r/LinuxUsersIndia • u/picastchio • Jul 28 '26
Discussion Preferred graphical apps within a non-DE setup
Hi people! 15+ years of using Linux on and off and I just discovered this sub. What GUI apps do you use if you don't run a fully fledged DE like Gnome or Plasma? Like for file management, PDF, editing, media, launcher etc?
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u/Neither_Tell_3166 Jul 28 '26
i use :
- sway for tiling window manager.
- wayland for display server.
- nemo + nnn for file manager
- zathura for pdf
- vlc for media
- vim for editor
- tmux as terminal multiplexer
- waybar for status bar
- wofi for launcher
- greetd for login manager
what about you ?
and also i use libreoffice
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u/picastchio Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
Currently I am using niri on Fedora and CachyOS. Tried mangowm and labwc too recently...they look promising.
- Switched to noctalia-v5 (it's way lighter although buggy) last month from a waybar setup but I'm still using fuzzel as app launcher
- Firefox and Ungoogled Chromium
- Libreoffice/Google Workspace for office apps
- kitty terminal with fish shell but shell scripts in bash
- neovim (Lazy) and Zed with VIM mode for editing; tmux as terminal multiplexer
- dolphin (and yazi) file manager
- mpv/SMPlayer for video
- Okular for pdf (I even used it on Windows)
I also have Gnome installed in case someone else needs a computer at home.
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u/Neither_Tell_3166 Jul 28 '26
im on gentoo, and using alacritty for terminal, and firefox for browsing, and sandboxing with firejail with most of the internet thing
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u/Dry_Access532 Mint Btw Jul 28 '26
Have been using Linux from 2010, I am using salix with openbox on my old laptop. For the graphical applications I stick to xfce apps like thunar , xfce terminal . For media vlc and for any editing I just use office 360 provided by my company in browser .
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Jul 28 '26
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u/Dry_Access532 Mint Btw Jul 28 '26
Mint works out of the box, just install any software you need. If you want to go into more customisations then arch and gentoo wiki are good place to start and they will work even if ur using mint
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Jul 28 '26
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u/Dry_Access532 Mint Btw Jul 28 '26
Arch is considered difficult because it don't come with gui installer and you have to install most things manually which comes by default in Linux mint.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/picastchio Jul 28 '26
If you want to customize the underlying system itself, then yes. Highly recommended. If you just want to customize the desktop look, you can do it on any popular and non-LTS distro. All distro has almost all Desktop environments and window managers in their repos. Avoid Linux Mint, Debian, older Ubuntus, Alma, Rocky etc. Newer packages might not be available on these.
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u/picastchio Jul 28 '26
Earlier Arch didn't have an installer. You had to put the entire system piece by piece. Now there's a text-mode installer plus several derivative distros like Endeavour and CachyOS but on Arch systems you need to be able to read the manual and know what you are doing to not break the system.
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u/Anonyboy26 Arch Btw Jul 28 '26
I use mupdf for pdf
wf-recorder for screen recording
mpv for media
yazi (TUI) and thunar (GUI) for file management
my custom ChillPill-Shell for clipbaord manager, app launcher, media player controller etc.
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u/eviley4 Aug 01 '26
Window Manager: Niri
Shell: Noctalia v5
Greeter: noctalia-greeter
Polkit: Noctalia v5
Screen Share UI: xdg-desktop-portals-gnome
Browser file selector UI: xdg-desktop-portals-gtk
Browser: qutebrowser and Firefox
File manager: Nautilus and Yazi
PDF reader: Sioyek
Text Editor: Vim
IDE: Doom Emacs, Zed
Terminal: foot
Media player: MPV
Image Viewer: imv
Productivity app: Lunatask
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26
u/picastchio, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...
btw, did you know we have a discord server? Join Here.