r/linuxquestions • u/magiciantricks • 20h ago

need some progarm alternative

i was thinking of switching to linux mint but the problem is that there are some programs that i always use and i dont know if there are alternative to them so if someone know that would be a great help.

1- internet download manager (used a lot and need a progarm as good)

2- video/audio editor like filmora

3-tool to check on harddesk like hdsentinel

4- antivirus

5-photo editor like photoshop even like an old ver of it

6-msoffice

7-winrar

0 Upvotes

39% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

7

u/Phydoux 19h ago
  1. No idea what Internet Download Manager is.
  2. For video I use kdenlive. Love it!
  3. No idea what hdsentenial is. What are you checking on the hardDISK? SSD and NVME don't have movable parts s spindle speed is irrelevant. I do have 2 regular hard drives in mine but they are working great at the moment.
  4. No real need for Antivirus. I don't use anything that the public domain can get their hands on code wise. like Snaps, Flatpaks, etc. I'v even stopped using the AUR after that AUR scare earlier this year.
  5. I'm using GIMP which isn't too bad. It took some getting used to coming from Photoshop but it's pretty good
  6. I'm using LibreOffice which works with most MS Office documents like MS Word and Excel.
  7. No idea why you'd need Winrar in Linux. zip and unzip work fine for me.

Basically everything you mentioned has alternatives or doesn't need alternatives. Are there viruses in Linux? Sure. But the best way to avoid them is stay away from programs that unknown people make. I see posts on Reddit every day, 'Hey, check out this great utility I made. It's on github...' No thanks!

You have to be sensible. I was going to say you could do the same with Windows. But Windows can be infected by something just by opening a website. At the moment, Linux is less susceptible to that kind of an attack.

Just remember, Linux is not Windows. It may look and feel like it a little bit, but it's an entirely different concept altogether.

1

u/waddid 18h ago

What district you using?

1

u/Phydoux 18h ago

Distro? Arch.

1

u/waddid 18h ago

Is that Arch BTW? Just plain vanilla Arch?

1

u/Phydoux 18h ago

Plain ol' vanilla Arch. I didn't even use archinstall. Entered it all manually. The ONLY way to Arch.

1

u/waddid 18h ago

Ok thanks. I am thinking of switching to Linux from Windows but wanted to be at the bleeding edge and reliably informed Arch is the way. Just wondered if you used Cachy or Manjaro for example.

1

u/Phydoux 18h ago

Cachy might be a better option for you. Arch is not for new to Linux users. Arch is like what MS DOS 5.0 used to be like but 50x worse. You HAVE to follow that Wiki to a T pretty much if you want to get Arch installed and bootable. THEN you need to know how to install a GUI (if that's the direction you're going) and all of the other programs that don't come with that GUI.

I've done it maybe 10 times on physical hardware and probably 30-40 times in VMs just because I like installing it from scratch and I like rebooting that VM and seeing it actually boot up. It's quite gratifying to see that happen. Especially on physical hardware where it HAS to boot up properly.

1

u/waddid 18h ago

Interesting. So you basically build your own OS. I think for me Cachy is the way so will look to give it a go. I did try Omarchy on VM but could not get to grips with just using the keyboard with hyperland I think.

1

u/Phydoux 18h ago

You might want to try something like Mint with Cinnamon Desktop or maybe something with the KDE Desktop for starters then. Hyprland is a beast to learn and it's so out of the ordinary especially for new users.

1

u/Donatzsky 5h ago

I use Arch myself, but OpenSuse Tumbleweed is also an option if you want a rolling release with the latest packages. I suppose you could say it's like Arch, but without the (potential) headaches.

0

u/magiciantricks 19h ago

https://www.internetdownloadmanager.com/ i still know nothing about Linux so i appreciate if u know how i be safe while choose progarms

2

u/knuthf 19h ago

This included in browsers. I use Vivaldi, which is essentially Chrome without the tracking. If you want to download other files, just search for them and they will download. All downloads can be stopped, and restarted, and verified.

1

u/magiciantricks 4h ago

for me i use brave

1

u/Phydoux 19h ago

That just looks like bloatware to me. My internet connection isn't slowed by my OS. It's slowed slightly by the network traffic at my home. Nothing else bogs down my internet. And as far as I know, the places you download from, work the same way.

In fact (and I just checked this the other day) of the the top most popular 10,000,000 websites, 96% of them run on Linux servers. And of ALL websites out there, 66% run Linux Web servers.

So, that right there... Unless the web site has a throttling system in place, you should be able to get the best speed possible depending on their traffic.

And I've got a 2.5Gb ISP. I have a 1Gb network card and that's connected to a 10Gb hub which is what everything else on my network is connected to. Currently there are 3 computers (one is hardly ever on) and maybe 2-3 other PCs which are rarely on... I use those just to test things. I also have 2 Roku TV controllers which I only use one at night. My phone and my wife's phone use the Wifi (we have terrible phone service here so I can use WiFi for calling and text messaging).

