Add applications to Linux Mint

[od4knb]

I propose adding the following applications to Linux Mint:

Main apps

• Veracrypt (encryption app, not DFSG compliant), OR:
• Zulucrypt-gui (encryption app, DFSG compliant)
• RescueZilla (Create image backup of disk/partition, CloneZilla compatible)
• Ventoy2Disk (create a bootable HDD/SSD/SD/USB with a lot of .iso files on the boot partition)
• Refracta Snapshot (create a bootable .iso file from a Linux Mint installation)
• Flameshot (screenshot tool with crop and edit functions)
• Cudatext (text editor for bash coders)
• a scanner app, that can properly scan black/white documents, like Hamrick Vuescan (Vuescan is the only paid software I use ...)
• Safing Portmaster (check network traffic)
• Audacious (Great audio player. Celluloid is not suited for playing audio files)

Tools

• Smartmontools (needed by inxi and GSmartcontrol)
• GSmartcontrol (test HDD/SSD)
• soundconverter (convert audio files)
• Asunder (rip copy-protected Audio CD. Sound Juicer cannot rip a copy-protected CD)

That would make Linux Mint perfect!

👍 Odie

02-01-2026-16.14: Edit: Asunder is preferred over Sound Juicer.

[fosslover306]

I've used safing portmaster, it was great and then something broke and my internet connection got broken too, so I was forced to remove it from my computer, and it is not in the standard debian repo which is not ideal for system stability.

I do love the ventoy idea tho, it is the best way to have a fully utillized bootable installer, unfortanly it is also not in the repo's.

Flameshot, great idea and very doable with wayland support as well from what I understand.

[od4knb]

Hi @fosslover306, Thanks for your reply.

About Safing Portmaster: do you know an alternative, to check if a villain is diving into your machine?

TT4N, Odie

[fosslover306]

Unfortanatly no , I do use Hblock to block problematic urls however.

What Linux really needs is a flatpak based vpn that filters traffic combining the best of portmaster, the best of hblock, and of course actually being availibile without breaking networking or making the system unstable.

And before you ask, anything out of the offical repo is not wanted as far as I know, and even tho I wrote a shell script to install hblock following the offical copy paste directions it was also firmly regected on the grounds of url based security, or anyother form of system protection is "usefull but not worth bothering with" becase all malware comes from bad software you knowingly installed and nowhere else, so it's your problem to solve and "users must learn how secure their own systems because url based securiy is a game of whack-a-mole so why bother"

Personally I think that sounds like giving up a fight you haven't even lost yet, but this is apearently the currant security and privacy stratigy 'why bother'.

just read the comment chain for my hblock disscussion if you want the full quotes and context to this whole mess.

https://github.com/orgs/linuxmint/discussions/1108#discussioncomment-15376128

[fosslover306]

Gsmartcontrol and refracta is also unessary, gnome disks which is already pre-installed can mount and create iso images, repair partions, check and test SMART status, create raid arrays, format drives and partions, and benchmark all connected drives, and change drive labels and mount points.

Gpart and parted are better choices for bigger problems and gparted is also pre-installed i believe.

And you do not need to list the dependencies of a package as well as the main package.

Unless their is a setup like what gpart and gparted have where parted is the main package, and gpart is not required but provides the advanced data recovery tooling and gpart is so small i don't know why they are treated seperatly.

[od4knb]

Hi @fosslover306,

Regarding alternatives to Safing Portmaster: Thanks for the information, but it's not my area of ​​expertise. I'll look into it later.

@fosslover306 wrote: "Gsmartcontrol is unnecessary, gnome disks which is already pre-installed can <...> check and test SMART status"

I think, keeping an eye on health of your (HDD/SSD), is necessary, and gnome-disk-utlity is not the best source of information for that. When I go to [gnome-disk-utility\KINGSTON_SA400S37240G_SSD\[⋮] button\SMART Data & Self-Tests...], I see the following information:

temperature: 99° C / 210° F

This value is incorrect. The SSD works fine, and there's no smoke coming out of my PC ;-)

This is a known issue.

When I issue inxi -v8, before installing smartmontools, the output reads:

Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 252.45 GiB used: 4.44 GiB (1.8%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda maj-min: 8:0 vendor: Kingston model: SA400S37240G
    size: 223.57 GiB block-size: physical: 512 B logical: 512 B speed: <unknown>
    tech: SSD serial: {ValueRemoved} fw-rev: 66.5 scheme: MBR
  SMART Message: Required tool smartctl not installed. Check --recommends

🛈 The smartmontools package contains the smartctl (cli) and smartd (daemon) binaries. When installing gsmartcontrol, smartmontools is installed as a dependency.

