I made a separate post for this list because since the day I wrote the previous list, I switched up a lot of softwares and I personally think that the previous post was “too bad to be fixed”.

In this list, I’ll try to provide more concise comments on why I use it and images for each entries and provide updates properly, if any.

One difference between this list and the old one is that I don’t prioritize GTK apps over Qt apps anymore since I got the Qt theming working.

You can still see the old list here for reference:

Featured

nh

Not so long ago, I complained about my extremely bloated /nix/store and tried to find a way to deflate it. Unfortunately, despite receiving some advices from exozyme’s Matrix room and the Internet, I was still unable to resolve my issues, that is old/orphan stores that will not be removed somehow.

Just yesterday, I was scrolling through the Home Manager’s option list and discovered nh. It is a set of utility that reimplements several Nix commands - including the “garbage cleaning” commands.

After quickly installing it with nix-env, I ran doas nh clean all, and…

Wow. It got rid of the LibreOffice binaries that has been sitting in my system for so long. Everything that did not belong to the generation got absolutely wiped. After organizing my packages, I ended up freeing around 40GB with this tool. I highly recommend this tool for NixOS users out there :)

LabWC

LabWC is the improved version of Openbox for Wayland. I have fallen in love with it ever since the day I discovered it on Alpine Wiki.

Just like Openbox, it is a stacking window manager, with almost all features inherited from the original project. It provides a very unique look compared to other window managers in the Linux ricing scene with titlebars, window/workspace switcher, right-click menus, etc. For cosmetics, it doesn’t have animations or blur; it only have window transparency, which is very appealing to people with simple tastes like me.

It has very active development on GitHub, and a lot of planned features on the table. Serves me well and satisfies my customizing needs, a very solid option for Wayland users indeed.

Internet

Floorp

Floorp is a Firefox fork developed by a group of Japanese students. Compared to vanilla Firefox, Floorp allows more choice in UI customization and is more optimized than Firefox in performance and memory usage (in my opinion).

Cinny

Cinny is a web-based client for Matrix, the instant messaging platform. It has a modern and sleek UI, and also has a lot of features.

I also use Neochat, which is a native client for Linux desktops developed by KDE, but unfortunately it is buggy on my machine, so I preferred not to use it.

Gajim

Gajim is a XMPP client developed using GTK and Python. Despite its tech stack, it’s the lightest and most stable XMPP clients available for Linux desktops, which is sad considering how old the protocol is.

senpai

senpai is a terminal-based IRC client. It supports IRCv3 features natively and integrates well with IRC bouncers (soju in particular).

qBittorrent

This is one of the most popular open-source BitTorrent client out there. It is good at what it does, has everything you need to torrent. There are also many other popular options as well, like Deluge and rtorrent. But in my experience, qBittorrent is the easiest one to use and also the one that doesn’t crash when I use it.

Nicotine+

This is a client for the Soulseek P2P network. The network is mostly for sharing music, but you can exchange all kind of files on this network. Music is what I’m here for, very helpful if I decided not to fetch something from private trackers.

newsraft

newsraft is a lighter alternative of newsboat - a text-based RSS reader. Though with lesser LOCs, by no means it is any less featureful than newsboat. newsraft allows you a lot of ways to organize your feeds and the reader have a decently modern look on its own.

neomutt

neomutt is text-based e-mail client and a modern fork of mutt. I use it with mbsync.

There are a lot of good options for a mail client for the Linux desktop, like Claws Mail, but I think neomutt is better because of NixOS.

dnscrypt-proxy2

DNSCrypt claims to be a protocol that encrypts, authenticates and optionally anonymizes communications between a DNS client and a DNS resolver.

I purposefully use this software to avoid DNS leaks.

Documents

Emacs

I switched from Neovim to Emacs because I didn’t feel too comfortable configuring Neovim and things break and there are too many ways to do the same thing. I actually did spend some time to find a good alternative to Neovim before landing on Emacs because I was too lazy to learn and write Emacs Lisp but I felt like all of them sucks and somewhat not very mature.

Atril

Atril is a PDF viewer developed for the MATE desktop environment. I personally use it because somebody told me it has no scaling issues. It is also very light.

crqt-ng

crqt-ng is an e-book reader and a fork of coolreader. I use it simply because it wasn’t packaged on NixOS yet (I have, BTW!).

Other options include: Calibre (good for management, not very well as a reader), Foliate (ugly GNOME looks)

GoldenDict-ng

GoldenDict-ng is a dictionary program and a modern fork of GoldenDict. Supports a ton of dictionary formats. You can read the whole Wikipedia on it if you want!

I personally use GoldenDict-ng as a Japanese digital dictionary and a sentence parser with Hakurei.

There are also qolibri but it can only read EPWING dictionaries - the files from old electronic dictionary devices.

Multimedia

swayimg

swayimg is a simple but powerful image viewer for Wayland.

Other options include: nsxiv

Aseprite

Aseprite is a source-available software for creating pixel artworks. There is a GPLv2 fork of Aseprite named LibreSprite, unfortunately I don’t use it due to slow development.

mpv

mpv is a simple but powerful video and audio player. It beats VLC and other video players on all aspects.

I believe all hardcore Linux users are already familiar with this software.

Memento

Memento is a mpv-based video player designed for Japanese learners. The main selling point of this player is that it can read Yomitan dictionaries and provide popups over subtitles. Basically MPV with plugins and a proper GUI.

Cantata

Cantata is a MPD client for playing music. It is the most complete MPD client available for Linux desktops in my opinion. Unfortunately, development for Cantata has ceased 4 years ago, but it is still very usable and stable despite that. I might consider forking it to implement some fun features :)

EasyEffects

EasyEffects provides audio effects for PipeWire audio streams. It is extremely powerful and lightweight, allowing you to apply various types of effects and uses only a tiny fraction of your system’s resources on headless mode (a consistent 25MB in RAM usage).

I use it with the “Perfect” EQ settings.

Utilities

fish

fish is a shell. Powerful and works out-of-the-box. I don’t write Fish scripts though.

yazi

yazi is a terminal file manager. Also considerably more powerful than other terminal file managers (lf, nnn, …). Very helpful for quick file operations.

syncthing

Software for file synchronization. Directly transfer files between devices on the same network without using any third-party hosts. Absolutely clears KDE Connect.

unar

unar is a free software version of The Unarchiver. Seems like it’s the only unarchiver that can extract multiple archive formats properly (without encoding issues). Extremely powerful.

Fcitx5

Fcitx5 is a framework for input method engines. I use it to type Vietnamese (with bamboo) and Japanese (with anthy).

KeePassXC

KeePassXC is a local password manager and a modern fork of KeePass. I opted for this instead of BitWarden and GNU Pass as it is more convienient, easier to sync and I have more control over my credentials.

Desktop

foot

foot is a fast, lightweight and underrated Wayland terminal emulator. Does its job well and never sacrifies performance.

waybar

waybar is a… Wayland bar. Inspired by polybar, it is the most mature standalone bar for Wayland environments, though development isn’t moving very fast (but you can always patch stuff anyway!).

fuzzel

fuzzel is a simple application launcher by the creator of foot.

swww

swww is a wallpaper daemon for Wayland. I use this just to rotate through my wallpaper folder.

mako

mako is a simple notification daemon for Wayland. Still needs some improvements though.

← Go to parent