Heres my list:

Transnomino (https://www.transnomino.com/)

StillColor (https://github.com/aiaf/Stillcolor)

SublimeText (https://www.sublimetext.com/)

Homebrew (https://brew.sh/)

VLC (https://www.videolan.org/)

Macs Fan Control (https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control)

Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/)

NetBird (https://netbird.io/)

Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

Honestly its not huge and most are probably obvious, but those are what I immediately install on my machines. Looking forward to seeing alternatives or new must-haves.

Handy, Cotypist, Markedit, Ghostty Tip, BetterTouchTool, GoodLinks, Pixelmator Pro, Handbrake, Zed, Onyx, LittleSnitch (or LuLu), Chezmoi, Stats, Shottr, llama.cpp, oMLX, LM Studio, Parcel, Things, OrbStack, Msty Studio.

Magnet app (for window splitting) is usually one of my first installs. I think I paid like $7 for it years ago and it's well worth it.

Hammerspoon, Little snitch, iTerm2, Chezmoi, Orion

Malwarebytes, Microsoft Office. That's the software I'll install when I buy a new device.

Package manager: Nix(alternative to homebrew) https://nixos.org/download/#nix-install-macos

Package management: Nix-darwin https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin

Browsers: - Librewolf https://librewolf.net - Tor https://www.torproject.org - Orion https://orionbrowser.com

Video downloader: Yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Video/audio player: Mpv https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv

Video editor: LosslessCut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Video encoding: Ffmpeg https://search.nixos.org/packages?&query=ffmpeg

Office suite: LibreOffice https://www.libreoffice.org

IDE: Zed https://github.com/zed-industries/zed

Window management: Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

Menubar system monitor: Stats https://github.com/exelban/stats

Screen tweaks: MonitorControl https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

Autorun checker: KnockKnock https://github.com/objective-see/KnockKnock

Video streaming platforms: Grayjay https://grayjay.app/desktop

Communication: Signal https://signal.org/download/macos

Torrenting: Transmission https://github.com/transmission/transmission

VPN: Mullvad https://mullvad.net/en/download/vpn/macos

DNS: NextDNS https://nextdns.io

Add the following in denylist to block the constant communication with apple servers:

aaplimg.com

apple-cloudkit.com

apple.com

apple.com.akadns.net

apple.com.edgekey.net

apple-dns.net

apple.news

cdn-apple.com

icloud-content.com

icloud.com

me.com

mzstatic.com

push-apple.com.akadns.net

safebrowsing.apple

Connect to the mac from anywhere: Tailscale https://tailscale.com/download/mac

Raycast (also does window management, dictation), Chrome, Ghostty, Karabiner..

Ublock-origin with Firefox, Audacity, Batch Photo Resizer, calibre, cardflow, Diffraction, Ejimo and Ultra Character Map (try finding emojis without them), Libre Office, Paprika Recipe Manager, Samurai Safe, SeaMonkey (who else edits HTML?) GIMP, Darktable, RawTherapee, Super Photo Upscaler, Sublime Text, VLC, Clearview (and why isn't epub supported natively?), PhotoSync (share photos with all platforms), GhostText for editing browser text areas with Sublime Text or other. (life-saver)

Ones I actually use.

I always come back to Safari.

I’d install apps based on your needs. If you install other people’s must-have apps, you’re not going to have such a clean install anymore.

Firefox Nightly - https://www.firefox.com/en-US/channel/desktop uBlock Origin - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin Ghostty - ghostty.org Homebrew - https://brew.sh Oh-my-posh - https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh Zed - https://zed.dev 1Password - https://1password.com Tailscale - https://tailscale.com iStats Menu - https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus Little Snitch - https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html Ice Toolbar Manager - https://icemenubar.app MarkEdit - https://github.com/MarkEdit-app Magnet - https://magnet.crowdcafe.co/ Pi - https://pi.dev