After installing smartmontools it reads:

Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 252.45 GiB used: 4.44 GiB (1.8%)
  ID-1: /dev/sda maj-min: 8:0 vendor: Kingston model: SA400S37240G
    family: Driven SSDs size: 223.57 GiB block-size: physical: 512 B
    logical: 512 B sata: 3.2 speed: <unknown> tech: SSD
    serial: {ValueRemoved} fw-rev: 66.5 temp: 14 C scheme: MBR
  SMART: yes state: enabled health: PASSED on: 18d 20h cycles: 188
    read: 397 GiB written: 102 GiB

I think temp: 14 C (14° C) is more like it.

This is a known issue as well.

After installing gsmartcontrol, I start it's GUI, and check my SA400S37240G SSD. I see a lot more information then gnome-disk-utility provides, not only a SMART list. When I go to the "Statistics" tab, I see:

Temperature statistics (rev.1):
Current temperature (C): 16
Highest temperature (C): 33
Lowest temperature (C): 10

That's more trustworthy than the 99° C value, that gnome-disk-utility shows. Please, try gsmartcontrol, before disgarding it, it's a nice app.

@fosslover306 wrote: "Refracta is also unessary, gnome disks which is already pre-installed can mount and create iso images"

Although gnome-disk-utility has a lot of useful functions, it's not suited to create a bootable .iso file of your own running customized Linux Mint (or other Debian/Ubuntu based) installation on HDD/SSD, but Refracta Snapshot can, just like antiX ISO Snapshot. Refracta also has an OS, and a "Refracta Installer" tool, to create an installation on HDD/SSD from an .iso file created by Refracta Snapshot.

gnome-disk-utility would be great for creating an .iso file of a data partition (with personal privacy-sensitive data), if it was able to encrypt and compress the .iso file, but it isn't. Then again, RescueZilla can compress the .img file, but can't encrypt it either. This is absolutely something for the gnome-disk-utility and RescueZilla wishlist! The Image Explorer in RescueZilla 2.6.1-plucky (to retrieve a file from an .img data backup) is still in beta state, and that's not a good thing...

When you image a say 240 GB SSD, with 30 GB data on it, using gnome-disk-utility, a 240 GB (uncompessed) .iso file is created. That's not workable. Rescuezilla compresses the data, leaves out the empty space, and creates a 30 GB image file.

@fosslover306 wrote: "Gpart and gparted are better choices for bigger problems and gparted is also pre-installed i believe"

Gpart (Guess PC disk partition table, find lost partition): good tip, seems usefull indeed! I'll try it out soon. I allways use Testdisk & Photorec for disk/partition/file recovery actions. Photorec is part of the testdisk package.

gParted is an excellent Partition Manager indeed, and it is available in the .iso (when you boot from it), but it's not available in your installed Linux Mint on HDD/SSD (I've not tested this in v22.3-beta).

@fosslover306 wrote: "And you do not need to list the dependencies of a package as well as the main package"

As I do not do such a thing, I think you mean "And you do need ..."? To make a distiction between packages in the Debian/Ubuntu repo, and packages that are on e.g. Github/SourceForge, I present a download link for each application.

When you click a Ubuntu Package Search link, e.g. Zulucrypt-gui, click a version, e.g. noble - 6.2.0-1ubuntu3, you'll find a "depends, recommends, suggests, enhances" list. A red dot is a requirement (dependendency).

You can also use Debian Package Search. That site provides the same layout as the Ubuntu variant.

But I guess, you also want the requirements of the packages, that are not in the Debian/Ubuntu repo. I keep your remark in mind:

"And before you ask, anything out of the offical repo is not wanted as far as I know"

and @clefebvre hasn't responded yet, so I won't spend too much time on it.

Kind regards, Odie

[fosslover306]

I did not know about the temperture bug I will check for that temp reading error.

But the 'remark' is not really mine as much as it is the summation of the rejecting reasons I get, combined with outright statments I have nothing against you or anyone else, I just want you to be informed(please disregard this if I missinterpreted your reply)

and yes gnome disks could use some work but knowing gnome it will probably never happen hopefully in the future a better designed disk utiliy will be made to improve on gnome disks and add the badly needed iso compression capibities, it was probably designed for 30GB HDDs and 5GB thumb drives and that was the end of it, at the end of the day no normal user wants to juggle 5 disk manager programs when one can do all 5, which is probably why gnome disk utillity is still the standard for better or worse. Hopefully the power of flatpak will bring new cross distro base system managment programs, untill then I can just imagine what that future could look like.

