It’s the first weekend of May, and I’ve got three Linux apps that earned a spot in my workflow the hard way—by actually being useful. These picks solve specific problems I didn’t even realize had better solutions. If you’ve got a few hours free this weekend, they’re definitely worth installing.

Albert

The Spotlight alternative Linux users deserve

Albert is a keyboard launcher for Linux—think of it like macOS’s Spotlight feature, but more powerful and fully customizable. You press a hotkey (I use Ctrl+Space), type what you want, and it happens. No need to click anything, navigate menus, or even open an app.

I mostly use Albert for web searches. If I want to search for something online, I hit Ctrl+Space, type my query, select the search engine I want to use—Google, YouTube, or ChatGPT, and press Enter. It opens directly in my default browser with the results. It might sound like a small thing, but it removes a surprising amount of friction from your day when you’re constantly looking things up.

Beyond web searches, Albert also handles quick calculations, terminal commands, file searches, and system actions—all from the same box. I also use it to set Pomodoro timers without switching apps and to run quick terminal commands without opening a terminal. Once you get used to triggering everything from one place, going back to the old way of doing things feels genuinely slow.

In essence, you can configure Albert to do almost anything. It has a robust plugin system that lets you enable different features. The default plugins already cover a lot of ground, and you can extend it further with Python if you want to build something custom. The possibilities are mostly limited by your imagination.

One thing to know going in is that Albert isn’t usually available in most distros’ default package manager. You’ll need to add the official OBS repository for your distribution first—the instructions are on Albert’s official website. It’s not complicated and should only add a minute or so to the installation process.

Ventoy

One USB drive, every ISO you’ll ever need

If you use Linux, you’ve probably created a bootable USB drive before. The usual process involves a tool like Balena Etcher where you select an ISO, flash it, and wait. It works, but I’ve never been a fan of it—especially the fact that it dedicates the entire USB drive to a single ISO.

For example, you can use a 128GB USB drive to flash a Linux ISO that’s only 5GB, and the remaining space becomes unusable. That drive can now boot only that one ISO. And if you want to use a different one, you have to start over.

Ventoy solves this in a much more elegant way—in fact, I’d say this is what the default process should be like. You install Ventoy on your USB drive once, then copy ISO files onto it like regular files. Ventoy automatically detects them and builds a boot menu based on what’s there. You still have access to the full capacity of the drive, so you can store multiple ISOs and create a true multi-boot USB.

You can also mix ISO files with regular files like movies or music, turning the drive into both a utility tool and a storage device.

Ventoy supports over 1,300 tested image files, including most Linux distros, Windows ISOs, rescue tools like SystemRescue, and diagnostics utilities like MemTest86. It works with both legacy BIOS and UEFI systems, so the same drive functions across a wide range of hardware.

fzf

The missing search layer your terminal never shipped with

Before diving into fzf, I want to highlight three situations most Linux terminal users will recognize:

• You ran a long, complex command a few days, maybe weeks ago—full of flags and custom paths—and now you need it again. You press Ctrl+R to search your command history, but it only shows one result at a time and expects you to remember the exact wording.
• You need to open a file buried several directories deep. You start tab-completing your way through each level, but you either take the wrong path or can’t find it at all.
• You need to kill a frozen process but don’t remember its exact name. So you run ps aux, scan through a wall of output, find the PID, and then run the kill command manually.

fzf is the solution to all of these problems. It’s a command-line fuzzy finder—you pass it a list, and it lets you search through it interactively as you type, without needing exact matches. The matching is “fuzzy,” meaning you can type a few characters in roughly the right order, and it will still find what you’re looking for.

Once you enable shell integration (usually a single line in your Fish, Bash, or Zsh config), you get three keybindings that replace the above three workflows entirely. Ctrl+R becomes a full interactive history search with multiple results visible at once. Alt+C lets you jump to any directory without tab-completing through each level. And typing kill -9 followed by Tab opens an interactive process picker instead of dumping raw ps aux output.

The real power of fzf is that it works as a Unix filter. You can pipe the output of almost any command into it and turn it into a searchable interface. That’s when it starts to show off its real potential, and you start building workflows around it.

The only caveat is that fzf is purely terminal-based, and it doesn’t do much out of the box without shell integration. That said, installation is straightforward, and it’s available in most distro repositories.

Three apps to make your Linux experience better

Now and then, you install something on Linux, and it just clicks—not because it does anything spectacular, but because it quietly removes a small, persistent annoyance. These three apps do exactly that. They cover different parts of your workflow, are genuinely useful, and are well worth an hour of your weekend to try.

8/10

Operating System

Kubuntu 24.04 LTS

CPU

Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX (2.7GHz up to 5.4GHz)

This laptop is purpose-built for developers and professionals who want a Kubuntu Linux-powered portable workstation and gaming platform. It features an Intel processor capable of hitting 5.4GHz and both integrated graphics and a dedicated NVIDIA 5070 Ti GPU for when you need extra power for machine learning or games.