How to find new software on Linux

I often get asked for and give out (sometimes unsolicited) software recommendations. Sometimes people wonder where I find out about this stuff. There is one way to find software which I think is underrated, which is to use the package manager of your operating system (your operating system does come with a package manager, right? right.).

In particular, I’m talking about package managers with community maintained repositories of software. There are several reasons why I think this is a good way to find software:

1. The incentives are towards software that respects you, as a user. Community maintained repositories generally require the person who added them to the repository to not be the same person or organization that wrote or maintains the software. This means that someone else liked the piece of software enough to maintain it as a package, and undertook the effort to add it.

   On the other hand, software you find on centralized paid app stores, or on the internet, reaches you often because whoever made it paid a lot for advertising and publicity. So the software you find there will tend to be the type focused on emptying your wallet, (or other ways of making money off you, like spyware, or cryptomining).

2. You don’t have to worry about updates. The package manager will handle this.
3. There are minimum standards. Distributions tend to have minimum standards about what can be included in their repositories. For example, Debian is known for putting in a lot of effort to make sure the software in their repositories fulfills stringent criteria around Software Freedom. You can generally trust that whatever you download from there will not be spyware, malware, etc.

So what does this mean in practice? If you don’t have a good package manager for your system, get one! All mainstream Linux distributions come with one, and so do BSDs. If you are on Windows, there is one called Chocolatey, but I haven’t used it and hence cannot recommend it. Similarly, on MacOS, there is MacPorts (Homebrew is the other big one, but it’s not community curated, so the above argument does not really apply).

Once you have a package manager, learn how to query it for available software. Many Linux distributions have a graphical interface you can query their repositories with locally in addition to the traditional command line-oriented interface, but if that’s complicated, you can usually just use the website of your distribution. It should have an interface for searching for packages.

After that, just try it out! When I realize I need software to do something, I will often search my distribution’s repositories for related keywords, then install all the results that look interesting. After trying them out and figuring out which one I like, I uninstall all the others and enjoy my new software.

Happy searching!