Useful Software

[Lurch]

Seeing as there is a decent IT/programmer population here, I'm curious to what software utilities you keep handy to help make your computing experience more enjoyable.

Here are some of the programs I use as an IT Helpdesk Analyst/Network Admin:

-f.lux (automatic monitor brightness control)
-ArsClip (clipboard manager)
-Hiren's Boot CD (bootable CD that contains various recovery utilities)
-Angry IP Scanner (network scanner)
-TreeSize (disk space manager)

I recently discovered ArsClip, which is essentially what prompted this thread. How could I have done IT for this long without a clipboard manager?!  

How about you? What software do you use to make your job easier, or your overall computing experience more enjoyable?

[iri]

IntelliJ IDEA. I support the local businesses!

[exitfire401]

Seeing as there is a decent IT/programmer population here, I'm curious to what software utilities you keep handy to help make your computing experience more enjoyable.

Here are some of the programs I use as an IT Helpdesk Analyst/Network Admin:

-f.lux (automatic monitor brightness control)
-ArsClip (clipboard manager)
-Hiren's Boot CD (bootable CD that contains various recovery utilities)
-Angry IP Scanner (network scanner)
-TreeSize (disk space manager)

I recently discovered ArsClip, which is essentially what prompted this thread. How could I have done IT for this long without a clipboard manager?!  

How about you? What software do you use to make your job easier, or your overall computing experience more enjoyable?

All of the above plus ninite. Makes imaging go ridiculously fast.

[slip84]

Notepad++ - Great text editing utility with plugins and whatnot
7zip - Compression tool with lots of options and flexibility
Bulk Rename Utility - It renames things... in bulk
TXTCollector - Need 100 log files crammed into one log file? This tool does that.

[azhdar]

clover  : http://ejie.me/

[Computer-Lab in Basement]

UBCD (for diagnostics)
Clonezilla (for Linux imaging)
Windows PE's (Win8.1 PE w/Ghost for Windows imaging)
Teamviewer/join.me (for remote support when GoTo Assist isn't installed)

Just to name a few I've used recently...

On a more corporate level, we use PDQ Inventory/Deploy for general device inventory and software deployment.

Oh, and Spiceworks for our Helpdesk.

[ddot]

Some of my better finds from over the years:

AquaSnap - Gives me more control over hot corners
Puretext - Allows me to strip formatting when copying and pasting
7-Zip Theme Manager - Makes the 7zip toolbar and icons a little less ugly
doPDF - Lets you print to PDFs for free without too much bloat
Metapad - A nice little upgrade over notepad without too much clutter or useless features that a programmer doesn’t need

[Lurch]

Great responses, all! Thank you!

ninite. Makes imaging go ridiculously fast.

I've heard good things about ninite in the past! I'll check it out!

Notepad++
7zip
Bulk Rename Utility
TXTCollector

+1 for Notepad++ and 7-Zip. Will check out the other two!

clover  : http://ejie.me/

Cool! Definitely going to be checking that out! Just curious, have you come across any bugs with this software, or is it rather stable overall? 

UBCD (for diagnostics)
Clonezilla (for Linux imaging)
Windows PE's (Win8.1 PE w/Ghost for Windows imaging)
Teamviewer/join.me (for remote support when GoTo Assist isn't installed)

Just to name a few I've used recently...

On a more corporate level, we use PDQ Inventory/Deploy for general device inventory and software deployment.

Oh, and Spiceworks for our Helpdesk.

Nice! I'm going to check out PDQ. I use Clonezilla, join.me, and Spiceworks as well! Do you post on the SW community at all? My handle is kenjen.

Also, is there any reason you don't use Clonezilla for imaging Windows-based workstations? Just curious.

[azhdar]

clover  : http://ejie.me/

Cool! Definitely going to be checking that out! Just curious, have you come across any bugs with this software, or is it rather stable overall? 

