6mo ago

Which default software do you replace after you install your distro?

After I install Linux Mint (which is the distro I have settled on), I replace:

Thunderbird with Betterbird
Firefox with Librewolf (I also install Brave for web services that need a chromium browser).
Celluloid / Rythmbox with VLC player
Default Libreoffice with latest Libreoffice from source.
ClipIt/Parcellite with xfce4-clipman

I find this to be my optimal setup and these software give me the extra quality of life that make my workflows easier.

What software do you replace and install on your distro of choice?

Edit: I forgot to say I replace sudo with doas. That's something my friend told me to do although I personally don't find any immediate working advantage with it.

155 comments

I don't replace anything. I just install what I need from the beginning.
And yes, I run Arch btw. :D
- lol ditto. but the first thing I do on new installs is chsh /bin/zsh, replace caps lock with control and enable vi keys. otherwise I'm dysfunctional
  
  Yeah, there is nothing more annoying in general when starting to type text into a co-workers desktop than having random letters show up rather than having the cursor move around.
- switched to nixos after a decade on arch. What does "default software" mean? :D
  
  Systemd?

Firefox -> Edge
Libreoffice -> Gsuite PWAs
kernel -> Azure Linux kernel (added trust of Microsoft)
nano -> vim
vi -> Emacs
GNOME -> Deepin
Bash -> Powershell >=7.0
- I think you forgot to add /s
  
  Probably should have added yeah. Based on the amount of downvotes, some people took it too seriously
- nano -> vim
  This one is extremely consistent with the others because once you have made the switch, it becomes harder to escape.

Fish for shell everywhere
- Any specific features made you go fish over others like zsh?
  
  It just feels better and lighter. Also, autocomplete looks nicer. Devs are also amazing. They have a clear vision of the product. And Fish 4.0 had been rewritten in Rust. Now I just cannot go away:)
  
  I use fish instead of zsh just because it has all the nice stuff without having to set anything up. Helix over Neovim is pretty nice for this too.

I replace ARCH with Windows 11 bloat edition. I use windows 11 BTW
- I use Windows 11 inside of a Gentoo vm inside of Windows 10 on my ipad.
  
  Huh I bare metal run proxmox virtualising my LFS to start a gentoo VM where I have my XP VM I remote into with my phone

As a former Windows SUPERUSER, I always change the desktop wallpaper, just to show off. 😋
But jokes aside and apart from things already mentioned, I always install the Speedcrunch calculator, and xbindkeys so I can copy all my keyboard shortcuts.

Nothing. I picked a distro that works for me out of the box. On top of that I only installed stuff, instead of replacing stuff.
- Too many people concentrate on which distro when in fact it's the desktop they choose that will have the biggest impact on their experience
  
  KDE <3
- Yeah this is me.
  I was reading these comments feeling as though I must be very odd until I got to yours.
  Debian comes with firefox ESR which I think is a good choice because it "just works", but it's also no one's "preferred" browser. I tend to use both LibreWolf and ungoogled-chromium all day every day.
  I do use the terminal every day. Years ago I used oh-my-zsh for a while but I think eventually I just kind of didn't bother to install it.
  For file manager and video player et cetera, I've always found the defaults to be good choices.
  
  I find most of the defaults are fine and get the job done, but I also understand the tinkerer types who like working on a super custom setup that's theirs.
  I still use old big iron unix boxes from the 90's, but most of the time I Install the GNU versions of stuff like ls, sed, cat etc because they are so much more feature rich (and just about any modern software/script assumes GNU versions of those tools anyway)

Arch, so pretty much nothing.
Except maybe ZSH (but it's 'added', I guess; not 'replaced').

Apps I replace with newer versions (on Mint too):
LibreOffice, with the latest .deb from their website
Celluloid, with mpv. I cannot tell how much I appreciate mpv even though it sucks with DVD, for which I use VLC ;)
yt-dlp, with the latest version available from git
Screenshot, with Ksnip.
Whatever the default image viewer is, with Pix.
- mpv FTW!
- how do you personally install yt-dlp? I just use pip(x).
  
  I remove the preinstalled version (sudo apt remove yt-dlp)
  In my ~/.local, I have a 'bin' folder in which to put any manually added app, and in my .bashrc I added that folder to the path. So everything in it is usable.
  I download the latest binary from https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#release-files and moved it to that bin folder.
  Done. I can use it like if it was the pre-installed app ;)
- Celluloid, with mpv
  Hard agree, also SM Player for the FE
  Whatever the default image viewer is
  xviewer, it's built on top of eog
  with Pix
  Is that no longer pre-installed, at least for camera imports?
  It was on 17-20.3 but I don't think I've done a clean (re)install since.
  
  s that no longer pre-installed, at least for camera imports? It was on 17-20.3 but I don’t think I’ve done a clean (re)install since.
  I could not swear, one or the other. Let's just say I make it my default viewer instead ;)

bash -> fish

Arch master race: you don't have to replace defaults if nom defaults are isntalled in the first place and you choose everything our own anyways.

