Table of Contents

• I run Arch btw
  • Music
  • Zen Browser
  • KDE

I run Arch btw

After going through my yearly application Prune, I wanted to go ahead and highlight some of my favourite apps that I have been using myself nearly daily at home. We range from all sorts of applications from Music players to Terminals!

Music

To Give some context for how I personally manage my music discog, I run two distinct platforms:

• Navidrome (Self-Hosted Music Library)
  • This contains all my Soundtrack albums, such as music from games, shows, etc. As most of these are typically harder to find on streaming services, so having them all in one easy to manage location is benefitial.
• Apple Music
  • Everything else runs through here, my “mainstream” library as I like to call it.

so with that in mind, Here are the two music apps I daily drive:

Feishin

Feishin is, as the developer puts it, “ A modern self-hosted music player.“ It’s a client that hooks directly into my Navidrome server, giving me a spotify-like experience on actually playing said music. I’ve been using Feishin since the beginning of the year when the app was originally a rewrite of the developers previous app, and It’s grown considerably and been fantastic. Previously on Windows I mainly used Musicbee, but as Musicbee doesn’t have a native linux client + I would like to be able to have my playlists synced across multiple devices, a Navidrome-esque client is great.

I had attempted to use Plexamp, but plexamp has it’s own issues such as the desktop app using literally the same UI as the Mobile App which is not at all useful on Desktop for any serious usage.

Cider

I’m hesitant to mention this one due to the controversial nature of the Developer involved in it (Lots of Transphobic talk & Elon shilling in their discord), so I won’t be linking any direct links to the application.

Cider is a Desktop client for Apple Music, meant to pick up the slack where the default Apple Music app suffers. Sadly this is really the only viable option for Apple Music on Linux, otherwise I would’ve dropped this app a long time ago.

Zen Browser

I have a difficult relationship when it comes to web browsers to say the least, with a lot of my main gripes being the same UI/UX Design as the original Chrome Launch, to the moronic addition of unecessary AI Features. Originally back when I was on windows, I was a big fan of the rebooted Edge Browser, as it was actually a lot faster than any of the other chromium browsers I used at the time (Vivaldi, Chromium itself), but afterwards I shifted into using Firefox. With Mozilla for whatever reason REALLY GETTING INTO AI, I decided to find another alternative Gecko browser, which lead me to Zen.

Zen is a Firefox (or Gecko to be more specific) derivative, with it’s main goals being privacy & productivity. The UI is fantastic, with a lot of really great features I use almost daily, I love the “Essentials” Tab pins as it gives me direct access to the most used tabs I access, that being my homepage & Proxmox servers. It also has “Zen Mods”, a specific Extension shop for more extensively changing the UI of the application, which allows me to give it a fully transparent look that matches the rest of my KDE look.

KDE

Speaking of KDE, I spent the better part of a entire week working through my KDE setup to get things just right. I am a big fan of MacOS’ Application Bar UI/UX, and so that’s what I always strive to mimic. I am currently running a Triple Screen setup, with my main screen being a 1440p Ultrawide OLED monitor that has a lot of issues with rendering text, especially in linux, due to the triangular RGB layout on the panel. As such the first task was finding a optimized font renderer designed specifically for this issue. for now I use the freetype2-QDOLED package on the AUR that fixes the majority of my issues on that front, though I’m looking for a 4k UW alternative to replace my main browser.

As for the UI Design itself, I run a rotating wallpaper that changes every hour, and using KDE Material You Colors, I have nearly every app automatically update to match the color scheme of said wallpaper. to Achieve the blur effect, I use better blur DX

Finale

Open-Source software is a vast ecosystem of incredible individuals striving to make something to better improve their lives & the lives of others, so it’s incredibly important to highlight when some contributions go above and beyond in their scope of work. If you ever have an opportunity, please go ahead and donate to these hardworkign Devs! Many of them do this just for the love of the work, and they deserve all the positive recognition for it!