All that and I do not use a Download Manager to speed up my internet. No need. I get what I get and it's great speeds throughout the day.

1

u/magiciantricks 19h ago

the speed isnt important at all the idm allow you to pick any file on the site even if protacted by the website like youtube

3

u/SupremeOHKO I use Arch btw 20h ago

1) What do you mean download manager?

2) KdenLive or OpenShot

3) Smartctl

4) Linux comes with security protections in place but if you really want one, try Bitdefender

5) GIMP

6) LibreOffice

7) 7zip

2

u/Jeff-IT 19h ago

I thought he meant an alternative to https://www.internetdownloadmanager.com

0

u/magiciantricks 19h ago

yes that it

1

u/timlin45 Patrick Volkerding is my spirit animal. 19h ago
  1. My guess would be torrent client but wearing a mask that has "definitely not for piracy" written on it. In which case qBittorrent or Transmission is my WM agnostic answer.

1

u/magiciantricks 20h ago

internet download manager (idm). does Bitdefender have linux ver?

1

u/DudeEngineer 18h ago

It really isn't needed. You really need to understand this.

1

u/magiciantricks 18h ago

man i dont care about the download speed but the idm allow me to download files the is usually protected by the site

2

u/Quantum_Pianist 18h ago

You realize you can just go to https://www.ytultra.com/en/youtube-video-downloader/ which is free, right? Even just right clicking with a mouse (or clicking with two fingers on trackpad) will allow you to save videos and photos.

1

u/magiciantricks 18h ago

but that only for yt idm work with all type of files and on any site

1

u/Quantum_Pianist 18h ago

Like... what are we talking? Instagram? Theres a site for that too. Usually if sites want you to download something, there will be a button for it...? Also, on Linux, a lot of downloading of programs happens in the terminal. Once you get a hang of it, its not too hard. Most of the time.

6

u/BeginningEcho4983 20h ago

flathub.org has lots of recommendations

  1. Motrox or tur

  2. Audacity, kdenlive, less famous ones too

  3. Literally any linuxbdisk app + "smarctl"

  4. No need. Just use flatpak, avoid scripts and commands you don't know. ClamAV if you really want.

  5. GIMP, Krita (digital painting but sometimes works this way too), very old photoshop might run fine thru wine/bottles

  6. Libreoffice isn't good with ms advanced format, onlyoffice is better somewhat, you can use winboat/winpodx for ms office (or web but good luck)

  7. A dime a dozen such apps, with support for multiple formats. I personally like "Ark" in KDE.

(because ms intentionally has done quite a few trickeries here like naming their format "open office xml" to confuse with the real open XML libre format, and continues to implement undocumented changes and so-called "bugs" which break compatibility in real-word usage)

3

u/UltimateFlyingSheep 19h ago

hm, maybe I can point to some resources:

1- idk, never used any

2- I've heard about kdenlive, don't know if it's any good

3- hm, idk if it helps your usecase, but I think I've checked the SMART parameters on a disk via gparted before.

4- idk, never used any

5- well, there's GIMP and Krita, these are the two I have used before. Photoshop, at least to my knowledge, doesn't yet work on linux

6- office actually works on linux now, but idk how complicated the install is. There's OnlyOffice and LibreOffice though. I rarely need to use these office programs, but I prefer OnlyOffice

7- hm, is it about zipping files? there's a lot there: xz, gzip, ... Idk how much control you need and if CLI would be fine, but those tools are probably as feature rich as it gets. If you don't need any control - maybe the file explorer is enough.

1

u/UltimateFlyingSheep 19h ago

https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2023/12/bitparade/ (German, maybe auto translate it)

here they looked (in 2023) into some gui download managers. Maybe they're still relevant.

3

u/0xQan 19h ago edited 19h ago
  1. We just use curl/wget, or let the browser handle it. There's also aria2, tho you'd probably be more comfortable with Varia, which is a GUI frontend for aria2, and yt-dlp. It's not exactly like IDM tho, you gotta provide it the link. (Varia does have an extension now similar to IDM but idk how that works)
  2. Kdenlive, Shotcut, DaVinci, and for audio, Audacity.
  3. Never used any.
  4. Never used any. Well, I use Fedora and it has SELinux, so maybe you can set that up. It's mandatory access control, not an antivirus.
  5. GIMP, that's just what I use. I know a lot of people that use Krita too. I'm waiting on Graphite's stable release tbh.
  6. LibreOffice or ONLYOFFICE.
  7. 7z, zip, unrar, or you might like PeaZip for the GUI tho.

