Rocks

The idea of this page is inspired by the “Stuff that rocks” page of suckless.org.

Arch Linux — DIY distribution with excellent documentation and backend user intuitiveness. Great middle ground to source-based distributions and preconfigured distributions.
Fedora Silverblue — Immutable distribution based on Fedora and OSTree offering easy backup and rollback solutions; pushing bleeding-edge technologies such as the latest versions of GNOME, PipeWire, Wayland, btrfs, etc.
Gentoo — Source-based distribution that aims to provide full control over what you use, which goes as far as the ability to modify core dependencies.
MicroOS — Immutable distribution based on openSUSE offering easy backup and rollback solutions in LTS or bleeding-edge flavors.
NixOS — Immutable distribution offering easy backup and rollback solutions; utilizing nix package manager at the core; extremely portable and vanilla packages.
Pop!_OS — User-friendly distribution with outstanding battery life improvements; one of the best distributions for NVIDIA users.

Flatpak — Universal package manager providing sandboxing (security), containerization and desktop integration.
rpm-ostree — Hybrid image/package system that installs, updates and removes on RPM-based distributions by recreating images to boot from.

GNOME — Innovative GTK desktop environment pushing bleeding-edge technologies in the Linux desktop such as Wayland and XDG portals.
Plasma — Innovative Qt desktop environment pushing bleeding-edge technologies in the Linux desktop such as Wayland and XDG portals.

Sway — Innovative window manager pushing bleeding-edge technologies in the Linux desktop such as Wayland and portals.

Matrix/Element — Secure, decentralized, federated, and open source chat platform with modern features. Can be a Discord alternative to some extent.
Session — Secure, decentralized, federated, anonymous, and open source chat platform based on Signal. No need for a phone number.

LibreOffice/Collabora Office — Feature rich, available in all platforms office platform. Great alternative to Microsoft Office when using the Tabbed UI. Can be run in servers for real-time collaboration.

OSTree — Git for binary files or operating systems. Used for committing changes, rebasing, reverting, etc. for much bigger environments like operating systems. I like to call it “Git on steroids”.
KDE Connect/GSConnect — Allow Android devices to wirelessly interact with the Linux desktop and other Android devices.
Hardware Probe — Probe hardware, software and check what works and what does not.
PulseEffects — Powerful input and output audio manipulation software.
NewsFlash — User friendly RSS reader.
Switching Software — Website listing ethical, easy-to-use alternatives for an end user.

Cool projects/scripts related to Flatpak:

Flathub — Centralized and most popular Flatpak remote.
Fedora Flatpaks — The Fedora Project’s Flatpak remote.
Flatstat — Permissions statistics of Flathub.
Flathub stats — Download and update statistics of Flathub.
Shell aliases for Flatpak applications — bash script to alias all flatpak run commands to smaller variants.

Mindustry — Cross-platform, free and open source hybrid tower defense and factory game.