and very extendable.
  • VS Code: Good default editor layer for coding, search, and project navigation.
  • pi coding agent: Practical coding-agent harness for real project work.
  • Obsidian: Useful for notes, checklists, drafts, and working context.
  • Git: Classic version control.
    • glab and gh: Command line access to GitHub or GitLab if you need it.
  • ripgrep: Fast recursive search across codebases and notes. Agents use it.
  • curl and wget: Essential that’s somehow not in build-essential.
  • cmake and build-essential: One time runs for when the system is fresh.
  • uv: Fast Python package and environment management.
  • htop: Quickly view what processes are doing.
  • rsync: More powerful scp tool.
  • sshfs: Mount remote filesystem.
  • ffmpeg: Solves a surprising number of recording and media-conversion problems.
  • Docker: Useful for containers, reproducibility, and local service setup.
  • FileZilla: Useful when a graphical SFTP client is the easiest path.
  • RustDesk: Practical remote support tool.
  • Tailscale: Low-friction private networking between machines.
  • Mullvad VPN and Cloudflare WARP: Handy for privacy, travel, and awkward network situations.
  • OBS Studio: Great for demos, talks, and screen recordings.
  • VLC: Reliable player for ordinary and weird media files.