Looking back, my blogposts mostly revolve aroud complaining about things I dislike. There are also many things to like out there, so this post is dedicated to that: software I use often, love, and want to recommend to others.

Sway

After some years of using GNOME as my primary desktop environment, I tried Sway. You know that feeling when you try something new, and it instantly hits that sweet spot of being both intuitive and feeling right? That's Sway for me. I love how lightweight it is, the fact that it's running on Wayland so multiple displays with different resoultions aren't painful anymore, and the best part: it's highly configurable. I'll upload my config somewhere soon.

I recommend running it together with swaylock and waybar.

SQLite

Whenever I have a situation within some project of mine where I need to save some data on disk, 9/10 times I use sqlite. It's fast, has bindings for every language under the sun, well documented (the documentation is interesting enough to be read like a book, IMHO) and battle tested.

Next time you need to save some data - consider joining the fan club.

fish

The first thing I do whenever I set up a new computer is install the fish shell. I have nothing against bash, in fact you can tune it to have a lot of the features that fish has out of the box, but that's the problem, I am lazy. Fish has a very good command history, and the built-in git support is amazing.

Thunderbird

I love Email in general. Open standard, widely supported, text first. Thunderbird brings a lot to the table - besides e-mail, it can also be used as an RSS reader, which is my primary method of consuming news (...along with a rather large list of RSS filters - never having to read something about Elon Musk again by itself is already worth it).

KDE Okular

Okular is a document viewer. I use it to read (and edit!) PDFs. It is snappy, doesn't annoy me, and is open source (okay, everything on this list is, but still!). Also, did you know that it's the first piece of software which is certified by "Blauer Engel" (a German Eco label) as being "Energy efficient"? Their testing methology looks decent. I bet we won't see any Electron stuff on that list anytime soon (and not on this list either).

Firefox

If this list where sorted by popularity, then Firefox would probably be a lot higher, but it isn't, so it's down here. Firefox is fantastic software. Mozilla, the parent company, wasn't always without missteps. We had the Mr. Robot marketing thing, which was a pretty big WTF moment for me. Or the funny graph about their CEO making more money while Firefox user numbers tanked. But all in all, I feel like they are doing their best in a hypercommercialized world to stay afloat, while building an absolutely amazing piece of very complex technology.

Rclone

I use Rclone for backing up data (using cron for managing backup times). It supports many backends, even though I only use it with sftp. I especially love that I can layer backends. For example, Rclone allows to layer a crypto backend onto an sftp backend, so that any file operation is automatically encrypted. If you're looking for some backup solution - seriously consider Rclone + cron.