I discovered it very recently, but haven't come across any bugs yet. May be more stabler than OG windows explorer ^^

[hjc1710]

Looks like a lot of Windows suggestions here, so gonna throw some Linux suggestions into the ring:

1. Sublime Text 2/3 - my generic text editor.
2. IntelliJ IDEA - best IDE ever.
3. guake - dropdown style terminal for quick, one off SSH sessions or quick terminal calculations
4. terminator - my main terminal application; great theme support + has all the usual goodies (tabs, panes, copy on select, etc.)
5. nuvolaplayer - let's me listen to Google Play Music through the web UI, but can still bind to system level shortcuts like pause, play, next, etc.
6. f.lux - same reasons as Lurch (also Twilight on my Android which does the same thing).
7. keepass2 - my favorite password manager ever, so robust and works decent on Linux with mono (but now that .NET is OSS, it should get better!!!).
8. hexchat - my IRC client
9. www.terminal.sexy - created my nice Solarized theme for Terminator

Some command line utils I love:

1. jq - processing JSON, such as beautifying it, extracting properties, etc. (incredibly powerful: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/)
2. xclip - I swear to god if I have to use my mouse to copy/paste one more time...
3. awk/sed/cut/head/etc. - standard UNIX utils are godly for generic text processing.
4. saltstack - not really a CLI util, but this is what we do on the DevOps side for infrastructure bootstrap and management and it is simply amazing. Love it so much more than the competitors I have tried (Chef and Puppet; **** Puppet so hard).
5. keybase - I don't use it, but if getting into GPG is proving hard for you, keybase can help (and I have invites). I use plan 'ole GPG.

And bash is my shell of choice, but I've considered swapping to fish, it sure looks purty. I imagine there's more, but this is all that comes to mind right now (besides the obvious ones like Python, git, etc.). If I find more, I'll post again .

One of the biggest ones for me is f.lux. I never thought it would be that useful. But now, after using it, anytime I turn on my PC at night without it, it's just too bright and hurts my eyes.

[Computer-Lab in Basement]

Also, is there any reason you don't use Clonezilla for imaging Windows-based workstations? Just curious.

Well, it's mainly because Ghost doesn't like imaging Linux drives for some reason, not to mention that my current project requires dealing with obsolete technology (refurbishing a bunch of old Pentium 4's to be used as terminals) which aren't capable of booting our Win8.1 PE flash drive (they boot to Win7 PE just fine, but Ghost isn't a part of that WIN image).

And because I'm too lazy to get Clonezilla working on a USB drive, that would have enough space to store the images...

keepass2

Almost forgot that one... it's such a great password manager.

[Tactile]

I find Double Commander enormously useful on a Windows machine...

http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/

[iri]

IntelliJ IDEA - best IDE ever.

i feel so much patriotism that it lightens my house!

[rowdy]

NOT Thunderbird.

[katushkin]

I really disliked f.lux, I just think the screen looks so weird when it changes colour, especially when I used to do the majority of my gaming at night when the whites went all yellow.

I like WhatPulse, Display Fusion, and WinDirStat

[slip84]

I really disliked f.lux, I just think the screen looks so weird when it changes colour, especially when I used to do the majority of my gaming at night when the whites went all yellow.

I like WhatPulse, Display Fusion, and WinDirStat

I'm in the same boat as you. It looks horrible. Very horrible.

[pr0ximity]

I really disliked f.lux, I just think the screen looks so weird when it changes colour, especially when I used to do the majority of my gaming at night when the whites went all yellow.

I like WhatPulse, Display Fusion, and WinDirStat

WinDirStat is great, has helped me many times in the past reclaim space on my drives. Really good at putting your usage in perspective.

I like KeyTweak for keyboard remapping on Windows (basically just a layer over editing the registry).

Also been enjoying Foxit Reader instead of Adobe garbage.



(WhatPulse looks a little like... a social keylogger? Interesting idea, but I have to say that's one I'll be skipping out of principle.)

[spoonypirate]

I can't live without:
SublimeText
Chocolatey
Wincommandpaste
Angry IP scanner
LessMSI/orca
Greenshot
Cyberduck
Lockhunter
Mobaxterm
Remote desktop connection manager
Sandboxie
Winmerge

[hjc1710]

IntelliJ IDEA - best IDE ever.

i feel so much patriotism that it lightens my house!

