Doctor, Doctor, my brother thinks he’s a chicken!
Too much fun! Like many other Comp. Sci. students, I spent way too many hours trying to get Eliza, an automated psychiatrist from MIT, to say something shocking. Weizenbaum, the developer, “was surprised and shocked that individuals, including his secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.” In this sense AI is nothing new because Eliza passed the Turing Test in 1967.
There’s no doubt there are a great variety of Linux packages in use.
Recently I did a CD install of Debian 12 (Bookworm) desktop with Gnome, which loads a bunch of stuff over the Net. Here are extra packages that I installed manually. The first set is used by and with an automated configuration script that I wrote, so they have to come in to begin with.
Here are third-party packages I admire. These are not available in Debian repositories although some provide Debian-compatible repositories of their own.
Tor Browser Bundle: Anonymizing Network Browser
This is available from https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/ as a tarball. This should be unpacked and the whole tor-browser_en-US directory moved to the ~user folder. This is so that the browser can auto-update at user authority as the need arises.
RetroShare: Secure Communications with Friends
This has its own Debian-compatible repository.
metar: A Package to Parse METAR Coded Weather Reports
weeWX: Open source software for backyard weather stations.
From http://weewx.com/docs/debian.htm. Although a Debian package exists, doing any development practically requires that all the code be in user-space, so don’t install the package. Download it instead.
OpenHAB: Home Automation
This has its own Debian-compatible repository.
Ant: GTK3/4 Themes by eliverlara
From https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest.
This is for claws-mail. It provides better contrast.