Programs I use and recommend

Basic

Operating system: Artix Linux because it's free, it works, and it's fun. I definitely recommend using Linux, or at least some other free software OS, but if not Artix I'd recommend Debian, since Artix requires some amount of maintenance while I'm pretty sure Debian can do fine much longer with no updates.; I think it's also worth noting that I use Luke Smith's dotfiles deployed using LARBS, but I've made plenty of modifications to it, including many new shell scripts for my own nefarious purposes.
Window manager / desktop environment: dwm (a build based on Luke Smith's) because it's fast in both performance and function. I will admit I have longed for a prettier-looking environment, but I haven't found anything that beats dwm's workflow for me.
Terminal: st (again, the build included in LARBS,) but I feel like that might not be that important. It puts words on the screen. It lets me do it too. That's all there really is to it
Web browser: I used to use Qutebrowser for a while, but recently switched back to Firefox with the arkenfox user.js. Both can work with even the most egregiously modern sites, and are probably the closest to a passable browser as you can get nowadays.
Text editor: Vim. That's all there really is to say on the matter. Technically neovim but mostly because that's what LARBS comes with.

Utility

File manager: lf because it's fast, it's customizable, and it comes with LARBS.
Document viewer: Zathura because it comes with LARBS. Ok for the record almost all of these come with LARBS.
Music player: mpd with ncmpcpp. It has all the features I want from a music player, that is to say, it plays music.
Video player: mpv because it's the best one.
Image viewer: sxiv. Really there's not much to say about most of these.
Image editor: GIMP for general image editing, but Krita for drawing stuff, which is most of the image editing I do. Krita is a bit on the heavier side, but I have yet to be convinced that there's anything much better. Note that neither of these come with LARBS.
Mass image editor: I thought I should mention ImageMagick because it is so useful when you need to do the same thing to a bunch of images. It's how I make the thumbnails for images on this site, and if I had to make them manually and remake them each time I wanted to change them? I'd be dead in the ground by now. This site would never be finished because I'd be six feet under.

Obviously I use more programs than that but I don't think most of them are that important. I don't think you'd care that I use maim instead of scrot or anything like that. And more importantly, I don't care about that. At least that one in particular.

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