cat > bat
ls > exa
(h)top > btop
whatever terminal > alacritty
whatever browser > librewolf + brave
cli editor > micro
app launcher > albert
vlc > mpv
- cd > zoxide
  
  didn't know about that one, thank you
- Similar to yours:
  bash > fish
  cat > bat -p
  ls > lsd
  df > dysk
  top > glances
  firefox > qutebrowser
- Why hate for librewolf?
  
  read carefully, he's replacing whatever browser with librewolf or brave

Clementine - music player
yakuake - terminal
fish - command line
Geany - text editor
eza - replacement for ls
zoxide - replacement for cd
bat - replacement for cat
Librewolf - replacement for Firefox
Brave - replacement for Chromium
- When I installed MX KDE on my laptop, I found out about yakuake as it was installed by default. I always use it almost immediately whenever I log in to run my update script. Saves a few extra seconds to just press f4 rather than click the terminal icon and then type. Absolutely love it.
- Wait? Why cat needs replacing? Do you have a link for bat?
  
  Here you go.
- Yasuke for Terminal because he was a sole black man in Japan of his time. Just like Terminal program is solely black as compared to most other apps.
  Most people dont use dark mode on Linux because most apps look horrible in Linux under dark mode
  
  Oh wow, cool story about Yasuke. Is that where Yakuake got its name from?
  Most people dont use dark mode on Linux because most apps look horrible in Linux under dark mode
  Among my friends, dark mode users hugely outnumber light mode users, I really don't have any apps that struggle to support it. LibreOffice used to be really bad, but I don't really edit documents anymore, so I don't use it often, but when I do, I don't see issues (although the document background is white, because paper, so the contrast is a bit weird). I'm curious about which apps didn't work for you.

Celluloid is honestly better than VLC. Native Wayland, Pipewire, no filesystem permissions (Flatpak)
I am on Fedora Kinoite, I replaced Kwrite with Kate, all the other default KDE apps are great. Okular, Gwenview as Flatpak, and apart from that a mix of different KDE, GNOME or 3rd party apps as Flatpaks.
I made a list here, but it is a bit outdated
https://github.com/boredsquirrel/recommended-flatpak-apps
- Celluloid does much less than vlc, why not just using mpv (which celluloid uses as backend) so you have a full player
  
  TIL there's a frontend for MPV. Nice.
  
  Celluloid can play music and videos, online video streams etc. It has support for MPV config files.
  MPV uses X11 only afaik, so it relies on XWayland. It also likely has no portal and pipewire support.
  So no MPV is not a "full player"

I choose what I want when I install. I use Arch btw

I usually replace these:
Bash with Fish
Neofetch (if there is) with Fastfetch+Hyfetch
Firefox with Floorp
Mkinitcpio with Dracut
GRUB with systemd-boot
- Why systemd-boot? I don't know much about it. But I've heard it's faster?
  
  It's mostly personal choice but I find it easier to configure and it's certainly more lightweight and faster than GRUB (although probably not by a noticeable amount). Since I don't need BIOS support I prefer to use it.

Defaults hehe
I use arch btw
- well arch defaults are just a terminal with very little tooling

There are a handful on non-default apps I've used across my last 3-4 distros at least:
mpv - the best video player, period. Minimalist UI, maximalist configuration options. I've been using it for many years across many OSes and at this point everything else feels wrong.
Geany - My favorite GUI text editor on Linux.
Foliate - the simplest eBook reader I've found.
Strawberry - It's "fine". Honestly, I've never found a music player on Linux that I really liked. I keep falling back to Strawberry because it's familiar and generally works as expected.
- I'm still struggle to unclear typing vlc, but MPV works so much better
- Starwberry
  Have you tried DeaDBeeF? It's the most similar to foobar2k coming from Windows.

I install the minimal version and go from there.

bash -> fish
default text editor (like Kate) -> geany
firefox -> firefox-esr
chromium -> ungoogled-chromium
nano -> micro
top -> htop, btop
default PDF reader -> Okular
- Do you really replace bash though? I also use fish but even as a relatively deranged minimalist I haven't removed bash as it has so many dependents.
  
  Replacing doesn't mean removing in this case.
  It still needed for the system scripts, etc.
  More like fish is my daily driver, bash if needed (I can write a script in bash faster then in fish).
  
  Personally I wouldn't call that replacing. But that's probably because I am a deranged minimalist. I can't answer this thread because technically I didn't remove anything that my installation started out with.
- nano -> nvim
  fixed that for you
  
  Stop.
  Everyone has their own preferences.
  No judging here.

I replace the <default, slow, annoying to use> image viewer with qimgv, which is ergonomic and very fast.

pdf reader with okular

Gnome Files with Thunar.
It’s the perfect file manager for a user like me.
- Nautilus is abomination in the file browser. Except maybe deepin's

Default terminal -> Kitty

VLC player with mpv

Firefox with (used to) Vivaldi, but now Zen Oh. That's it. Everything else for me is default

Rustdesk, so I can remote into my main computer and the others I manage.
PWAs For Firefox.
And that's about it.
I use Debian BTW. (Was on Fedora but killed it when there were sound issues, turned out to Rustdesk at fault. Can't do Mint as it boots to black screen.)

