Nazeem.Me

A blog about technology, football and all the other random stuff in my life

The 2026 Software List: 110 Applications I Actually Run

Written by

Nazeem

in

,

·

Four years ago I published a list of twenty. Nine of them are still here — and the other ninety-odd arrived to keep them company.

In September 2022 I wrote 20 Must Have Software Applications for Every PC. Dashlane, Chrome, Microsoft Office, Kaspersky, PuTTY, TeamViewer. It was a list of things you install on a laptop or desktop.

This is not that list. Somewhere between then and now the interesting software stopped living on my desk and started living on a Proxmox cluster in a minirack. But the old list didn’t get deleted — nine of those twenty are still in daily use. Dashlane, Microsoft 365, Firefox, VLC, PuTTY, Shotcut, OpenVPN, Spotify and Plex all survived. What changed is that they’re now outnumbered five to one by things I host myself.

A note on what this is not: a Linux-versus-Windows piece. I run two CachyOS desktops and a Windows workstation, and I use whichever one has the software I need. Serato and DaVinci Resolve are the reason the Windows box exists. And I have a Mac Mini somewhere on my desk to make sure I don’t get too comfortable with any one platform.

The rule for this list: everything here runs on my own hardware. I’ve marked every licence, and where something isn’t actually open source I say so with a ✱ rather than quietly leaving it out. I’ve excluded anything that ships as a CachyOS default — Dolphin, Konsole, Spectacle and friends are fine, but I didn’t choose them.

Part 1 — Hosted (46)

Running on a three-node Proxmox cluster, two Synology units and an Unraid box.

Virtualisation and infrastructure

  1. Proxmox VE — AGPL-3.0 — Four hosts, ~30 containers. The single most load-bearing thing I run.
  2. Proxmox Backup Server — AGPL-3.0 — Deduplicated, verified backups on a 20:00 schedule. Verification is the part that matters.
  3. LXC — LGPL-2.1 — Almost everything below is a container, not a VM. A service costs me 200 MB, not 2 GB.
  4. Docker — Apache-2.0 — For the handful of things that only ship as an image.
  5. Portainer CE — Zlib — A UI over Docker for when I can’t remember the flags.
  6. TrueNAS — BSD/GPL — A testing environment rather than production storage, and I keep having to remind myself of that.
  7. Caddy — Apache-2.0 — 33 vhosts and automatic HTTPS I have never once had to think about.
  8. Restic — BSD-2 — Encrypted, deduplicated offsite backup. Its check --read-data is the only reason I trust any of it.

Network and DNS

  1. Pi-hole — EUPL-1.2 — Two instances, kept in sync. Blocks the ads and, more usefully, shows me what my devices talk to.
  2. Unbound — BSD-3 — Recursive resolution, so DNS queries don’t go to an upstream that logs them.
  3. nebula-sync — MIT — Replicates config between the two Pi-holes in about two minutes.
  4. WireGuard — GPL-2.0 — Faster than OpenVPN by a margin I measured rather than assumed.
  5. cloudflared — Apache-2.0 — One tunnel, no port forwards.
  6. LibreSpeed — LGPL-3.0 — A speed test that doesn’t leave my LAN, which is the only way to test a LAN.

Security and identity

  1. Vaultwarden — AGPL-3.0 — The Bitwarden-compatible server. See the honest note about Dashlane later.
  2. Infisical — MIT (ee/ directory gated) — Secrets for everything the cluster runs. Ended a long era of .env files.
  3. Authentik — MIT — Evaluated properly, and I still haven’t deployed it. That’s a finding, not a failure.
  4. Authelia — Apache-2.0 — Same story. I wrote the whole forward-auth build and shipped three lines of Caddy instead.
  5. fail2ban — GPL-2.0 — Worth checking fail2ban-client get <jail> logpath rather than trusting that a jail does anything.
  6. Wazuh — GPL-2.0 — SIEM for a house, which sounds absurd until you read the logs.

Monitoring and dashboards

  1. Grafana — AGPL-3.0 — Health data going back to March 2022.
  2. InfluxDB — MIT — The time-series store underneath it.
  3. Glance — AGPL-3.0 — One page that replaced five logins.
  4. Pulse — MIT — Proxmox monitoring that understands Proxmox, which Grafana doesn’t out of the box.
  5. Beszel — MIT — Lightweight host metrics. Agents on the four hosts and, I keep reminding myself, none of the guests.
  6. Heimdall — MIT — A link page. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Media and downloads

  1. Jellyfin — GPL-2.0 — The open source half of a two-server media setup.
  2. Radarr — GPL-3.0 — Films.
  3. Sonarr — GPL-3.0 — Television.
  4. Prowlarr — GPL-3.0 — Indexer management for both, so I configure things once.
  5. Bazarr — GPL-3.0 — Subtitles, which matter more than I expected.
  6. SABnzbd — GPL-2.0 — Usenet.
  7. qBittorrent — GPL-2.0 — The other kind.
  8. Calibre-web — GPL-3.0 — A reading interface over the Calibre library.