JetBrains master race... UNITE! /rings_together

NOT Thunderbird.

Agreed, Thunderbird just works... poorly for me. So damn poorly. I use Office365's web interface.

I really disliked f.lux, I just think the screen looks so weird when it changes colour, especially when I used to do the majority of my gaming at night when the whites went all yellow.

I like WhatPulse, Display Fusion, and WinDirStat

For me, I never do visual stuff (I'm a backend/API builder), so the color change doesn't bother me in the slightest. I actually enjoy it and anytime f.lux kicks in, a huge smile hits my face . Our designer doesn't use it for the reasons you guys stated though.

I find Double Commander enormously useful on a Windows machine...

http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/

Gonna have to check that out.

[HoffmanMyster]

Not sure if this will be a bit of "scope-creep", but here are my favourite audio-manipulation programs:

• EAC (Exact Audio Copy) - Rips CDs to hard drive very accurately
• Trader's Little Helper - Converts between formats (including lossless)
• CDBurnerXP - Burns CDs
• foobar2000 - Music player
• last.fm scrobbler - Scrobbles music plays

foobar and last.fm are really well known, but I wanted to have the list be complete. 

[exitfire401]

While I agree about f.lux looking weird, it has completely stopped my frequent headaches at work. I've tried everything from adjusting brightness and contrast levels, and my eyes just can't look at intense white for more than a few minutes without beginning to hurt.

[Computer-Lab in Basement]

Greenshot

Another one I forgot to mention...

[exitfire401]

• last.fm scrobbler - Scrobbles music plays

TIL what a scrobbler is. Foobar ftw.

[HoffmanMyster]

• last.fm scrobbler - Scrobbles music plays

TIL what a scrobbler is. Foobar ftw.

Here's me.     

And foobar is spectacular.  Especially the portable mode that allows me to keep my entire library/settings backed up in my Dropbox so I can just take my external drive with all my music and plug it into any computer I have and use it as I would normally (no old versions of the library to worry about, old skin settings, etc.).      Oh and it makes re-imaging my computer easier.  And it makes me not freak out about the possibility of losing my theme that I spent days working on.   

[exitfire401]

• last.fm scrobbler - Scrobbles music plays

TIL what a scrobbler is. Foobar ftw.

Here's me.     

And foobar is spectacular.  Especially the portable mode that allows me to keep my entire library/settings backed up in my Dropbox so I can just take my external drive with all my music and plug it into any computer I have and use it as I would normally (no old versions of the library to worry about, old skin settings, etc.).      Oh and it makes re-imaging my computer easier.  And it makes me not freak out about the possibility of losing my theme that I spent days working on.   

Agreed on all fronts. It took me a week to get my foobar the way I wanted it.

[intelli78]

Interesting thread, but it's REALLY important to put descriptions, not just a name...

Also Lurch you may want to read this thread too: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=59587.0

[MythicalWagyu]

• last.fm scrobbler - Scrobbles music plays

TIL what a scrobbler is. Foobar ftw.

Here's me.     

And foobar is spectacular.  Especially the portable mode that allows me to keep my entire library/settings backed up in my Dropbox so I can just take my external drive with all my music and plug it into any computer I have and use it as I would normally (no old versions of the library to worry about, old skin settings, etc.).      Oh and it makes re-imaging my computer easier.  And it makes me not freak out about the possibility of losing my theme that I spent days working on.   

I'm going to have to pick your brain about foobar sometime... I haven't figured out how to set it up yet but I keep hearing about all these cool features it has 

[sethk_]

I have Toastify which lets me bind keys to media controls for Spotify, since I use boards without media controls, f.lux to aid with headaches, and sublime 3 because it is a great text editor.

[tp4tissue]

Yo dawgs!

What do ya'll guyzes use for secure email..  your own servers?