Terminal -> foot Text editor -> neovim, or more recently I've been trying Helix.
Those are the biggest two. I also recommend mpv over VLC.

bash -> zsh
Gnome terminal -> Ghostty/Alacritty
Adwaita -> My custom adwaita build with smaller sizes
Default UI/Mono Font -> Inter/Meslo
Default browser -> Zen Browser

I still haven't found a web service that really needs a chrome browser or that you cant' just trick with changing the user agent

Isn't that just one of the perks of Linux? Unlike windows where your pretty much forced to use Microsoft software on Linux you have a plethora of choices.
You can choose pretty much whichever Desktop you want, whichever default packages you want you can even choose between Default, Snap, Flatpak, app image and build from source.
There's no one size fits all on Linux, we all have our own unique set up

I stared using Zen Browser instead of Firefox lately and i find it really good.
- It's so good! I love the design right out of the box, with very few settings adjustments.
  Note that zen currently only has vertical tabs (horizontal tabs are on the roadmap). If horizontal tabs are a must, try Floorp browser instead, which has several similarities with Zen.

I use MPV as movie and general media player with my custom config as well as auto-crop and URI copy/paste scripts. It works better than any other media player I tried in the last 10 years. I only use VLC for DVD menus, but it sucks even at that task, because the cursor gets stuck and the menus lag even when playing from SSD folder.
I use Tauon Music Box as music player because of its design, easy playlist/library customizability and Jellyfin integration. I also pay for spotify and use spicetify with custom skins if the songs are available there.
Kröhnkite as real auto-tiling solution with KDE Plasma.
But I'm on Arch btw., so there is not much default software apart from what the KDE meta packages contain.

First thing I install is git, followed by emacs.
Then I download my init.el and my PC setup is complete.

Firefox -> Zen Browser

Konsole - kitty Firefox - librewolf Bash - fish Juk - mpv

I’ve recently started using https://www.nushell.sh/, and while it’s not bash compatible, which can lead to some annoyances, it’s really excellent for working with terminal data in a clean and useful manner

Kinda in the Pop!_OS - NixOS club but Zen Browser here.

There isn't much in a default Gentoo install to replace. In most of the cases where a decision is possible, you make it during the install process. Thus, I have nothing to remove afterwards (but a lot to add!)

On Ubuntu, replacing Firefox/Thunderbird snap version with actual deb version.

Ooh, not a "hot take" answer. I rather like MusikCube. It plays nice with putting my music on my NAS and running it from both my personal machines and my Windows/work machine too. I'm not specifically excited by it as a TUI, but it also works just fine as a basic-'03-iTunes-style-navigation clone. It's super boring in the most usable of ways.
My more "hot take" answer is that I replace the terminal program in Fedora with the boring arsed "Gnome Console" from vanilla Gnome. It does all the stuff I want it to do and nothing more. If I was slightly more different than me I might be upset that it doesn't do enough terminal things but I'm just me. :)

I think one of the few default things I've technically replaced on my laptop right now is Libreoffice's powerpoint software with the OpenOffice one because I am too dumb to figure out how to make it so Libreoffice's powerpoint software doesn't immediately default to every character having basically 0 spacing between each other every time I either make a new document or slide. That, and I can almost never find the right number of points to make the text look good no matter the font.
Also, I do have the Librewolf appimage, but I use it a little less than my slightly tweaked default Firefox install.
Otherwise I'm normally fine with defaults, besides installing gridplayer to watch things off my external HD so I can watch and resize my shows in a way I can't with other video players.

Firefox gets switched to Zen Browser (and before that, Floorp).
I also always download Okular for PDFs. It always seems to be better than whatever the default is.
I typically also substitute OnlyOffice for Libra Office.

I replace Spectacle with Flameshot.

I don’t. I install a distro with sane defaults and get to work.

Bash with fish and GCC with Clang.

I use gentoo: I only install what I like/want/need...

Replaced alacritty with ghostty
Fish With Zsh (Fish not being posix got annoying)
The distro am using comes with not too much apps so yeah thats it

Doas has a readable config file and it is easier to add an user. To answer your question On an MX install.
Xfwm -> bspwm
Dont remember -> nsxiv
Don't remember -> mpv
Featherpad -> Mousepad

Found myself replacing the broken file roller flatpak by the file roller from thr APT repo.
The desktop linux feels more and more like windows as time goes on. The things that worked fine for years are being broken in new and innovative ways.

Bahah as other dude said I don't replace anything cus I'm on arch btw, but I often tend to remove the default web browser whenever i run a vm or somethinf cus base Firefox isn't my thing, its far too dull for me. I rock ff forks like zen browser, librewolf, icecat, and mullvad. Currently on zen.

sysvinit with openrc-init
elogind with seatd
Yes. I run Gentoo.

155 comments