Some of my favorite Flatpak apps
Almost two months ago, I switched back to Ubuntu as my primary operating system. While I still have a Windows 11 VM, I never really use it. Ubuntu 26.04 fits all my needs I had since switching to it. While I installed it during the beta, the final LTS version has also been released since then.
I used Linux already many years ago as the primary operating system and tried different distributions because all promised something special. But nowadays I think the distribution should provide a stable base, and I will use tools like Flatpak, Snap (oh, oh, that’s controversial), Homebrew, or Docker to install and run the applications I require.
My favorite of those package tools is Flatpak. With Flathub (think of it as an app store for Linux), there’s a huge selection of pre-packaged software available, most of it up-to-date and installed with a single command. Flatpak generally provides isolation and granular options to control the permissions of the apps. On my setup, I also tried to replace most of the preinstalled GNOME apps with the versions from Flatpak, to take advantage of bugfixes or new features that might not appear in the LTS repositories of Ubuntu.
In this post I want to share some nice tools on Flathub I discovered since switching back to Linux. Maybe you find some of them useful.
Packet is a Quick Share client for Linux. With it, I can easily share files to my phone or from my Android phone to my laptop. I just need to have Bluetooth enabled and be connected to the same WiFi with both devices.
Windows has a native emoji picker. While Ubuntu/Gnome also has one, I didn’t really like it and replaced it with Smile. I configured it with a keyboard shortcut. It also lets you search for emojis and puts the selected emojis in your clipboard for you to easily paste them.
Speaking of clipboards, I originally used the “Windows 11 Clipboard History for Linux” for a week or so before I switched to Serigy. It’s been working pretty well since then. From Windows I am so used to the clipboard history that I absolutely need this feature on my computer.
I learned about PeaZip when I was searching for a good way to view and manage archives (zip, 7zip, tar, etc.) on Linux. PeaZip supports every archive format you can think of.
RClone Manager is a graphical frontend for Rclone, my tool of choice to access various cloud storage providers.
PDF Arranger is a nice little tool that lets you arrange pages in PDFs. Change the order of pages, merge PDFs, or delete pages – all possible with it.
And some fun at the end. The classic 2048 game on Linux.