I love EOS & have it installed on various devices for various purposes, usually with KDE Plasma but 1 (HTPC) with XFCE. Apps/utes vary by devices’ purpose but I always reach for:
Sys
- lts & headers
- perl-rename
- cronie
- inxi
- timeshift
- btrfs tools & grub menu & autosnaps
- gparted
- dd / ddrescue
- smartmontools (mainly for spinning rust in the past, may start using again for ssd)
- htop/btop
- yay
- firewall (usually firewalld) & if a server then fail2ban with multiple filters of increasing ban severity
- nano (yeah I’m one of those
) - relevant gpu drivers & tools (eg: nvidia, nvidia-settings, nvtop…)
- .bashrc (aliases for the win)
Media
- yt-dlp
- ffmpeg
- kid3
- okular
- gwenview
- pinta
- vlc
Comms/Net
- brave
- thunderbird
- hexchat
- ssh & sshfs
- curl / wget
- bluetooth (usually bluez, bluez-utils, blueman)
- kde-connect
- proton-vpn
- transmission
- keepassxc
Games
- wine
- heroic games launcher
- steam
- bash (1-liner automation is FUN!
)
Also use OpenOffice on a laptop used for such purpose, KDE Connect very useful with that too (file transfer, copy/paste, SMS…).
And just recently started using arch-audit-gtk for critical update notifications & find it handy.
There are others that come and go but I think that’s most of them.