Having had one to many Windows updates trash my system, I've decided to go back to Ubuntu and am loving it.

However, it's been a while and I was wondering if any could recommend any overlooked gems in terms of games/software for it.

Just for 'shits and giggles' really, I'm not looking for anything specific, but I'm curious to see what my fellow goggers can recommend.

With nearly 500 Linux games on GOG, and nearly 2,500 on Steam, I'm afraid that you do need to be a wee more specific.

Sure, for games just peruse your game list and filter on operating system to Linux and you'll get the full list of games available for Linux either in the store or in your own library depending on what you're looking at.

As for software, here are some of my favourites:
- htop
- iptraf
- mc (midnight commander)
- espdiff

htop your favourtie program?

Intense fun...

Perhaps I explained poorly, I'm not struggling for games or apps, I'm just interested in what people are using and enjoying.

Don't forget that your distribution has some free games in the repository, including Nethack (a roguelike), Battle for Wesnoth (a strategy game), and bastet (a Tetris clone whose gimmick is that it almost always gives you horrible pieces and never gives you good ones).

I dunno, I prefer iotop. Endless fun.

It's a good idea to have screen or tmux around.

ssh is a useful program that allows you to connect to your computer remotely. (If you are going to expose it to the public Internet, make sure you disable password authentication and only use key-based authentication.)

Edit: Another good one: ncdu is good for managing disk space and seeing what files and folders take up the most space.

Well, out of what the Software Center offers I got Aisleriot solitaire (get gnome-cards-data along with it in order to have the full cards theme set), gnome-mines, gweled and pychess. Of these I prefer gweled, as it's a very good rendition of Bejeweled. I also have Zsnes and Kega Fusion for Super Nintendo and Sega emulation respectively -and I also use Lutris as a (mainly) dosbox-games-not-on-GOG client, and chocolate doom for the gog version of Ultimate Doom that doesn't have a linux version (innoextract helped me extract the .wad). I also use frotz from the terminal to play z files (e.g. frotz zork_1.z5) as the version of frotz given by lutris apparently isn't compatible with 64bit systems and thus didn't work.
You can also find lots of games with linux versions on itch.io btw- I personally found so many interesting games that I keep a separate bookmark folder just for those...

Been playing some Master of Magic and Two Worlds on my Linux desktop/The Way on my htpc/Dominions IV in my lappy.
So there you go ;)

MOC - a console audio player
Stellarium - a planetarium program

iotop is good for when you journlaing kthread go crazy.

Yes - I remember Stellarium. I'l be sure to give it another look. :-)

nice choice to leave Micro$oft!!

It's good that you like Ubuntu, as it comes with the most "love it or hate it" desktop environment (IMO)

First of all it would be great to know what kind of hardware you're using, to help us understand if you can run also some recent AAA games (post 2005 let's say)

Also remember that WINE can run almost every DirectX9 games, and if you own an AMD card you can use WINE-Gallium Nine which can assure you the same Window$ performance on you Linux machine (in most cases)

so in fact you can play a looooot of "Window$ only games" on Linux, e.g.:

Ufo extraterrestrials
Tropico
Sid Meier's Pirates
Dawn of War
Civilization 3-4

but also some AAA games like:

Fallout 3-NV
Red Orchestra 2
Red Faction Guerrilla
Grid
Dirt 3
Valkyria Chronicles
Planetside 2(free game)

and soooo on

some native Linux indies that i liked are:

Insurgency
Mini Metro
Limbo
Doorkickers
Human Resourse Machine
Deponia
Never Alone

so the list can go on almost forever, maybe you can tell us what genre you like the most :)

Don't forget SuperTuxKart it just hit 1.9.2-stable and is a lot of fun, especially if you have a few friends. I use it daily, I used to use steam as my gaming frontend on windows, but found I couldn't get it going on Linux as I had it on windows. Found Lutris after someone mentioned it on Reddit, and found it easy to setup, and easy to use. I use it to launch all my games, from Linux games, to wine (using PoL) and emulated (from the a2600 right up to the PSP),