Essential Productivity Apps for Elementary OS

Elementary OS is awesome. The user interface is aesthetically appealing and simple to figure out without reading manuals, watching tons of tutorial videos and without digging through tons of menus and sub-menus to change most settings.

I like to use my computer to do stuff, not fight the UI.

However, if you're a office productivity type of user, here's a list of apps you're likely to need:

Office Productivity Applications

• LibreOffice 
  • ​a good alternative to Word, Excel, Access
• Dia
  • ​Flow Charting Tool

Internet Browsing

• Chromium
  • While I like using the default "Midori" light weight browser and I still use it regularly, I'd recommend installing Chromium as it works better with Google Drive, Udemy etc.

Graphics Editing

• Gimp
  • An alternative to Photoshop
• Inkscape
  • A Vector based graphic creation program
• MyPaint
  • A painting program with a large brush collection including charcoal and ink to emulate real media and also a highly configurable brush engine 
    

3D Modelling

• Blender
  • ​My favourite 3D model creation program. 

The great news is that all the above are software are free or donation-ware i.e. if you use some of them regularly, do consider donating to the software devs so that they can regularly update the software.

Oh, unless you like getting under the hood, stick to installing apps from the "Software Centre" and avoid terminal commands like "sudo get-app" and the like. It's a lot safer and stress free.
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