List of software

An ever-growing list of software; useful for comparing alternatives. Each section is ordered by personal opinion, from the best software at the top, to the worst software at the bottom (of each section). Each entry aims to include a brief annotation describing the software's key features. Unused software is listed at the bottom with no comment attached.

Character encodings

• UTF-8 (perfect, just be careful about codepoint equivalence)
• ASCII (good but control block is dated; English-only)

File formats

• Plain text (simply brilliant; use LF endings and UTF-8)
• TSV (simply brilliant; use LF endings and UTF-8)
• HTML (the size of the specification may induce a coma)

Mail clients

• aerc (beautiful)
• Thunderbird (overall quite good)

Operating systems

• 9front (good but insufficient for basic user needs)
• Alpine Linux (good for daily driver but dependencies are clumsy)
• Plan 9 from Bell Labs (good but not much software and bad hardware support)
• Arch Linux (good for daily driver but Alpine Linux is nicer)
• OpenBSD (system startup is slow)
• FreeBSD (overcomplicated)
• Ubuntu (progressively increasing bloat; broken package manager)
• Microsoft Windows (rude and disrespectful; inherently flawed system design)
• OpenSolaris (impossible to use)

Programming languages

• Go (good but uses garbage collection; insufficient basic type support)
• C (maps well to assembly; atrocious standard libraries)
• Python (attractive to novices; horribly slow)

Text editors

• acme (good but cannot show graphical programs in windows)
• Visual Studio Code (good but inefficiently uses screen space)
• sam (similar to ed but graphical and multi-file)
• nano (good if stuck in a character cell display)
• Pluma (too much on the screen; nice Cobalt theme)
• gedit (similar to Pluma but worse)
• vi (command mode by default...)
• ed (only if stuck in command-line)

Window systems

• Wayland (okay; a bit more complex than needed though)
• X11 (atrocious)

Web browsers

• Firefox (overall good; insufficient customisation and control)
• Lynx (good if stuck in a character cell display)

Last update: 8 February 2024, 11:52 UTC