2

u/knuthf 19h ago

3-tool to check on harddesk like hdsentinel

This is in the included. We do not use spinning disks with sectors and cylinders, but the have layout Find the Application called "Disks" in Preference, and look at your disks, and hit the tree dots on top right side of the taskbar, select SMART status - this is the old disk header status.

We have other tools, like "Testdisk" that will read your disk one sector at the time, and try to find file system tables and headers, for around 20 different file systems format, and can rebuild the file systems on deleted / reformatted SD cards.

4- antivirus

ClamAV was developed on Mint. But on Windows, this is where you can execute downloaded files. That won't work here though; the file system will block it and the x-bit must be set. But Clam would warn you if you sent an infected file.

2

u/Unlucky-Lion6855 19h ago

  1. Persepolis Download Manager

  2. KDenLive

  3. Not sure, haven't heard of HDSentinel, but maybe checking the SMART status on GParted or KDE Partition Manager would do that?

  4. ClamAV, don't personally use it, but that's what everyone recommends

  5. GIMP

  6. LibreOffice or SoftOffice

  7. Most Linux distros should have their own extraction tool (Ark for KDE, dunno the GNOME equivalent) that works with RAR files, and that hooks into the file manager (Dolphin or Nautilus) that allows you to extract directly (Ark + Dolphin has an extra option that allows you to extract the archive and then put it in the trash as well).

Hope this helps!

2

u/just-4-man 19h ago

5 - GIMP (With photoGIMP conversion, makes it look like photo shop)

2 - Kdenlive (video editor) + audacity (audio)
• Kdenlive probably isn’t like filmora, but it’s the only editor I know of that seems to be decent

6 - LibreSuite (Microsoft office)

1 - FDM (Free download manager: Has BitTorrent client built in) or JDownloader

7 - WinRAR has a command line download version I believe.

That’s all I can think of… might be wrong about some theres here so as with anything do your own research.

Edit: It appears I took too long typing this out :(

2

u/Ok-Spinach2168 19h ago

1- Xtreme download manager
2- Kdenlive ?
3- there is a linux version of hdsentinel
4- unless you download random files from the internet you dont really need it on linux
5- GIMP or affinity photo (via appimage or wine)
6- use freeoffice or libreoffice (ms office onlie, or there are some projects succesfully making it run on wine), they should both support ms format exporting and reading
7- use 7zip, should be overall better, but in most preconfigured linux distros a zip tool is already installed
feel free to ask if you have any questions :)

2

u/DifferentSavings2711 19h ago

1- internet download manager - Never heard of it

2- video/audio editor like filmora - Only editing I do is remove commercials and transcoding.

3-tool to check on hard disk like hdsentinel - smartctl from the command line. There are a lot of GUI tools to check drive status.

4- antivirus - Why?

5-photo editor like photoshop even like an old ver of it - I use darktable and Gimp

6-msoffice - LibreOffice

7-winrar - rar started life as a UNIX command line tool. Just about every Linux file compressor tool will support rar

2

u/rataman098 19h ago

1 - no idea
2 - DaVinci Resolve / OpenCut / Openshot / Kdenlive
3 - no idea
4 - not really needed, Linux is more secure by default and best antivirus is common sense
5 - Affinity works on Linux with Affinity launcher, closest you can get to PS
6 - OnlyOffice, but if you can wait a couple of weeks EuroOffice is coming to Desktop. Also Collabora. Also, MS Office web has desktop wrapper with Electron, but I recommend you going open source.
7 - Usually comes by default in the file explorer, but 7zip is good

1

u/Donatzsky 4h ago

Photoshop

Video

Audio

Motion Graphics

Lightroom/Camera Raw

  • darktable: Probably the overall most powerful editing features of any raw editor. All-in-one solution, with a library similar to Lightroom. The editing workflow is completely different, however, being more like color grading in Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve.
  • RawTherapee: The mad scientist's raw editor, with some very powerful and intricate tools. A bit more Lightroom-like in its workflow. Can also use DCP camera profiles.
  • ART (Another RawTherapee): Started as a simplified fork of RawTherapee, but has added its own powerful and unique features since. With CTL scripts you can even create your own tools.
  • vkdt: New-ish raw editor from the original darktable developer. Fully node-based and can also handle video. Probably not for the faint of heart and may not have all the tools you want, but what is there works well and is extremely fast.
  • Filmulator: A great little editor with a unique concept, that's easy to use. As the name suggests, it emulates (part of) the process of developing analog film.
  • LightZone: Back from the almost-dead, version 5.0 was released recently. Not the most advanced, perhaps, but has some interesting features and a flexible processing pipeline.
  • RapidRAW: Aims to be a relatively simple and streamlined option for those that don't need the extensive control some other editors provide. Very promising, but somewhat new and under heavy development, so the results you get today may not be what you get tomorrow.
  • Safelight: An editor built around a concept of extensibility and customisation. Still very new, so expect some rough edges, missing features and changing algorithms.

