Linux

• 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

I replace ARCH with Windows 11 bloat edition. I use windows 11 BTW

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

VLC player with mpv

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.

1. VLC with SMPlayer. I don't understand why they keep shipping VLC as default. It sucks.
2. Kate with KWrite.
3. Nano with Vim in *buntu variants
4. Elisa, Rhythmbox, etc. with Strawberry. Although I mostly just use Spotify nowadays.
5. Calculator with calc.

Everything else works just fine, unless the distro made an insane choice like having XTerm as the default terminal emulator.

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

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. :)

cat > bat

ls > exa

(h)top > btop

whatever terminal > alacritty

whatever browser > librewolf + brave

cli editor > micro

app launcher > albert

vlc > mpv

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

I replace Spectacle with Flameshot.

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

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.

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

The default terminal (varies) gets switched to Kitty. VLC to MPV.

Okular instead of the default PDF editor (varies).

Text editor (varies) to Vim.

I usually just install Arkenfox, but if I'm feeling lazy I'll use Librewolf.

I prefer doas, but I don't usually switch to it.

I rebind my caps lock key (most useless key ever) to escape.

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

I wonder who's even using these built in video players, no subtitle support, barely any keyboard shortcuts, trash like windows media player

Gnome Files with Thunar.

It’s the perfect file manager for a user like me.

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

I definitely do the Firefox to LibreWolf (and also install Brave as a backup). I also replace the default video player with Haruna and VLC (but default to Haruna). I change music players all the time so I just replace the default with whatever I feel like using at the time. In the past I've replaced Thunderbird with KMail, but on my latest install I left Thunderbird alone since I like having available RAM.

bash -> fish

Arch, so pretty much nothing.

Except maybe ZSH (but it's 'added', I guess; not 'replaced').

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.

pdf reader with okular