[umikali222]

You can make an iso through the disks app (although I agree that that feature leaves a lot to be desired), for audio there's rythmbox. You can test and even fix disks through the disks app. I feel like the rest of the apps aren't really needed and rather power apps that you can install if you need. Although on the other hand for example hypnotix isn't really needed either.

[od4knb]

Hi @umikali222,

Thanks for your reply.

@umikali222 wrote: "You can make an iso through the disks app <...> You can test and even fix disks through the disks app"

Please read my reply to the @fosslover306's post about this.

@umikali222 wrote: "for audio there's rhythmbox"

That's a nice app too, but I prefer Audacious. Setting Rhythmbox as the default audio player, instead of Celluloid, would be a step forward.

@umikali222 wrote: "<...> rather power apps that you can install if you need"

For people that boot from an .iso file, it's pretty handy that these tools are in the .iso file on the Linux Mint website. Try Ventoy, it's a great bootloader!

Kind regards, Odie

[umikali222]

I had to install ventoy once and never opened the app again. I don't need it to come preinstalled on my mint iso. If you have ventoy on a usb stick then you can put a separate iso for a distro/utility that has these apps for working with disks. I guess if gnome disks has problems, then maybe we could fix these bugs instead of installing a separate app for a feature this app has. Having 2 or 3 apps would not only not follow KISS, it might also be confusing for new users. I guess you could modify gnome disks to redirect you to the appropriate app, but I think fixing up gnome disks might be a better idea.

…

On January 6, 2026 12:00:11 AM GMT+01:00, Odie Pastunik ***@***.***> wrote: Hi @umikali222, Thanks for your reply. > @umikali222 wrote: "You can make an iso through the disks app \<...\> You can test and even fix disks through the disks app" Please read my reply to the @fosslover306's post about this. > @umikali222 wrote: "for audio there's rhythmbox" That's a nice app too, but I prefer Audacious. Setting Rhythmbox as the default audio player, instead of Celluloid, would be a step forward. > @umikali222 wrote: "\<...\> rather power apps that you can install if you need" For people that boot from an .iso file, it's pretty handy that these tools are in the .iso file on the Linux Mint website. Try [Ventoy](https://sourceforge.net/projects/od4knb-linux/files/#user-content-booting--an-iso-file-from-usb-hdd-ssd-using-a-ventoy-boot-loader), it's a great bootloader! Kind regards, Odie -- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #1279 (reply in thread) You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Message ID: ***@***.***>

[od4knb]

Hi @fosslover306,

"I did not know about the temperture bug"

The GNOME Team doesn't either. Perhaps My issue isn't investigated because of the "[LOW]" designation ¯\(ツ)/¯

"I just want you to be informed"

Did I provide enough information?

"it was probably designed for 30GB HDDs and 5GB thumb drives"

And 3.5" floppies ;-) The "gnome-disk-utilty" 46.0-1ubuntu3 package in LM 22.3-beta is pretty old. It's the version for Ubuntu 24.04 (the base for LM 22.X).

The newest version in the Ubuntu repo is 46.1-2ubuntu1 but that version is only mend for Ubuntu 25.10 based systems. I hope, that LM 23.0 will come soon after Ubuntu 26.04 is issued in april 2026. I don't know why the Linux Mint team doesn't adapt every XX.04 (april) and XX.10 (october) stable Ubuntu release. That would make Linux Mint more up-to-date, but not "Long-Term Support". 24.04 is the latest Ubuntu LTS version.

I successfully installed gnome-disk-utility_46.1-2ubuntu1_amd64.deb on LM-22.3-beta, installed smartmontools, started the "Disks" GUI, selected my SSD, and cried out loud:

Assessment: Disk is OK (99° C / 210° F)

"Hopefully the power of flatpak will bring new cross distro base system managment programs"

A Flatpak package is a good idea for bulky new systems (the Flatpak host is installed on LM-22.3-beta BTW), but not for older computers, as it slurps resources. Same goes for Snap packages (Snap host is not installed in LM-22.3). Perhaps an AppImage?

Nice chatting with you,
Kind regards, Odie

[od4knb]

Hi @umikali222

"fix these bugs instead of installing a separate app for a feature this app has. Having 2 or 3 apps would not only not follow KISS, it might also be confusing for new users"

I agree. One app for a specific aim, that incorporates all desired features, is preferred. Put some pressure on the GNOME DEV Team.

