This website serves a subjective collection of the best software for Ubuntu, compiled by me, Dirk Schmidtke. Neither me nor this website are in any way associated with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.

What makes software great? To cut a long story short: A program should do what it’s supposed to do, and do it in a user-friendly way. But that’s where the problems start. Let’s take text editors like Emacs or Vim – they are a nightmare for newcomers, while experienced users swear by their operating concepts. Or consider the Gnome shell – Linux users have been arguing about its UX concepts for years. (Some Linux users argue a lot at all.)

From a good software we may expect that it is constantly maintained, that bugs are fixed as soon as possible and that it comes with a good documentation – ideally for users as well as for developers. Almost all programs gathered here are free and open source. For more and more people open source is a knock-out criterion.

All programs described here I use or have used myself. Of course I don’t know even remotely all 104118 packages that Ubuntu provides (this number was valid for Ubuntu 22.04, counting all architectures, excluding updates and backports.) Did I miss something? Please let me know in the comments. Comments will be re-opened soon.