Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day.
He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice.
When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles.
If you're heading to college and shopping for a new laptop or PC, get the best hardware you can afford—but when it comes to software, don't think you're locked into Windows. Linux has evolved a lot over the years, and modern distros are just as intuitive to use as Windows. More importantly, Linux is generally more efficient than Windows, so you can get more performance out of the same hardware. And as someone who went through college using a Linux PC, I can tell you that Linux has an impressive collection of apps to help you get through your day-to-day student life.
Obsidian is probably one of the best apps out there for students and anyone who likes to gather knowledge in general. At its core, it's a local-first, Markdown-based note-taking application—but it can be so much more than that. Beyond writing notes, you can save web clippings, add images, attach PDFs, and pull in pretty much anything you want.
However, the real magic is in how Obsidian allows you to connect all your notes. You can create wiki-style links between notes and visualize those connections in a Graph view, where every note shows up as a node with lines connecting it to other notes. This lets you notice patterns between your notes that you could otherwise overlook.
For example, there could be two notes that you never thought were related, but they actually connect to a mutual third note. Suddenly, you have a bridge between two separate ideas. This helps you find commonalities between different concepts, which can help you learn topics in a more cohesive way and build a deeper understanding of how everything fits together.
Building a second brain has never been easier.
Anki is one of the most effective underrated apps I've encountered. It's popular among many med students, but there are also plenty of people who know nothing about it. It's basically a flashcard tool with a really clever spaced repetition algorithm built in. You create flashcards that could simply be your Obsidian notes turned into question-and-answer pairs—with the question on the front of the card and the answer on the back. These flashcards can be organized into decks, typically one per subject or topic. Then every day, you'd open Anki and quiz yourself on how well you remember everything.
Now, a lot of flashcard tools can do this—what makes Anki interesting is that after answering each card, you can rate it based on how difficult you found it to remember the concept. These ratings directly feed into the spaced repetition algorithm, influencing which cards appear in your following review sessions. Questions you found hard to recall will show up more frequently than those you found easier. This increases your exposure to the questions you find hard, allowing you to remember them better.
How I use Claude to build personalized Anki flashcards based on my own study material, in minutes.
Super Productivity is by far one of the most powerful productivity apps I've come across. At its core, it's a task management application—you fill it up with everything you need to do for the day, whether that's studying a subject, researching a topic, or finishing homework. Big tasks can be broken down into subtasks to make them more manageable. Each task can also have an estimated completion time, and when you start working, you can track how long it actually takes. This lets you see how well your estimates stack up against your real-world performance—which is particularly useful if you have a tendency to be overoptimistic.
Beyond this, Super Productivity gives you multiple ways to view your tasks. There's a planner board that lays out your tasks in a daily, time-boxed view, a calendar mode that shows how your week looks, a Kanban board for tracking progress across everything you have going on, and an Eisenhower Matrix for prioritization. That last one is especially handy when you've captured a ton of tasks but don't know what order to tackle them in—the matrix helps you sort everything by importance and urgency.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg—there's a whole plugin ecosystem that adds even more features and functionality. If you're someone who's ambitious and has a lot on their mind but lacks a system to follow through and stay accountable, Super Productivity can be that tool.
Most task managers just let you capture and store your tasks. This one also helps you get them done.
You've probably heard all the hype around AI by now, but not all AI is created equal. The quality of any AI tool comes down to the model powering it underneath—and Claude is one of the best models out there. On Linux, you get access to it through Claude Code, which also happens to be one of the best ways to use Claude.
You see, unlike the Claude web app, Claude Code gives the LLM direct access to your system. It can run terminal commands, allowing it to make direct changes to your PC. This means it can read your files, edit existing files, and even create new ones.
