As any carpenter will tell you, there’s nothing more important than having the right tool for the job. But in Linux repositories, there are countless tools for all sorts of jobs. So what to use? Here are a few good apps I came across recently.
This weekend we’re taking a magnifying glass and giving things a close-up look. What are we looking at? Everything: your hardware, your files, and even artwork that’s scaled down to individual pixels.
Hardinfo2: Detailed Info and Benchmarks for Your PC
If you’re like me, you’re frequently checking your PC’s specifications, be it for product comparison, to judge if your device can run some heavy-duty software, or for troubleshooting connectivity issues. That’s why I was excited to find Hardinfo2, a versatile tool for not only checking hardware specs but also putting them to the test with benchmarks. I counted 19 different benchmark tools built-in, from cryptographic hashing to raytracing.
That’s not all though. It also gathers some other potentially useful data points like what programming languages are installed (and which versions), the health of your battery, and your BIOS version number.
If you’ve been around the Linux world long enough, the name Hardinfo may sound familar. In fact, if you go back into the How-To Geek archives, we actually wrote about using Hardinfo over a decade ago in 2012. The original Hardinfo was abandoned by its developers, and another group decided to carry on its legacy with an improved and maintained successor.
To get Hardinfo2, you can install it using one of the commands below. Note that some repositories still carry the original Hardinfo, so if you want the actively maintained continuation, make sure you don’t forget the 2 at the end of the package name.
sudo dnf install hardinfo2 #Fedora
yay -S hardinfo2 #Arch User Repository
sudo zypper install hardinfo2 #openSUSE
You can also download RPM, DEB, and Arch installation packages at the Hardinfo2 download page.
Pixelorama: Design and Animate Pixel Art
If you’re an artist doing retro-style work (or you dream of getting started) and you’d like to do more with your Linux computer, Pixelorama is a free and open source pixel art sprite editor. While many of the most popular creative apps have little or no Linux support, Pixelorama runs natively on Linux.
I may be a writer, but I also have an artist’s streak in me, and I had fun putting together low-resolution gradients with Pixelorama. It has layer and mask tools for non-destructive editing, plus export tools designed for creating game assets. It also has built-in animation capabilities and can even import animations from other popular design apps.
Like any good creative app, Pixelorama also has its own extension system. You can download them from the community to extend Pixelorama’s capabilities or build an extension yourself, with a little GDScript knowledge.
You can find Pixelorama on Flathub. If you want to support the developers, you can also buy Pixelorama on Steam for $10. It’s also available on Itch.io where you can run it in your browser without any installation required.
tree: Map Your Directories in the Terminal
When you’re working in the Linux terminal and you need to figure out where your files and folders are, sometimes the ls command just isn’t enough. It can take several minutes to scope out an entire directory and all its subdirectories to see where everything is. That’s when you should learn to use the tree command.
At any point, you can simply enter tree and you’ll get a recursive printout of every folder and subfolder in your current directory, along with all the files. It all appears in a tree structure with pipes showing you what files belong where. The command output uses colors to make
That can be a lot more info than you need, though, so you can tell tree you want just specific directory like this:
tree Documents/Resumes
If you’re exclusively interested in directories and not files, you can use the -d command to specify directories:
tree -d Pictures
If you’re looking for specific directories or files, you can filter for them using a pattern like this, which pulls up only files with a .jpg extension:
tree -P *.jpg
There are several more useful flags, like -u to print file ownership, –prune to exclude empty directories from the tree, or –gitignore to apply filters using any .gitignore files. Gaining familiarity with your Linux file system will make it easier to put down roots and make it your own.
As a longtime Linux utility, tree is widely available across distro repositories. You can install it using one of these commands:
sudo apt install tree #Debian and Ubuntu
sudo dnf install tree #Fedora
sudo pacman -S tree #Arch
sudo zypper install tree #openSUSE
None of these apps piqued your interest? Be sure you check out the apps I recommended last weekend. They involved money management, file backups, and typing skills.
