Recommended applications

This page lists X11, Wayland).]] Users having a particular requirement should find reliable and easy to install software here for common Gentoo Linux needs.

Most software here is in the stable branch, but some useful and otherwise high quality software is still in the testing branch. In that case packages may be made available for installation, however packages from the testing branch should only be used after taking notice of any risks.

In most cases, software designed for one desktop environment will work just as well with another desktop environment, though sometimes with less integration. Installing software from a different desktop environment may pull in more dependencies than an equivalent native application; there is usually no issue at all with this.

These applications should be widely useful and of sufficient quality to merit inclusion. To reference a new piece of software here, please read the adding to this page section.

Desktop environment
A desktop environment is a complete ecosystem of software and resources providing a homogenous graphical user experience. Generally based on specific widgets, configuration system, root window with desktop background, taskbar with window list and menu, icons, window manager etc. It provides a coherent visual metaphor for a user to interact with the computer.

A desktop environment can be a great convenience to most users, though a custom graphical environment can be assembled if preferred, i.e. Xorg could be used with a window manager and select desktop utilities. Gentoo does not have separate releases or "flavors" for different desktop environments, as some other distributions do - a desktop environment is simply installed on the base system. Gentoo's flexibility means that many desktop environments are available, and more than one can generally be installed in parallel. Gentoo can of course be used exclusively in text mode, as a server platform for example.

Cross-toolkit themes
See GTK themes in Qt applications for more information.

Taskbars / Panels
A taskbar is generally a strip on one edge of the screen with a menu, a representation of open windows, shortcuts to launch apps, widgets to display information etc. Desktop environments usually provide a taskbar but the default can often be replaced or complemented according to user preference. A taskbar associated with a window manager can form the basis of a custom desktop environment.

Window managers
A window manager manages the creation, manipulation, and destruction of on-screen windows in X11. If a desktop environment is used, a window manager will generally be provided. This it the list of the currently most used window managers, for a more complete list of packages available on Gentoo, see this list.

Archive managers
Theses graphical file archivers support multiple archive formats and should work with any desktop environment.

Clipboard managers
The X11 clipboard supports multiple selections which may be filled by simply selecting text on the screen or by specifically using a copy function. X11 selections have a coherent operation and applications implement their use by convention, though the conventions are not always fully respected. Clipboard managers generally manage a history of the X11 selections and sometimes modify their behaviour.

Terminal emulators
A terminal emulator enables interaction with the system through a powerful text based interface. See the terminal emulator article for more information and even more package choices.

Chat clients / video conferencing
Some other popular messaging services can be used on Gentoo using their web interface, such as with WhatsApp.

Audio

 * - free cross-platform audio recorder and editor.
 * - simple sound recorder.

Scanning

 * - scan documents, perform OCR, produce PDFs and DjVus, gtk based.
 * - a personal document manager, scan or import your documents and find them back in a snap with full text search !
 * - simple document scanning utility for GNOME.
 * - simple image scanning application based on libksane and KDE Frameworks.
 * - tried and tested graphical scanning frontend.

See the wiki page on SANE for more information on scanning in Gentoo.

Video

 * - GTK program to take pictures and videos from your webcam, GNOME oriented.
 * - simple Qt5 or GTK 3 interface for capturing and viewing video from v4l2 devices.
 * - just as the name implies.
 * - just as the name implies.

Audio players

 * Audacious - a media player similar to XMMS, and Winamp.
 * - a music player and library organizer based on Amarok and Qt.
 * - an open-source jukebox for large collections of MP3/Ogg/FLAC files.
 * - a music management program designed for all music enthusiasts.
 * - an ncurses interface for playing audio files, Music On Console.
 * MPD - a flexible, server-side application for playing music with X11 clients.
 * - a Qt-based audio player with Winamp/XMMS skins support.
 * - a music playing application for GNOME framework.

Image viewers

 * - part of (a collection of tools and libraries for many image formats).
 * - an image viewer and browser for GNOME.
 * - image viewers for the framebuffer console (fbi) and X11 (ida).
 * Feh - open-source image viewer mainly aimed at command-line users but works as a very lightweight minimal viewer for X11.
 * - a lightweight GTK image viewer.
 * - a GTK LXDE lightweight image viewer.
 * - an image viewer and browser for GNOME.
 * - a fast and easy to use image viewer for browsing and displaying a collection of images in KDE.
 * - a lightweight Qt image viewer.
 * - a fast, simple, elegant, minimalistic image viewer for X11. Written in C with GTK.

