Distributions

❌ Avoid

any linux distro use systemd and this why

• Arch linux
• Ubuntu
• Mint
• Debian

✅ Instead use

• use linux distro use init system like runit or opencl
  • if you want something cool and very light, use Alpine
  • if you love Debian and you want to use APT ,use Devuan
  • if you love Arch Linux and you want to use PACMAN ,use Artix
  • if you need to use something useful and from scratch distro with awesome Community ,use Void Linux

Browsers

• Abaco - A graphical web browser for Plan 9 that supports most of HTML 4.01.
• Conkeror - A Gecko based browser, with Emacs-style key bindings, appearances and behaviors.
• Dillo - Blazingly fast graphical browser with basic CSS support.
• edbrowse - ed-alike webbrowser. Unfortunately it is not the standard web browser.
• ELinks - Feature-rich fork of Links, but without the graphical mode.
• Links - A text-based browser that also has a simple graphical mode.
• Lynx - text-mode web browser, supports the Gopher protocol.
• netsurf - Very fast graphical browser with custom engine that has near-perfect CSS support.
• surf - WebKit2 browser that can be embedded into other applications and uses dmenu as the address bar.
• Tridactyl - A WebExtension that tries to make Firefox Vim like. Unlike many similar extensions it works with firefox 57+.
• uzbl - Web interface tools which adhere to the UNIX philosophy.
• VimFX - Vimperator (Doesn't work with Firefox 57+)
• Vimperator - An extension to make Firefox keyboard friendly and Vim-like. (Doesn't work with Firefox 57+).
• w3m - Text-based browser which can view images in the terminal (X11 hack).

Text Editors

❌ Avoid

• VSCODE
• pyCharm
• any GUI IDE

✅ Instead use

• acme - Rob Pike's framing text editor for Plan 9. Included in plan9port.
• ed - ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR!
• ired - A minimalist hexadecimal editor and bindiffer for p9, w32 and *nix.
• mg - A portable version of mg maintained by the OpenBSD team.
• helix - A post-modern modal text editor heavily based on Kakoune written in Rust.
• mle - A small, flexible console text editor.
• nano - A pico clone - this is small simple code and easy to use.
• nvi - A small, multiple file vi-alike.
• micro - A terminal text editor, written in go with common key bindings like ctrl-c to copy and ctrl-v to paste.
• sam - An editor by Rob Pike with inspiration from ed.
• traditional vi - A fixed version of the original vi.
• vim (With the GUI, use :set go+=c to kill popup dialogs). It can be compiled to be as minimal as possible (see vim-tiny in Debian repos).
• vis - A modern, legacy free, simple yet efficient vim-like editor.
• wily - An acme clone for POSIX.

Desktop Enviroment

❌ Avoid

• Gnome
• Cinnamon
• KDE

✅ Instead use

I advise you to use Window Manager instead of Desktop Enviroment but if you want Desktop Enviroment use this list

• XFCE
• MATE
• lxqt
• lxde
• enlightenment

Window Manager

• DWM,- very very customizable/minimal window manager (customizable by code)
• i3-gaps - Window Manager (customizable by conf file)
• bspwm - A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning
• IceWM - speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user’s way. It comes with a taskbar with pager, global and per-window keybindings and a dynamic menu system.

Terminal

❌ Avoid

• Terminator
• cool-retro-term

✅ Instead use

• ST - lightweight/customizable terminal by Suckless Team you need to patch your terminal and add/remove what you want from code and recomplie it :D
• RXVT - lightweight/customizable terminal
• mtm - Perhaps the smallest useful terminal multiplexer in the world.
• Alacrity
• Kitty - the fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
• TYM
• Sakura
• dvtm
• contour - Modern C++ Terminal Emulator
• rio - A hardware-accelerated GPU terminal emulator focusing to run in desktops and browsers.

File Manager

❌ Avoid

• any GUI File manager , it's lightweight yes but with big files it's take more time

✅ Instead use

• Ranger - command line file manager written in Python
• LF - Command line file manager written in GO (alternative for Ranger - Python File manager)
• NNN - Command line file manager written in C
• FFF - command line file manager written in bash
• sfm - simple file manager

Songs Stream

❌ Avoid

• Offical Spotify Player
• offical Deezer Player

✅ Instead use*

• ncspot - Command line spotify player for linux
• dzr - Command line Deezer player for Linux

Mail clients

• aerc - email client for your terminal.
• fdm - fetch and deliver mail.
• heirloom-mailx - A mail client based on the original Berkeley Mail 8.1 with many new features.
• isync - MDA that can work better for IMAP, also known as mbsync.
• mblaze - UNIX utilities to deal with Maildir.
• mmh - Meillo's mail handler (mmh), a fork of nmh.
• mpop - a POP3 mail client. It is much faster and simpler than fetchmail.
• mutt - A ncurses mail client for fetching, reading and sending email.
• nmh - Message Handling System.
• plan9port/Mail - A mail client for acme. Included with plan9port.
• s-nail - An improved heirloom-mailx.

