Recommended Software: Personal computer

This is a curated list of software that I use on personal computers (as opposed to servers). The items are categorized. A short description of each piece of software is given, as well as further comments.

1. OS and system

Here we list system-level software.

1.1. Base system

GNU/Linux (Operating system)
Void Linux (Linux distribution): Distributions do not matter much, but I stuck with this one. The base system is stable, lightweight and lets the user choose his "environment" to a large extent. It is a rolling release distribution. I switched from Debian a long time ago.
- xbps (Package manager): I found the packages I used were well maintained and up to date.
- runit (Init system and service supervisor)

1.2. Utilities

fcron (Job scheduler): Like cron but for computers that sometimes miss parts of the intended schedule.
rkhunter (Rootkit detector)
clamav (File-scanning antivirus)
autofs (Mount manager): Automatically mount drives from anywhere (usb, disks, remote shared drives etc.)
smartmontools (HDD SMART data viewer): Can run some health-checks on disks.
iperf3 (Data transfer speed assessment): Can be used between a server and a client to measure the rate of data transfer.

1.3. Environment and ricing

awesomewm (Window manager): Tiling (though allows floating) window manager. Configured through lua scripts. Requires a bit of time to configure it, but resources are available.
cava (MPD FIFO visualizer): I use it to display a spectrograph visualization on my desktop of the audio being played.

2. General purpose user-interactive programs

We list here software fulfilling general personal computing needs.

Terminal and utilities

urxvt (Terminal emulator)
Rlang (used as a calculator)
vim (Text editor): Fast and easy to use on configuration files, scripts, text data of almost any kind. I recommend using vim bindings whenever possible in other programs.

Documents

calibre (Ebooks management): I only use the CLI utilities to convert between formats.
djview (DJVU files viewer)
mupdf (PDF viewer)
mutools (PDF editor): CLI utilities for most common tasks, such as merging pages together, splitting etc.
xournalpp (Document editor for pen tablets): Used in conjunction with a pen tablet to create handwritten documents. I use it for taking notes while watching video lectures.
simple-scan (Interface for scanners): Simple GUI for scanning documents.
texlive (LaTeX distribution)
libreoffice (Office suite): I use it mostly for spreadsheets. I never use it for text documents but I occasionally have to visualize them.

Image

exiftool (Image EXIF editor): CLI.
feh (Image viewer): Lightweight.
flameshot (Screenshots): The user can select the part of the screen to save as an image.
gimp (GUI Image editor)
ImageMagick (CLI Image editor)
inkscape (SVG editor)

Plotting

graphviz (Graph visualizer): Produces image output from text descriptions of graphs.
gnuplot (Plot visualizer): Produce image output from either data or formulae. Scriptable and customizable.

Video

fswebcam (Webcam management): CLI for testing webcams and scripting videos etc.
yt-dlp (Video downloader): CLI program to download video media from web pages.
mpv (Video player): The video playback quality can be customized.
obs (Streaming): Save or stream video and audio, including desktop and webcams. Easy to use.
ffmpeg (Video processor): Featureful, can cut and merge videos, manage audio, subtitles, encoders and much more.

Music

mpd (Music player daemon)
ncmpcpp (MPD client): Allows editing metadata of music files. The interface is in the terminal and customizable.

Files

rsync (File transfer): Useful for making backups of data regularly and copying only the changes. Also works for remote transfers.
Thunar (File manager): GUI, responsive and has plugins for common functions.
- tumbler (Thumbnails for Thunar)
Veracrypt (Encrypted containers): Create and open encrypted containers of arbitrary size. Not sure if this is still super maintained though.

Communication

evolution (Mail client): GUI.
element (Matrix (chat) client): Not so great with resource usage on desktop since it is an electron app.

Browsers

firefox (Internet browser): Not ideal, but at least it will still be maintained in the foreseeable future.
chromium (Internet browser): For when firefox doesn't work.
torbrowser (Internet browser): For visiting Tor onions.

Remote graphical sessions

remmina (RDP client): Connect to Windows computers using RDP.

Other

gnucash (Accounting): I track personal income/expenses with this. It can display diagram reports.

3. Domain-specific

These pieces of software are only useful for specific trades or hobbies.

3.1. Engineering

freecad (CAD suite): My usage is strictly for viewing CAD files at present.

3.2. Research

JabRef (Reference manager): I use it to store lists of research papers by category, track which ones I have read, and store notes about each paper.

3.3. Development

Emacs (IDE): I find it hard to use out of the box, but it can be configured to a larger extent than other IDEs. Documentation and packages are plentiful.
cloc (Count Lines of Code): CLI utility producing reports on the number of lines of code in projects.
shellcheck (Shell script static analyser): CLI.
git (Version control): Who doesn't use it? Vanilla CLI is perfectly usable.