[Vibex]

I'm on linux, but here are some of my preferred pieces of software.
WM: herbstluftwm
Bar: dzen2 or bar
Terminal: urxvt
Browser: Luakit
File Manager: Ranger
Mount: Bashmount
Shell: zsh (with fish syntax highlighting)
Image: termage This is a script I wrote up/modified a bit back. Was gonna rewrite it in python, but meh. I'm super lazy.
Media Player: DSAS (this is a program I'm still working on, so until I'm finished I would recommend mpd)

[tp4tissue]

I'm on linux, but here are some of my preferred pieces of software.
WM: herbstluftwm
Bar: dzen2 or bar
Terminal: urxvt
Browser: Luakit
File Manager: Ranger
Mount: Bashmount
Shell: zsh (with fish syntax highlighting)
Image: termage This is a script I wrote up/modified a bit back. Was gonna rewrite it in python, but meh. I'm super lazy.
Media Player: DSAS (this is a program I'm still working on, so until I'm finished I would recommend mpd)

wht for secure mail.

[BlueNalgene]

MiKTeX - LaTeX editor with nice features
KiCAD - Because gEDA is kinda horrible
Gimp - Good stuff
OriginPRO - Data visualization
Zotero - This is what I use for citation management.  Waaay better than Endnote and FREE to boot.

[HoffmanMyster]

• last.fm scrobbler - Scrobbles music plays

TIL what a scrobbler is. Foobar ftw.

Here's me.     

And foobar is spectacular.  Especially the portable mode that allows me to keep my entire library/settings backed up in my Dropbox so I can just take my external drive with all my music and plug it into any computer I have and use it as I would normally (no old versions of the library to worry about, old skin settings, etc.).      Oh and it makes re-imaging my computer easier.  And it makes me not freak out about the possibility of losing my theme that I spent days working on.   

I'm going to have to pick your brain about foobar sometime... I haven't figured out how to set it up yet but I keep hearing about all these cool features it has 

Sure thing!  Two comments though ( )
1) I am not an expert and don't claim to be
2) I did all of my modifications three years ago, so there could be a) things I don't remember, and b) updates/changes I am unaware of

All that said, I'm happy to help in any way I can.    Here's a screenshot of my setup below.    The hardest and most time consuming part of my modifications were changing the portion in the main window that has the album information ("Porcupine Tree - [2009] The Incident [Disc 1]").  The default for that was to display something else and I wanted it to give me the info I wanted, which required changing some code in the module.      I honestly don't remember what I did, but I remember it being difficult for me.     Not to scare you, I'm just saying.   


foobar2000 by HoffmanMyster, on Flickr

[ManicMatt1125]

Small words and a stern voice

[BlueNalgene]

• last.fm scrobbler - Scrobbles music plays

TIL what a scrobbler is. Foobar ftw.

Here's me.     

And foobar is spectacular.  Especially the portable mode that allows me to keep my entire library/settings backed up in my Dropbox so I can just take my external drive with all my music and plug it into any computer I have and use it as I would normally (no old versions of the library to worry about, old skin settings, etc.).      Oh and it makes re-imaging my computer easier.  And it makes me not freak out about the possibility of losing my theme that I spent days working on.   

I'm going to have to pick your brain about foobar sometime... I haven't figured out how to set it up yet but I keep hearing about all these cool features it has 

Sure thing!  Two comments though ( )
1) I am not an expert and don't claim to be
2) I did all of my modifications three years ago, so there could be a) things I don't remember, and b) updates/changes I am unaware of

All that said, I'm happy to help in any way I can.    Here's a screenshot of my setup below.    The hardest and most time consuming part of my modifications were changing the portion in the main window that has the album information ("Porcupine Tree - [2009] The Incident [Disc 1]").  The default for that was to display something else and I wanted it to give me the info I wanted, which required changing some code in the module.      I honestly don't remember what I did, but I remember it being difficult for me.     Not to scare you, I'm just saying.   

Show Image

foobar2000 by HoffmanMyster, on Flickr

Alright, let's talk Foobar components.  What does everybody use?

I think at the moment the only ones I have running that didn't come default are

• iPod manager
• Playlist Tools beta
• foo_stopaftercuralbum

[HoffmanMyster]

Alright, let's talk Foobar components.  What does everybody use?

