Software

Here you can find a list of the software I like to use. There are literally loads of options available, for a more comprehensive list, check out the Arch Wiki it is really useful to find software and alternatives to things you may already use.

Core Desktop

This list makes up what I consider, a core desktop environment - the OS itself, window manager, compositor, panel, menu system, terminal emulator and user shell, file manager and text editor. This is what I like to use, but hopefully it will give you some ideas if you have never strayed away from a traditional desktop environment, such as Gnome, KDE or XFCE (to name just a few.)

• Operating System - Arch Linux: I use Arch btw. It is a rolling release distribution meaning it is updated constantly - this may mean your system will be unstable. Personally I have had virtually no issues, you’re mileage may vary though!

• Window Manager - Herbstluftwm: A manual tiling window manager, you are in full control where you want to place windows (it may not be for everyone.) Simple and elegant!

• Compositor - Picom: A compositor is perhaps not strictly essential, but it provides nice transitions when opening and closing windows. It is also one way to prevent screen tearing.

• Panel - Polybar: A customisable panel that can provide any information you want to know.

• Menu - Rofi: A menu system that can be used as an app launcher and a window switcher or anything else requiring a menu.

• Notification - Dunst: Customisable notifications to notify you about notificications that you need notifying about.

• Terminal - st: a light weight, yet heavily customisable terminal emulator.

  • Shell - Zsh: my shell of choice is zsh, with addition packages you can have some really great features such as autocomplete and syntax highlighting.

  • File Manager - lf: A fast and extensible file manager, you can do almost anything with it!

  • Text Editor - Neovim: Rewrite of Vim aiming to improve the user experience.

Additional Software

This list is made up of the programs I use day to day, which supplements the previous list - essentially making a full on desktop environment to rival any other! Some of these applications may be considered essential such as an image viewer, but really and truly all this stuff can be added as and when or after you’ve set up your base system.

• Image Viewer - sxiv: Light weight program to view images. Sadly, no longer maintained, but still in the official Arch repositories. See also nsxiv available in the AUR.

• Music Player - moc: An ncurses music player, no faffing about with mpd. If you use pulse audio check out moc-pulse in the AUR.

• Video Player - mpv: Light weight video player, it’s also used as a back end to various other players… so cut the bloat and just use this instead!

• PDF Viewer - Zathura: Minimal document viewer, note you must also install zathura-pdf-poppler or zathura-pdf-mupdf to add PDF support. Personally I use poppler.

• Terminal Spreadsheet - sc-im: The vim of spreadsheets.

• GUI Spreadsheet - Gnumeric: Sometimes I just need a GUI, this does the job well. At least I don’t need to install Libre Office.

• Terminal Image Manipulation: Imagemagick: Great for simple edits.

• GUI Image Manipulation - Gimp: Better for more complex image processing.

• Vector Graphics -Inkscape: Great tool to create vector based graphics.

• Email Client - Mutt-wizard: Not such much an email client in and of itself, but if installed via the AUR it pulls all the needed dependencies - neomutt (the actual client) among others.

• Web Browser - Librewolf: A fork of the Firefox web browser, focusing heavily on privacy. Available on the AUR, get the binary version unless you want to compile it for hours!

  Useful addons for browsers include:

  • uBlock Origin: Comes preinstalled with Librewolf - no need to install this unless you use Firefox. Blocks ads and trackers.

  • Decentraleyes: Also prevents tracking.

  • ClearURLs: Removes tracking elements from URLs.

Themeing

I just use the stock light Adwaita theme. I don’t actually like dark themes that much… especially when it’s snow white text on a jet black background - the text really burns into my retinas! I only use a dark theme for the terminal - with my own colour scheme that doesn’t induce a headache. I use laptops, so adjusting the brightness of the screen is not a big deal.

I also just use the stock Adwaita icon theme - I don’t use icons in rofi, dunst etc.

The gnome-themes-extra is also nice to have for GTK2 apps, such as GIMP.

Terminal Colours

My terminal theme is made of the following colours:

• 0 = #4F535E

• 1 = #D85C38

• 2 = #B0BA4D

• 3 = #FFAB55

• 4 = #88CADA

• 5 = #DA90DB

• 6 = #77D8B0

• 7 = #D0C0B2

• 8 = #7A7D8C

• 9 = #D9755B

• 10 = #C9D274

• 11 = #FFC182

• 12 = #B8D3DA

• 13 = #E4B2E6

• 14 = #A8E8CE

• 15 = #F8ECDF

• Background Colour = #050506

Note: Some NEWT applications may be hard to read, I fixed nmtui, but I will tweak other settings when I come across them.

Additional Consistency

Here are some applications that help make application themes consistent. An honourable mention goes to Lxappearance, (Don’t forget the GTK3 version either) it is a GUI front end to select GTK themes. I don’t use it as it’s fairly easy to set the theme via the setting.ini file for GTK3 and gtkrc-2.0 file for GTK2. I haven’t really looked at whether there are easier ways to theme QT apps, so I use the following programs… I think you can set the QT theme to use the GTK2 theme, but frankly the GTK2 Adwaita theme kind of sucks.

• Kvantum: A tool that allows you to select themes. It has a lot of themes available to match almost any GTK theme. I did modify the KvGnome theme to better emulate Adwaita.

• qt5ct: This just allows you to tell Qt5 apps to apply the Kvantum theme.

• qt5ct: Same as above but for Qt6 application.