Software recommendations

Here I will list some libre software projects that I recommend people use and/or donate to.

Trisquel GNU/Linux is a distribution that aligns with the Free Software Foundation's Free System Distribution Guidelines. That means that it includes no proprietary software, firmware, or other "blobs", and does not at any point recommend you to install non-libre software. Of all the FSF's recommended distributions, I find that Trisquel is the most complete and full-featured. NOTE: Will probably require you to buy a cheap libre software friendly USB WiFi card to use, as it doesn't include most WiFi firmware.
Gentoo Linux is a more advanced distribution that allows for great customization, while also having an awesome selection of software. I specifically recommend Gentoo out of the "normal" (non-FSF-approved) distributions because it has a special feature which no other distribution has: you can specify what licenses are acceptable for software on your system, and the operating system will warn you when installing software that doesn't meet your criteria. For example, I have it configured to warn me whenever I try to install software using the Artistic License. This is a great feature because it lets you understand what software on your system is truly libre and what pieces you still need to replace that are proprietary.

Sway is a tiling window manager, the equivalent of i3 but for Wayland instead of Xorg. This is my favorite way to use Wayland. You really have not experienced a computer to its fullest extent until you've tried the tiling window manager workflow along with heavily keyboard-driven applications. It makes working on projects very efficient, and I truly feel like the computer is an extension of myself, not the other way around.
MATE is a very nostalgic and effective desktop environment in my opinion. I don't particularly like using a desktop environment in general because I find tiling window managers faster to use and easier to maintain, but if I had to use one or I wanted to experience a distro's default desktop environment, I'm always trying to use MATE. When I started using Linux in 2007-2008, the GNOME desktop environment was at version 2 and had a very unique and interesting workflow to it, and MATE is a direct fork of GNOME 2. Beyond that though, it has such a flexible look, where it can either look like the Ubuntu 8.04 experience from my youth, or it can have a more Windows-esque (or Cinnamon-esque) look like it does in Trisquel. I like both of these workflows for a desktop environment, so MATE hits all the checkboxes for me.

Neovim, which is just Vim but with better defaults and better extensibility. Neovim is my text editor of choice for document writing, coding, and also for writing the HTML for this website!
Zathura is a great, simple PDF viewer that has a lot of the fancy features (such as clickable links) supported, while also using Vim keys for navigation. Pairs great with a window manager.
TeX Live is how I produce all of my PDF documents from LaTeX code. Supports everything imaginable, comes in most GNU/Linux distribution repositories, and has a very easy-to-use command-line interface.
LibreOffice is what I use when I need to open someone's .docx file because they were too lazy to convert to a .pdf before sending it to me. (BTW, schools requiring you to use .docx or sending their documents as .docx instead of .pdf that everyone can open with a web browser even on a phone should be criminal.)
qrencode encodes data into QR code image files. It's really that simple. Demystifies QR codes into a single line in the terminal.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a great email client, and allows you to interface cleanly with personal email servers in a way comparable to email websites like Gmail.
Any variant of Mozilla Firefox is highly recommended over Chromium-based browsers, as the current Manifest v3 debacle shows that putting all your open source eggs into the Google basket is not in the best interest of users.
Newsboat is a command-line RSS/Atom reader that interfaces well (perhaps unintentionally) with scripts, allowing for things such as macroing a keybind to download a webpage or a linked video directly from Newsboat with an external program.
yt-dlp is a fork of youtube-dl which is strictly better than youtube-dl in every way. Necessary for conveniently and effectively preserving online videos for future generations (and also to save yourself an offline copy for a trip or what have you).

Pipewire is a new audio system for GNU/Linux systems that, in my opinion, is strictly better than PulseAudio, fixing all of PulseAudio's bugs while also supporting all the same software.
Alacritty is a terminal emulator that I really enjoy. I don't like the default colors at all, but it's easy to change the color scheme; I have mine set to the "xterm" scheme and I use that on all terminal emulators for all of my work, and I can just copy a file filled with color schemes between installations and enable whichever one I want to use. Otherwise it's fast, responsive, and I have never once had a bug or crash occur, and there's no features I would want removed or added. Just an excellent terminal emulator. It's like having a perfectly configured st from the suckless project already pre-compiled and with none of the hassle or bugs.
BusyBox is a little program that can take the place of nearly all of the utilities on Linux in one executable. I don't personally use it very often, but I do like that it exists for small/embedded systems and I support their efforts. I particularly enjoy the basic implementation of vi that's included that comes out to only ~3000 lines of code.

mpv is the best video playing software ever made. Supports everything. Plays beautifully. No messy interface to get in the way, everything is keyboard driven with simple hotkeys. While VLC is probably the more "popular" video player, mpv is more stable and has better compatibility than VLC.
Minetest is basically a libre Minecraft. There are differences between the two games, but besides the ridiculously huge scale of Minetest (it goes down thousands of blocks deep before you hit bedrock which is annoying), I prefer almost everything in Minetest to Minecraft.
NetHack is a classic free software game with tons of depth and challenge. If you're into classic dungeon crawlers (and are okay with arcane key bindings), I'd say definitely give it a shot. You can either install it locally, or play it on one of many servers that are still available from your terminal.
Stockfish is the world's premiere chess engine. Have it analyze your games and find interesting lines, or try and play against it and never win a single game.

May 3, 2024. Updated May 10, 2024.