Debian and basically everything in its repos. Might be somewhat old, but it is really fucking stable
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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My small selfhosted system appreciates this very much. Having Debian as my base OS makes everything easier.
Total agreement. So many unsung heroes involved in Debian. Work has agreed with me - today's job involved migrating those load balancers to Debian underneath.
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KCalc. Man, it just computes! It can add, subtract, and even multiply. It's never given a wrong answer.
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So many. So many little utilities that just work. To mention a couple I think no one will mention because they are not sexy: Okular and Ark
Big fan of the KDE suite of software. I've tried alternatives, but always come back to plasma and associated software
Okular works so well at this point that I use it to annotate all my PDFs if I don't explicitly need free-hand drawing (and xournalpp otherwise).
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Syncthing. Absolutely ace bit of software. I remember it being a little questionable in 2013, but today it performs exactly the same task, just more reliably. Love it.
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Based on my experiences running multiple servers and pcs on multiple distros for more than a decade, almost all problems originate between the keyboard and the chair attached to the machine running Linux.
Misconfiguration is usually the culprit.
Oh and important note: I run Arch BTW
nano 😎
nano
Systemd
*grabs popcorn*
Just it always makes you wait for ~3 min and shows: ... wait for something to be Configured (25s / no limit). :-)
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The Linux Kernel.
Anything from Debian. I even run Debian-Testing, and it's rock solid. Also, Linux mint, on my other partition.
Vlc.
I'm on arch and everything I need just works, no fuss. Webstorm, steam, bitwarden, notesnook, mullvad, anything I need just works really. Of course as with any is there are things that are pain in the ass but that is everywhere no exceptions.
xterm, xv, mc, tmux, gimp, seamonkey
Firefox + uBlock Origin + sponsorblock. Set it and forget it.
I haven't seen an advertisement or a sponsored segment on my desktop in over a decade, and same with my phone for several years. I'm astonished how willing most people are to put up with a constant barrage of ads coming from devices they own
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Many have already mentioned tools that I also use and appreciate immensely.
My pick is Steam. I've picked up on gaming in the past 2 years and it's very stable right now. Every game that I have interest in just works, I can install games, including early access or demos without looking at the compatibility or the release date. The download speeds of games are high (imho at least where I'm located, and compared with a PS5). My partner is a heavy gamer and has to yet find a game that doesn't work on her machine.
tmux, weechat, helix
bash. Konsole. vim (-neo or otherwise up to the point it became AI infested). ssh. steam. git i could go on for quite a while
The program sl, works every time
Nah man, piece of shit software; Sometimes it just lists some random directory contents.
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Nano
I tried neovim for a while and I went back to vim for that reason: setup once, then forget about it.
I have plugins that haven't been touch for 5 years+ and they are working as intended.
Rock solid.
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I'll give a shoutout to the rEFInd boot manager. If anyone has ever had trouble with Grub, rEFInd continues to work for years across multiple machines. I have never had a problem with it.
rEFInd
Good shout. Not something I've heard of before and I've certainly had my share of problems with grub2, even recently.
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The OS itself, Debian. If I have to pick a component, Mate Panel. Compared to the Windows 11 start menu, it's useful, customizableand has no ads. My IT department at work can't even figure out how to remove the Windows 11 start menu ads from my computer.
Cron
nano
tree, locate, nvim, flatpak, htop, bmon, etc.
Debian!
Nano
- Linux Mint.
- Cinnamon.
- Xfce.
- PPSSPP.
- GNOME Boxes.
As phil Collins would say... Su su su sudo
Nginx.
It runs everything at home and at work.
Prosody for me. I set it up over 2 years ago, and the only time I touched it was when updating to the latest Debian stable and enabling some new features in the config files. It's been rock-solid and just worked without complaint.
Bottles.
Without it, I wouldn't be able to run addictive keys on Linux. I paid for the software back when I used Windows and since I'm able to use addictive keys on Linux, haven't bothered trying to find an alternative.
That said, its the only use case I've had with bottles that just works. Other programs ive tried are more hit or miss.
mpv
Arch
Depends what "fuss or bother forever" means. Background tools run without interaction, and therefore aren't bothering. But any application with interaction is basically "fussing". The simpler the programs and its scope, less chance of problems are expected. Also updating with an Arch system BTW can cause an issue, that is not even related directly to the program itself. Oh and I'm known to make simple questions complicated...
As a daily user of Firefox and Thunderbird, they just works. I also use the KDE standard terminal "Konsole" and don't remember having a problem. I do screenshots (maybe not everyday, but often) here and there using KDEs "Spectacle". It works as expected. The simple terminal tool fastfetch to display system information works always. After installing searxng-git, to run the search engine server locally, it basically always works without fuss. I just have to update it from time to time manually, as it updates from Git source directly.
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