I think at the moment the only ones I have running that didn't come default are

• iPod manager
• Playlist Tools beta
• foo_stopaftercuralbum

• ABX Comparator
• Quick Search Toolbar
• Waveform seekbar
• Columns UI
• Audioscrobbler

I think that's it, but I'm not sure.  I have my list of components, but can't remember which ones I added / use regularly. 

And I use iTunes for iPod management, because I don't like fighting with third party software support.  It's much easier to let it play nice with iTunes than struggle through it.  Plus, I think some programs don't play nice with the older iPods anyway (I had issues with the 3rd gen and Winamp), so that's another reason.

[trizkut]

Alright, let's talk Foobar components.  What does everybody use?

I think at the moment the only ones I have running that didn't come default are

• iPod manager
• Playlist Tools beta
• foo_stopaftercuralbum

• columns ui
• panel stack splitter
• waveform seekbar
• audioscrobbler
• ELplaylist

for the most part i'm just using a theme I found online

[swathe]

I'm a linux guy but work in a Windows world so most of the stuff I like using has to be cross platform

SSH: Remote access to *NIX servers. On windows I use cygwin to give me the SSH tools I want
Emacs: It's labelled as a Text editor but it does so much more than that. I do my orject ammangement in org-mode then dump to PDF after exporting to LaTeX, it's beautiful.
Universal Media Server: USe this to UPnP stream to devices in the house. Encodes server side for difficult files the PS3 doesn't like.
Mutt: Terminal based email client I use for personal mail. Outlook is used for work

I also run my own private email server which has all the goodies liek webmail access, spam filtering etc etc on a Debian VPS. Works great

[iri]

I'm on linux, but here are some of my preferred pieces of software.
WM: herbstluftwm
Bar: dzen2 or bar
Terminal: urxvt
Browser: Luakit
File Manager: Ranger
Mount: Bashmount
Shell: zsh (with fish syntax highlighting)
Image: termage This is a script I wrote up/modified a bit back. Was gonna rewrite it in python, but meh. I'm super lazy.
Media Player: DSAS (this is a program I'm still working on, so until I'm finished I would recommend mpd)

WM: Cinnamon
Bar: Cinnamon default
Terminal: Cinnamon default
Browser: Chromium
File Manager: Cinnamon default
Mount: Cinnamon default
Shell: bash
Image: GIMP (hate it with passion)
Media Player: smplayer

i feel so casual compared to you

[Vibex]

I'm on linux, but here are some of my preferred pieces of software.
WM: herbstluftwm
Bar: dzen2 or bar
Terminal: urxvt
Browser: Luakit
File Manager: Ranger
Mount: Bashmount
Shell: zsh (with fish syntax highlighting)
Image: termage This is a script I wrote up/modified a bit back. Was gonna rewrite it in python, but meh. I'm super lazy.
Media Player: DSAS (this is a program I'm still working on, so until I'm finished I would recommend mpd)

WM: Cinnamon
Bar: Cinnamon default
Terminal: Cinnamon default
Browser: Chromium
File Manager: Cinnamon default
Mount: Cinnamon default
Shell: bash
Image: GIMP (hate it with passion)
Media Player: smplayer

i feel so casual compared to you

Haha, I just spend to much time tinkering with my linux setup. I like every thing to be perfect.

[hjc1710]

I'm on linux, but here are some of my preferred pieces of software.
WM: herbstluftwm
Bar: dzen2 or bar
Terminal: urxvt
Browser: Luakit
File Manager: Ranger
Mount: Bashmount
Shell: zsh (with fish syntax highlighting)
Image: termage This is a script I wrote up/modified a bit back. Was gonna rewrite it in python, but meh. I'm super lazy.
Media Player: DSAS (this is a program I'm still working on, so until I'm finished I would recommend mpd)