Kind regards, Odie

[fosslover306]

On my system at least the reported temperture from gnome disks lines up with other temp monitoring applications and is shown in both celsius and farhenhight, my guess is the bug comes from chosing the wrong temp sensor, or if it selected the right one measurments are probably not being taken at the same time or the same intervial, so tho's readings look wrong even if they are correct in a sense.

Welcome to the world of software and temp sensors, multiple points in the same room let alone different rooms will disagree on temperature and humidity when compared to any other sensor reading espeacilly when any heat is getting added or removed the same goes for humidifiyers. Software only makes it worse because all of them are being displayed in the same place at the same time, with no idea which one is correct or where the sensors are, and if any averaging is being done just adds layers of obfusatacion on top of the already inconsistant readings.

That being said gnome clearly needs a lot of work to modernize it for modern hardware with plenty of CPU power and IO speed, and gnome disks is not alone in that after all fcsk still says which filesystem is corrupt, provides no info on how to fix the problem, and clearly knows exaxactly what to do but has me do all the thinking anyway as if I know enogh to disagree with it and if I say no to it fixing somthing it skips it so I still need run the repair command again, so I have just press "Y" after every question anyway so a simple "would you like to fix the filesystem automaticly Y/N would surfice.

My point is everyone that knows how to fix these stupid papercuts needs do so, and stop requiring users to be nerds or find a poorly written guide or blog post on how to fix such stupid problems, this in not the 80's where everyone used the command line and had a manual that came with the computer in question with a detailed trouble shooting guide, with software that could not be changed easliy or at all for better or worse the excuses for simple fixes that should have happened 10 to 15 years ago should not be excepted today in 2026.

[od4knb]

Hi @fosslover306,

We're drifting a bit of topic, but you say interesting things.

As an average user, I'm satisfied when the temperature reading deviation is 10% or so. I want to get a warning pane when the temperature of the SSD/HDD (or a SMART value) is in the danger zone. For that, gnome-disk-utility needs to have a deamon.

Gnome-disk-utility is the best, when dismounting several large (256 GB) USB sticks: you'll see an hour glass (spiral thingy) until it's dismounted. The "[email protected]" systray applet does not present consistent messages, if you give a dismount command, when part of the data is still in the buffer (not yet written to the stick).

"Hardware tools, only for nerds": I agree, try determining the microarchitecture (feature) level of your CPU using ld-linux-x86-64.so.2... Why is this so complicated?

For formerly Windows users to adapt Linux Mint as their new OS, some things need to change, I agree. Just now I read this article about it. I think the "driver problem" is the most urgent one. I always look at the "minimal kernel version", before buying new hardware, but you can't expect novice Linux users to look in /boot to see which vmlinuz* file is installed. Closed-source drivers (e.g. NVidia) are not a good idea however, as mr T. (not the brown, but the orange one ;-) can summon NVidia any time to add a backport in it.

I think most Linux problems will be solved when only Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint remain, and these operating systems are used by 50% of the world's population. Just try explaining to novice users the added value of dnf, zypper, emerge, apk, slackpkg, yay, yum, and pacman compared to apt ... Such a superfluousness ... When there are only Debian based OS'es, Flatpak, Snap and AppImage will no longer be needed (well, when installed user apps will always run in a sandbox).

Developing software will also be much easier in that case. DTAP testing new software on hundreds of different Linux distros, with different OS bases, on different hardware (amd64, arm64 etc.), is unfeasible, since many apps are now maintained by just one developer.

Thanks for your reflections,
Kind regards, Odie

[fosslover306]

Well I don't agree the only solution is to become windows, or get rid of certain distro's entirely but taking questions about which distro is best seriosly and not giving joke answers, along with not making pointless one's like hannah montana linux or something like that would be a great start, however the reason for a lot of forks is the maintainers of a large project getting a god complex, chasing off users and then refusing to evolve and adapt over time till it is easier to fork a project then to get anything done on the original project, and when simple user facing quility of life improvments are not applied and cause papercut style problems which takes more time to justify not fixing them to apply the damn obvoius fix which no one will care about unless something goes wrong which is when the fix would be noticed, and probably by a new user which will need help the most.

If the system is being helpfull when stuff breaks then all users will have a better experince, especaily new users who will likely feel burned by the experince and never try again and warn others to stay away "you only get one chance at a first impression" after all but instead wanabe gods, neckbeards, and entitled nerds stop these improvments because they still think Linux is a "speicecial club" and new users will ruin the experince for them.

Stackoverflow tried that stratagy and as soon as anything got better or more friendly web traffic started droping, brodie roberson on youtube made a video on it.

To quote a commenter "they gate kept so well the castle closed".

Maybe a lesson will be learned this time?