Graphics

 * - batch image converter and resizer based on ImageMagick.
 * GIMP - the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It can be used as a simple paint tool, photo retouching and general image manipulation.
 * - framework and script language that allows the creation of complex macros, with GIMP and Krita plugins (enable appropriate use flags).
 * - powerful, free vector graphics design workshop.
 * - simple KDE-based painting program, like the traditonal MS Paint.
 * - professional open source painting program made by artists.
 * - fast and easy graphics application for digital painters.
 * - ultra light, bare X11 image editing tool.

Photography

 * Darktable - a photography workflow application and RAW developer.
 * - a powerful, feature-rich KDE digital photo management application.
 * - a graphical user interface for the creation & processing of panoramic images.
 * - a graphical user interface for high dynamic range image composition and processing.
 * - powerful, free, cross-platform raw photo processing system.
 * - photo manager for GNOME.

Video players

 * Mpv - a free and open source command-line media player.
 * - a fully-featured Qt front-end for.
 * VLC - a wildly popular, cross platform video player and streamer.

Video editors

 * - an award winning free and open-source non-linear video editor.
 * - a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.
 * - stable and effective non-linear video editor for low-end systems.

3D

 * Blender - a free and open-source 3D creation suite.

File Sharing

 * Nfs-utils - a file system protocol that allows client machines to access network attached filesystems (called exports) from a host system.
 * Samba - a re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol, a Microsoft Windows alternative to Network File System (NFS).

Network Management

 * Dhcpcd-ui - a Qt and GTK monitor and configuration graphical user interface for dhcpcd.
 * Iwd - an up-and-coming wireless daemon for Linux.
 * Netifrc - Gentoo's default framework for configuring and managing network interfaces on systems running OpenRC.
 * systemd-networkd - a part of systemd useful for simple configuration of wired network interfaces.
 * Wpa_supplicant - a wifi supplicant to handle network authentication.

Astronomy

 * - a space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions with a real-time 3D visualization of space.
 * - an open source planetarium for your computer with a realistic sky in relaitme 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.

Nanoscience

 * - view, convert, and analzye scanning microscopy data (e.g. atomic force microscopy).
 * - view, edit, and convert electron beam lithography files.

Diff/Merge tools

 * - a Qt frontend to diff3.
 * - a KDE tool for viewing the differences between files.
 * - a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers, under GNOME.
 * - a patch manager to easily manage large numbers of patches by keeping track of the changes each patch makes.

IDEs

 * - a GTK HTML editor for the experienced web designer or programmer.
 * - the open source, cross platform, free C++ IDE.
 * Eclipse - Java based IDE that can be used for other languages via plugins. Not in the Gentoo repository but can be installed from an overlay according to the the instructions.
 * - a GTK based fast and lightweight IDE supporting many different languages.
 * - supporting KF5/Qt, C/C++ and much more.
 * - a lightweight C++/Qt IDE from the Qt Project.

Programming text editors

 * GVim - a text editor based on the vi text editor.
 * Emacs - a class of powerful, extensible, self-documenting text editors.
 * - a KDE text editor.
 * - a vim fork focused on extensibility and agility.
 * - a very powerful editor for programmers.
 * Vim - a text editor based on the vi text editor.

Adding to this page
This page is a work in progress. If you regularly use a desktop software package from the Gentoo repository and can confirm it is of excellent quality, stable and of broad appeal for common tasks, please add it to the list ! The software should at least be maintained (i.e. relatively recent commits to the source; have periodic releases; not have too many reported bugs; most bugs should be getting fixed rather than accumulating, etc.), and preferably be well documented and from the stable branch. Please don't use this page just to promote a package because you like it, are an author or have other interest etc.

External resources

 * linuxlinks software directory - large, well organized catalogue of software with good descriptions. Software that is not in Portage can sometimes be installed by other means, such as being downloaded and complied after installing the appropriate dependencies.