Here's the software I use. I've recently started to reduce my use of TUIs in favor of CLIs, for a variety of reasons. When possible, I try to use lightweight programs that can run on any machine, from a single-board computer to a giant desktop. I don't ever want to feel like I need to upgrade my hardware to do the same tasks as before: hardware upgrades should only be justified by my use-cases significantly changing, existing hardware being broken beyond repair, or upstream abandonment of security patches.
I don't currently use a prebuilt desktop environment. I assemble mine out of the following components:
* Fedora: Primary OS, latest stable version. Uses Linux, Systemd, GNU libc, GNU coreutils, dnf, firewalld, and SELinux.
* Sway: Dynamic Wayland compositor that focuses on tiling window management but also supports tabbed and stacking layouts.
* Zsh: Login shell. POSIX-compatible and mostly Bash-compatible. Custom static build to skip checking system files and improve startup performance.
* DASH: Minimal POSIX-compatible shell that I use for non-interactive purposes (e.g. shell scripts). When statically-linked, its startup time is negligible even on the most underpowered hardware. This is really important to me, since many of my most-used commands are shell-script wrappers that I expect to run in a few milliseconds.
* Foot: Primary terminal emulator. Sometimes I use gnome-terminal when I'm using a screen reader.
* i3status-rust: Status bar. It's more efficient to use this single program than to shell out to a dozen utilities. Given the widgets I cram into it, it's more lightweight than most alternatives.
* News: Newsboat. I'm thinking of switching to a feed-to-IMAP or Maildir setup eventually so I can get sync and use mblaze, and replace a TUI with a CLI. Ideally something that supports WebSub.
* Containers: Toolbox: Creates quick mutable environments for me to mess around as root. I use Fedora Rawhide for more bleeding-edge packages in these environments. Quick mutable environments to mess around in or use different toolchains are pretty much my only use of containers.
* Video player: three builds of mpv, two with a PGO run on different types of video (anime and live-action-with-filmgrain). Often paired with yt-dlp and mpv_sponsorblock
* Image viewer: mpv (one less program to keep track of), swayimg. Both support AVIF and JPEG-XL now.
* Custom build of nginx-quic with some patches. Statically l inked against zlib-ng, BoringSSL, PCRE2, musl, headers_more, and ngx_brotli. Patched for dynamic TLS record sizing, using externally-managed OCSP stapling files, static HPACK dictionaries, removing server signatures, adding dark-mode on in-binary error pages.
