qalculate. It’s a calculator. A good one, though. You can put in 2 * x = 5.5 or 100 inches to meters and get an answer, it loads fast, it keeps history, the arrow keys work and it has all the fancy scientific buttons you’d ever want too.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/general_recommendations

Take your pick.

Distrobox for accessing any package from any other repo; including those belonging to other distros.

For gaming - https://github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch1 It bundles a few useful things as well like another suggestion: https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode as well as quite a few others, tinker is especially useful if you want to mod too, making mod organizer 2 very easy to use, taking a lot out of the otherwise manual set up

Also in general, look for custom launchers, Genshin has a custom launcher, runescape as well, I believe gog does too. If you can’t use foss at least use a better launcher.

for media honestly you can’t beat VLC, but I run a plex server I typically use, for music I use strawberry, and for asmr desktop noise Blanket is a super cool package, and I like Cozy for audio-books.

Edit: Oh and for gaming I saw another comment recommending retroarch and I totally agree, retroarch works amazing on linux, so much better performance than I ever had emulating on windows before I switched.

tree, screen, and wget have for a long time been the three packages I’ve always added on a fresh install.

Other packages are mainly connected to the use of the system at hand, like zellij, helix, and git on a development setup, or fish on any system where I do my doings mainly in a terminal och over ssh.

vim

For me after every install I immediately install media codecs but that’s only because fedora doesn’t ship with them by default.