Productivity and data

  1. Ghostfolio — AGPL-3.0 — Portfolio tracking, synced from IBKR. Its API tokens expire after 180 days and fail silently, so a timer re-mints them monthly.
  2. Vikunja — AGPL-3.0 — To-do lists I own.
  3. Trilium Next — AGPL-3.0 — The write-capable half of my notes. Obsidian is the other half.
  4. Home Assistant — Apache-2.0 — Home automation, and the only thing here my family notices when it breaks.
  5. WordPress — GPL-2.0 — This blog. Still, after all these years.
  6. Stirling-PDF — MIT, with carve-outs — Everything Adobe charges for. Note it has no login system at all in the build I run.
  7. Apache CouchDB — Apache-2.0 — Sync backend for Obsidian LiveSync.

AI

  1. Ollama — MIT — Local inference. Honest verdict: it did not survive contact with 16 GB of RAM.
  2. Open WebUI — “Open WebUI License” — BSD-3 plus added branding terms, which is why GitHub won’t classify it. Not quite open source, and worth knowing.

Hosted, but not open source ✱

  1. Plex ✱ — Proprietary. Runs alongside Jellyfin because the clients my family already use are Plex clients.
  2. Unraid ✱ — Proprietary, paid. The real cold storage box. 50 TB of array that I have never once had to think about.
  3. Synology DSM ✱ — Proprietary. Two units. DSM can act as an OIDC server, which I discovered while planning to build one.

Part 2 — Client, CachyOS desktops (56)

Two machines. Defaults excluded — if CachyOS installed it for me, it isn’t on this list.

The base

  1. CachyOS — GPL — Eight months in, it has broken my audio and eaten my Bluetooth. Still my favourite OS.
  2. KDE Plasma — LGPL-2.0+ — The edition I chose, so it counts.
  3. fish — GPL-2.0 — Sane defaults, no configuration. The $var expansion rules will still catch you over SSH.

Browsers

  1. LibreWolf — MPL-2.0 — Firefox with the telemetry removed and the defaults fixed.
  2. Brave — MPL-2.0 / BSD — The Chromium I actually use.
  3. Firefox — MPL-2.0 — On the 2022 list. Still here.
  4. Chromium — BSD-3 — For testing what everyone else sees.

Productivity and communication

  1. LibreOffice — MPL-2.0 — Handles everything Microsoft 365 does, except the things my employer needs.
  2. Thunderbird — MPL-2.0 — Genuinely good again, which was not true five years ago.
  3. Calibre — GPL-3.0 — The library manager behind Calibre-web.
  4. Signal — AGPL-3.0 — Where the conversations that matter happen.
  5. Telegram Desktop — GPL-3.0 — Client is open source, server isn’t. Worth knowing which half you’re trusting.

Media and creative

  1. VLC — GPL-2.0+ — On the 2022 list. Plays the file. Always has.
  2. Haruna — GPL-3.0+ — An mpv front end for when VLC’s UI grates.
  3. GIMP — GPL-3.0+ — Version 3 finally arrived and it was worth the decade.
  4. darktable — GPL-3.0+ — Raw processing. The Lightroom replacement that actually replaces Lightroom.
  5. Shotcut — GPL-3.0 — On the 2022 list. Still cutting video with it.
  6. FFmpeg — LGPL/GPL — Underneath half of the above, and reachable directly when they won’t do.

Terminal and CLI

  1. Alacritty — Apache-2.0 / MIT — Fast, boring, correct.
  2. btop — Apache-2.0 — top, but you can read it.
  3. htop — GPL-2.0 — Still installed, still the muscle memory.
  4. Glances — LGPL-3.0 — One screen for a machine you’ve just SSH’d into.
  5. ripgrep — MIT / Unlicense — I searched 80 vault notes for this post with it.
  6. fastfetch — MIT — Vanity, and I don’t care.
  7. micro — MIT — nano for people who want Ctrl-S to work.
  8. Vim — Vim licence — For the times something else isn’t installed.

System and maintenance

  1. paru — GPL-3.0 — AUR helper.
  2. Octopi — GPL-2.0 — A GUI over pacman for the once-a-month look at what changed.
  3. Snapper — GPL-2.0 — Btrfs snapshots before every update. The safety net that makes rolling release survivable.
  4. Btrfs Assistant — GPL-3.0 — A front end for Snapper and the filesystem underneath.
  5. Meld — GPL-2.0 — Three-way diff, mostly for .pacnew files.
  6. Mission Center — GPL-3.0 — The Windows Task Manager experience, done well on Linux.
  7. balenaEtcher — Apache-2.0 — Writes USB images without letting me pick the wrong disk.
  8. UFW — GPL-3.0 — A host firewall I can reason about at a glance.