Notifications

• herbe - Daemon-less notifications without D-Bus. Minimal, lightweight & written in C. You can use tiramisu to call herbe.
• tiramisu - Tiramisu is a notification daemon based on dunst that outputs notifications to STDOUT in order to allow the user to process notifications any way they prefer, like in your dwm statusbar for example.

Media Player

• ffplay - FFplay is a very simple and portable media player. It came with ffmpeg which depends on mplayer.
• MPV - Command Line/GUI Media player, also you can watch youtube videos without ads with MPV
• ncmpcpp
• mocp

Image viewer

• feh - A highly customizable image viewer that can also set a desktop background image.
• imv - Simple X11/Wayland Image Viewer. Depends on SDL2 and FreeImage.
• jpg/gif/bmp/png - Simple programs from Plan 9 to display images in no-frills windows. Included with plan9port.
• lel - Farbfeld image viewer.
• meh - image viewer using raw XLib, libjpeg, libpng and libgif.
• page - Plan 9's image/document viewer program. Included with plan9port.
• qiv - Quick Image Viewer.
• sxiv - Simple (or small or suckless) X Image Viewer. Depends on xlib and imlib2.
• xli
• xwallpaper Minimalistic wallpaper utility
• xzgv

Password managers

• pass - "The standard UNIX password manager".
• spm - Simple password manager (actively maintained fork of nmeum's tpm).
• tpm - Tiny password manager.

Audio Player

• C* Music Player - aka cmus, an ncurses music player that can be controlled with a UNIX socket.
• moc - console audio player for Linux/UNIX.
• mpd - A client/server based music player with console and graphical front-ends.
• mpg123 - A console MPG player which doesn't use auto*hell or extra libraries.
• mpg321 - A command-line MP3 player.
• mus - Modular daemon/client CLI player consuming a plaintext album directory queue
• vorbis-tools (Ogg/FLAC) - Command-line tools to play Ogg and FLAC files.

Video Recording/Edite

• FFMPEG - leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created
• ShotCut - Shotcut is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor.

image editors

• Image Magick - simple Command Line Image editor
• GIMP - The Free & Open Source Image Editor

screenshot

• maim - takes screenshots of your desktop. It has options to take only a region, and relies on slop to query for regions. maim is supposed to be an improved scrot.

• ksnip - is a Qt-based cross-platform screenshot tool that provides many annotation features for your screenshots.
• flamshot - Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software

• scort - command line screen capture utility

X11

• 9menu - A menu program based on the Blit-style menus so prevalent in Plan 9.
• dmenu - dmenu is a dynamic menu for X.
• ffcast - Simple screencasting.
• grabc - Grab the color of some pixel in X11.
• keynav - A new way for keyboard selection.
• wmutils - A set of utilities for managing windows. Can be used on their own or to augment a WM itself. Support for tiling present.
• xbanish - Hide the cursor while typing.
• xclip - A tool for controlling the X11 clipboard.
• xdotool - A tool for scripting X11 actions.
• xzoom - A simple zoom application.

wallpaper setter

• nitrogen
• feh

DOCUMENT VIEWER

• ZATHURA - lightweight/customizable Document viewer
• GV - GV allows viewing and navigating PostScript and PDF documents on an X display, by providing a graphical user interface for the Ghostscript interpreter

static web servers

• Quark - quark is an extremely small and simple HTTP GET/HEAD-only web server for static content.

• darkhttpd - Darkhttpd is a simple, fast HTTP 1.1 web server for static content.
• merecat - thttpd with vhost support.
• mini_httpd - By the thttpd developers. Even smaller subset of thttpd with support for .htpasswd, CGI, dirlisting, HTTP errors and SSL, nothing more or less than that.
• OpenBSD httpd/relayd - Designed to combat the feature creep of modern webservers. Boasts concise configuration, with sane defaults.
• thttpd - Outperforms many bigger httpds. Old, still works very well!

Page generator

• saait - simple html pages generator
• stagit - simple html page generator for GIT

display locker

• slock - Simple X display locker. This is the simplest X screen locker we are aware of

recycle bin

• trash-cli - Minimal CLI recycle bin written in Rust 🦀