WM: Cinnamon
Bar: Cinnamon default
Terminal: Cinnamon default
Browser: Chromium
File Manager: Cinnamon default
Mount: Cinnamon default
Shell: bash
Image: GIMP (hate it with passion)
Media Player: smplayer

i feel so casual compared to you

Yea I know... I use the same things as you, except for the media player (VLC for all videos), and I don't hate GIMP with a passion. I've been meaning to do a brand new install, go Arch, and really pimp out like awesomewm or something, but haven't had the time . The only default I stick by is bash and, IMO, if you're gonna use anything else it should be fish. To me, zsh is both too similar and just different enough from bash for me to not use it. Not everything I do in bash can be ported to zsh and vice versa and the gains zsh has over bash aren't that intense (everyone cites ohmyzsh and the autocomplete, the latter of which I hate), couple that with needing to do a decent deal of SSH'ing into servers and doing DevOps things and I find bash as my default shell to be pretty solid. I understand bash now and it will always be available (though understanding bash can take some effort).

fish, on the other hand, seems to have much more gains (like a sane syntax) than zsh, so I have been meaning to try fish.

Not sure if this will be a bit of "scope-creep", but here are my favourite audio-manipulation programs:

• last.fm scrobbler - Scrobbles music plays

foobar and last.fm are really well known, but I wanted to have the list be complete. 

Thank you for this Hoff... I hadn't taken the time to find a scrobbler for Linux and this one just works with my music player already (nuvolaplayer).

[iri]

i'd use zsh (with oh-my-zsh) instead of fish because of fish not being posix compliant.

also i'd switch to arch in a blink of an eye if it hadn't systemd

[Vibex]

Yea I know... I use the same things as you, except for the media player (VLC for all videos), and I don't hate GIMP with a passion. I've been meaning to do a brand new install, go Arch, and really pimp out like awesomewm or something, but haven't had the time . The only default I stick by is bash and, IMO, if you're gonna use anything else it should be fish. To me, zsh is both too similar and just different enough from bash for me to not use it. Not everything I do in bash can be ported to zsh and vice versa and the gains zsh has over bash aren't that intense (everyone cites ohmyzsh and the autocomplete, the latter of which I hate), couple that with needing to do a decent deal of SSH'ing into servers and doing DevOps things and I find bash as my default shell to be pretty solid. I understand bash now and it will always be available (though understanding bash can take some effort).

fish, on the other hand, seems to have much more gains (like a sane syntax) than zsh, so I have been meaning to try fish.

I still need to try fish. I like zsh for the auto completion and syntax highlighting. I couldn't care less about ohmyzsh though.

EDIT: Also, arch is a ton of fun. If you need any advice on it let me know.

[Firebolt1914]

OS: Arch
WM: i3 or gnome, may try herbsluftwm
Music: don't really have music files, kind of just stream from sub.fm
Browser: Chromium or Firefox, I honestly don't really care anymore
File Manager: Thunar
Terminal: URXVT
Text Editor: vi

I forget how I installed and configured all of this so I'm afraid to reformat my laptop to partition things better halp

[hjc1710]

i'd use zsh (with oh-my-zsh) instead of fish because of fish not being posix compliant.

also i'd switch to arch in a blink of an eye if it hadn't systemd

I... did not know that. I really only looked into fish briefly, saw some amazing syntax and quickly took it for a spin and was pleased. This is an interesting point, will have to do more research.

I still need to try fish. I like zsh for the auto completion and syntax highlighting. I couldn't care less about ohmyzsh though.

EDIT: Also, arch is a ton of fun. If you need any advice on it let me know.

I don't like zsh's "select and tab through the entries" style autocomplete. I prefer bash's "fill in as much of the word as possible and stop" approach, but that can be disabled in zsh (I do believe).

Noted on the arch help, I might be needing it ). I hear such interesting things about arch, some people despise pacman and think it's the devil, others think it's the best package manager ever. This is why I need to run arch myself to form an opinion .