Hardware and benchmarking

  1. CPU-X — GPL-3.0 — The CPU-Z of my 2022 list, reborn as free software.
  2. GOverlay — GPL-3.0 — MangoHud configuration without editing a config file.

Remote access and network

  1. Remmina — GPL-2.0+ — RDP and VNC into everything. Replaced TeamViewer from the old list.
  2. FreeRDP — Apache-2.0 — The protocol implementation underneath it.
  3. FileZilla — GPL-3.0 — Still the fastest way to move a file somewhere awkward.
  4. PuTTY — MIT — On the 2022 list. Installed on a Linux machine in 2026, which I refuse to justify.
  5. Smb4K — GPL-2.0 — Browsing SMB shares without remembering mount syntax.
  6. OpenSSH — BSD — The thing everything else is built on.
  7. iperf3 — BSD — The only honest answer to “is the network actually fast”.
  8. tcpdump — BSD — For when iperf3 says yes and it still feels slow.

Development and cloud

  1. Git — GPL-2.0 — Obviously.
  2. GitHub CLI — MIT — PRs without a browser.
  3. Google Cloud CLI — Apache-2.0 — Mostly for learning rather than running.
  4. rsync — GPL-3.0 — Thirty years old and nothing has replaced it.

On my desktop, not open source ✱

  1. Obsidian ✱ — Arch packages it as LicenseRef-Obsidian, a licence identifier the maintainers had to invent because it fits no standard. Every note behind this post lives in it.
  2. Tailscale ✱ — The client is genuinely MIT. The coordination server is not, which is the entire reason Headscale exists.
  3. Terraform ✱ — BUSL-1.1 since 2023. Source-available, not open source. OpenTofu is the fork that stayed.
  4. Dashlane ✱ — Proprietary, subscription. See below, because this one deserves an argument.
  5. Microsoft 365 ✱ — Proprietary, subscription. I run LibreOffice too. They are not the same job.
  6. Spotify ✱ — Proprietary. On the 2022 list, and nothing self-hosted has come close.
  7. OCCT ✱ — Proprietary freeware. Stability testing after a build.
  8. Geekbench ✱ — Proprietary. A number to compare against other people’s numbers.

Part 3 — Client, the Windows workstation (8)

BigBlackBox exists because two applications require it, and once you have a Windows box you may as well use it properly.

  1. OBS Studio — GPL-2.0 — The only open source application on this machine’s list, and one of the best pieces of free software ever written.
  2. Serato ✱ — Proprietary. DJ software. There is no open source equivalent, and I have looked.
  3. DaVinci Resolve ✱ — Proprietary. The free tier outclasses anything open source in video, and it isn’t close.
  4. Steam ✱ — Proprietary client. Valve has done more for Linux gaming than anyone, via a storefront that isn’t open.
  5. HWiNFO64 ✱ — Proprietary freeware. On the 2022 list. Sensor data nothing else matches.
  6. CPU-Z ✱ — Proprietary freeware. On the 2022 list.
  7. WizTree ✱ — Proprietary. On the 2022 list. Reads the MFT directly, which is why it’s instant.
  8. Foxit PDF ✱ — Proprietary. On the 2022 list.

The argument about the asterisks

Eighteen of these 110 are not open source. That number is the interesting part of the list, because I self-host alternatives to several of them and still don’t use them.

Dashlane is the clearest case. I run Vaultwarden. It works, it’s AGPL, it’s backed up nightly, and I could move to it this afternoon. I haven’t, because Dashlane’s autofill is better on the three platforms my family actually uses, and a password manager that people avoid is worse than one that costs money. The open source option lost on adoption, not on principle.

Plex and Jellyfin run side by side for the same reason. Jellyfin is the better project. Plex is on the television my family already knows how to use.

Serato and DaVinci Resolve are different. These aren’t cases where open source lost narrowly. There is no free DJ suite with Serato’s hardware support, and nothing in open source video comes near Resolve’s free tier. Creative and professional tooling is where the gap is still real, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Then there’s Open WebUI, which is on the FOSS side of the list but shouldn’t be taken for granted — it ships a custom licence with branding restrictions bolted onto BSD-3. Terraform did the same thing more dramatically in 2023. Licences move, usually in one direction, and it’s worth knowing which of your dependencies could move next.

What actually changed since 2022

Nine of twenty survived. That’s a much higher hit rate than I expected when I started counting.

The change isn’t that I replaced proprietary software with open source. It’s that the centre of gravity moved off the desktop. In 2022 the interesting software ran on a PC. In 2026 it runs on four machines in a mini-rack, and the desktops are laptops are mostly a way to reach it.

And the tools that stayed proprietary stayed because they earned it — not through lock-in, not through inertia, but because on the specific job they do they are still better. That’s a smaller list than it was in 2022, and it will probably be smaller again in 2030. But it isn’t going to be empty.

More posts