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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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Linux
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Proton.
It allowed me to ditch Windows for good. Playing games on Linux, often with similar or even better performance than on Windows, was an insane idea ten or fifteen years ago. Nowadays it‘s rare to see a game not working on day one. And if it doesn‘t, Proton‘s devs oftentimes fix it within a day or two. It‘s an amazing piece of software with an amazing team behind it.
Proton is a god damn godsend. After wrangling four or five WINE tools for a decade, this is a beautiful innovation. Genuinely, made switching away from Windows viable.
KDE Connect was worth switching away from Mint for. I was blown away. All of this stuff that just works!
OH! tmux obviously. It's rock solid.
Now that I think about it, most of it.
Neovim, curl, ffmpeg, all gnu utils, sioyek (pdf viewer), i3wm, autorandr, alacritty, tmux and so on.
ffmpeg
Does "Linux" itself count? I can't even remember the last time I had anything running Linux have a system crash.
vim
neovim
It just feels right. It took me some time to get used to the vim motions. But man, does it make moving around any project so fast and natural. I went in for the customizability. And that's obviously there. But the sheer speed it gives me is uncanny. My past self with VS Code could never.
I'd also suggest taking some time to write your own config from scratch once you get the hang of it; it'll be worth it.
Neovim's amazing ngl. Replaced MS Code with it at work and I couldn't be happier.
systemd
Booooh! lol
Those a fighting word~~s~~
here you go: systemd is so much better then sysv-init, it's not even funny
I really can't take people serious that think sysv-init was the superior system. I mean for real, have you ever worked with it and all it's shortcomings? It wasnt even a system, it was a bunch of bad init scripts
I've been using it since I started using Linux 26 years ago until Ubuntu switched to upstart and then systemD.
It did the job and was very easy to work with. I knew what the scripts did and I could write my own. And it didn't ask for a date of birth either.
Nobody argued that sysv was better.
Just that there are other options, apart from systemd.
i started my professional software development career in 1999. the amount of older guys who called the web stupid and a fad or "gopher is the future of the internet" was crazy. people hate change
It was a bunch of bad init scripts, but it was our bunch of bad init scripts.
grep
Okular.
ffmpeg and rsync are heavy candidates for me
openssh
and on the opposite side, nvidia drivers
busybox
less is an unsung hero.
MPV
Would change it for anything!
If I can't play it in MPV, I don't wanna play it.
Everything else feels like going back to the stone age. No offense to VLC fans. VLC is cool too, and I still recommend it because of its simpler GUI. But MPV is the MVP.
bolt launcher
foot has been pretty solid for me. No complaints.
GNU nano.
I don't know why I bothered using Vim, Neovim, Micro, mg, and JOE for so long, when nano was always there (though not necessarily OOTB), configurable with all of the features I used in the other editors, and has never broken as long as I've been using it.
The only editor I may leave it for would be Emacs, and that would be more for the extension scripts and an excuse to learn ELisp than anything else.
xbps as of recent
mpd+ncmpcpp
df -h for a bit of existential dread.
i3
tint2
geeqie