I forget how I installed and configured all of this so I'm afraid to reformat my laptop to partition things better halp

So, what I've decided I'm going to do next is install arch, but just the barebones OS. Then, instead of ever installing or setting anything up in the command line, I'm gonna write some salt files (which are YAML) that do just that (via CLI calls and what have you). Add this to a git repo, push to Bit Bucket, now I can get my setup on any computer by just running

Code: [Select]

salt '*' state.highstate
However, this means I have to remember to use salt to install all new applications after I've done this setup... so we'll see how it goes ).

[Vibex]

OS: Arch
WM: i3 or gnome, may try herbsluftwm
Music: don't really have music files, kind of just stream from sub.fm
Browser: Chromium or Firefox, I honestly don't really care anymore
File Manager: Thunar
Terminal: URXVT
Text Editor: vi

I forget how I installed and configured all of this so I'm afraid to reformat my laptop to partition things better halp

Just backup your /home folder. Thats what I do, cause I reformat my computers on a regular basis.

[Vibex]

I still need to try fish. I like zsh for the auto completion and syntax highlighting. I couldn't care less about ohmyzsh though.

EDIT: Also, arch is a ton of fun. If you need any advice on it let me know.

I don't like zsh's "select and tab through the entries" style autocomplete. I prefer bash's "fill in as much of the word as possible and stop" approach, but that can be disabled in zsh (I do believe).

Noted on the arch help, I might be needing it ). I hear such interesting things about arch, some people despise pacman and think it's the devil, others think it's the best package manager ever. This is why I need to run arch myself to form an opinion .

That is true about the autocomplete. I don't use that method, it just seems bulky. I usually just do the fill in as much as I can method.

Pacman is my second favourite package manager. First is Portage. Pacman is nice, but portage is just so powerful.
If you want to try arch more safely, try Antergos. It's what I currently use (because It's impossible to install arch at my university because of the way that the control wifi).

[Firebolt1914]

OS: Arch
WM: i3 or gnome, may try herbsluftwm
Music: don't really have music files, kind of just stream from sub.fm
Browser: Chromium or Firefox, I honestly don't really care anymore
File Manager: Thunar
Terminal: URXVT
Text Editor: vi

I forget how I installed and configured all of this so I'm afraid to reformat my laptop to partition things better halp

Just backup your /home folder. Thats what I do, cause I reformat my computers on a regular basis.

I didn't really think about that; I'm kind of new to linux (managed to install arch somehow), so i thought it didn't work that way.

[Vibex]

OS: Arch
WM: i3 or gnome, may try herbsluftwm
Music: don't really have music files, kind of just stream from sub.fm
Browser: Chromium or Firefox, I honestly don't really care anymore
File Manager: Thunar
Terminal: URXVT
Text Editor: vi

I forget how I installed and configured all of this so I'm afraid to reformat my laptop to partition things better halp

Just backup your /home folder. Thats what I do, cause I reformat my computers on a regular basis.

I didn't really think about that; I'm kind of new to linux (managed to install arch somehow), so i thought it didn't work that way.

We are all new at some point. My first go at linux was Gentoo, so I learned pretty quickly. Pretty much everything important is kept in /home. Just remember what stuff you had installed, and reformatting becomes a breeze.

[hjc1710]

OS: Arch
WM: i3 or gnome, may try herbsluftwm
Music: don't really have music files, kind of just stream from sub.fm
Browser: Chromium or Firefox, I honestly don't really care anymore
File Manager: Thunar
Terminal: URXVT
Text Editor: vi

I forget how I installed and configured all of this so I'm afraid to reformat my laptop to partition things better halp

Just backup your /home folder. Thats what I do, cause I reformat my computers on a regular basis.

I didn't really think about that; I'm kind of new to linux (managed to install arch somehow), so i thought it didn't work that way.

We are all new at some point. My first go at linux was Gentoo, so I learned pretty quickly. Pretty much everything important is kept in /home. Just remember what stuff you had installed, and reformatting becomes a breeze.

), I've heard some special things about Gentoo (like kernel compiling!), but some people love it.

Another tip to make migrations easier: install anything that can't be installed via your package manager (e.g., IntelliJ) into one directory. I put them all in /opt. Makes it a lot easier to keep track of the programs I have installed that aren't managed by apt.