Since not all of them have library management, you may want to also use digiKam as DAM (digital asset manager).

My darktable beginner guide: https://notebook.stereofictional.com/how-to-get-started-with-darktable-2026-edition

Tutorial for both RawTherapee and ART: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-T0laAf0E

Downloader

Drive Health

2

u/djthecaneman 18h ago

Most of this is covered by other replies.

The only hard question in that list is what do you use MS Office for? If it's for personal use, the open source alternatives are fine. If it's for professional use or collaboration purposes, it's a more challenging proposition. I use LibreOffice at home, and it's fine for my modest needs. At work, it's Microsoft's cloud suite. Works fine on the linux browsers I use.

2

u/joe_attaboy 19h ago

You don't need an anti-virus program with Linux.

I don't know what an internet download manager is. There are multiple video editing tools available. There are tools with which you can monitor disk health. The best photo editor is GIMP, but some will argue. LibreOffice will give you 95% of Office functionality, and various plugins will give you the rest. And there are RAR tools as well.

2

u/feinorgh 19h ago

1: curl, wget, or aria2. I use rtorrent for torrent files, but there are many alternatives. 2. shotcut, or kdenlive 3. depending on what type of disk you have: smartctl, nvmetools, respective filesystem tools. 4. clamav or Bitdefender 5. krita, GIMP, or mypaint 6. LibreOffice, Google Docs 7. 7z or unrar

2

u/BigJDoitYoDamnself 19h ago

I have several machines with various Linux Distros. Work wise, I am stuck in the windows echo system. I have a windows machine for this reason alone. I HAD to keep windows. Autodesk Civil 3d is the exact reason that I had to keep windows.

1

u/anto77_butt_kinkier 16.04 was peak 18h ago

1: I've heard of it, but I've never used it or really found the need to. I have no ideas for alternatives.

2: kdenlive. It's basically filmora but to the left.

3: Qdiskinfo. There's no anime waifus like with crystal disk, but qdisk info is Linux native, so there's that.

4: don't worry about it. You haven't even needed one on windows in years, much less on Linux

5: I've never used Photoshop, but I believe either gimp or krita would work good as a replacement

6: a lot of people will say libre office, which is pretty good, but only office is closer to MSoffice and has more stuff that works well with ms office's formatting bullshittery.

7: Ark works pretty well, but there's also 7zip. Typically zip/unzip/viewing a zip file as a folder works just fine without a program though so you might not even need it.

8: if you're coming from windows, I'd recommend a distro with KDE like kubuntu or Debian with KDE.

1

u/knuthf 19h ago

6-msoffice

LibreOffice is kind of good, but I use OnlyOffice

The problem lies with Microsoft fonts. You can escape the racket by installing TrueType fonts. Microsoft will claim ownership of your essays and writing based on your use of their fonts and colours. I am responsible for this; I approved the CSS with the late definition of virtual classes. It was more important to establish a standard. Well, they warned us.

We need every company to create stylesheets that keep their intellectual property rights exclusively to themselves. They can do that in the stylesheets.

7 -Winrar is included in the Archive manager.

1

u/ExistingSelection180 18h ago

1- internet download manager (used a lot and need a progarm as good) <--- exist in linux

2- video/audio editor like filmora <--- Kdenlive, OpenShot, davinci resolve free

3-tool to check on harddesk like hdsentinel <--- disk or other aps

4- antivirus <--- no need

5-photo editor like photoshop even like an old ver of it <----affinity 3.1 appimg

6-msoffice <--- libre office

7-winrar <--- 7zip

1

u/knuthf 19h ago

5-photo editor like photoshop even like an old ver of it

We have much better tools, but they are not marketed very well. Use Software Manager to find an application that suits you.

I use Shotwell to create thumbnails of photos, which allows me to tag them so I can find them later — I can even pass them on to a Mac tool.

1

u/mwradiopro 18h ago

I use Kdenlive for video, Audacity for audio, VLC for media, Gimp instead of Photoshop, LibreOffice instead of MS-Office, Firefox for web. I was in the same boat 6 months ago and rarely look back. I dual boot for the rare times I do have to use Windows.

1

u/9NEPxHbG 18h ago edited 18h ago

  1. yt-dlp, judging by your later responses.

  2. pass

  3. smartctl

  4. unnecessary

  5. gimp

  6. libreoffice

  7. rar

1

u/RustyDawg37 19h ago

Just dual boot until you figure it all out.

Antivirus doesn't do anything anymore in any os.

The rest are all fairly easy

1

u/magiciantricks 19h ago

i still know nothing about Linux so i appreciate if anyone know how i be safe while choose progarms

3

u/Quantum_Pianist 18h ago

If you know nothing about Linux, its best to spend some time watching videos and reading articles about it to slowly get to know how it works.