Maybe a package to take screen shots? This way people can share their results?
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Thanks, i updated the first post adding your suggestions.
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Rofi would be good to add to a basic setup. A keybinding for ‘rofi -show drun’ makes it onto my systems as a quick launcher.
- Viewnior
- galculator
Edit; Xreader seems to be an excellent choice if your goal is to just open pdf files and look at them.
I’ll express my opinion only concerning the simplest apps, since I don’t have much experience with other than i3 WMs.
browser: Firefox is the standard. I think pretty much everyone would expect it out-of-the-box.
text editor: I think xed may be one of the best choices. It’s simple and has minimal deps.
file manager: Caja, my best friend since Mint 
I may be biased, but I think it’s very user friendly.
terminal: I like and use termite, but it’s flagged out-of-date and hence doesn’t seem like the best choice. Maybe Tilda? It seems simple and has GUI config.
others: I use scrot for taking screenshots, python interpreter as calculator, Ristretto as image viewer and lector for reading. Lector is from AUR though 
Building Openbox from the ground up, my essential apps on top of lightdm are:
- compton (now called picom)
- urxvt
- vim
- firefox
- pulseaudio
- polybar
- pcmanfm
- plank
These are the essentials which make the wm work, and others are a matter of preference. I like obmenu-generator for the right-click desktop menu. Archlabs added a bar menu, like whisker, which turns Openbox into a poor man’s XFCE.
The problem is that Openbox and Polybar need to be configured and are not for complete newbies. OTOH, you could create a very small configuration for Polybar and leave the user to add stuff later. Alternatively, just use a basic tint2 for a bar. It’s ugly but it works.
Regarding termnials just as text editors there is a decision to make: Easy to use, or cred / expectations?
urxvt is usually used with tiled WMs but it is very annoying to configure unless you are well… a person that enjoy editing dotfiles by hand. Same with say vim etc. Or for that matter only including terminal file managers.
IMHO, of course
I agree. I have a standard .Xresources file to setup uxrvt and a standard .vimrc to setup Vim. I just keep them handy on a usb stick for each time I re-install.
I thought it’s for new users? So, basic apps are expected to have GUI? I like vim, but forcing others to use it won’t be the best user experience.
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Exactly
Leafpad is the easiest and lightest UI text editor I know of. No reason using vim.
Same reason I am advocating Xfce4-terminal. It is light, tho not as light as say urxvt but it has a simple right-click preference setup very similar to Gnome terminal for example.
I also really don’t think we should ship a terminal file manager as default. Sure, add one in, but do not set it as default.
Btw regarding Thunar and desktop above: PCManFM is not tied to a desktop; Thunar is, just like say Nemo (which is why I run Nemo in Xfce with the --no-desktop flag to make it not try to replace Xfce desktop with Cinnamon Desktop). Thunar “drags” the Xfce desktop with it as a dependency.
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This probably needs to be segregated into QT vs GTK. If I’m picking common apps for KDE, Deepin and lxqt they are going to be different than lxde, mate, gnome etc just to minimize the required libraries to be loaded into memory.
The problem with window managers is that most of them are neither qt or gtk.
One of the cool things about WMs is you can build them out how you prefer.
I’d argue featherpad is a better choice for QT based distro’s.
Parole is also a nice light media player before you step up to the smplayer/mpv and vlc level. There are dozens of light music players on gtk side but clementine does great on qt side,
Well, vim has tons of plugins and is incredibly powerful editor, but surely not everyone would need or like it. Besides. I thought it’s part of the core anyway.
Ranger launching automatically in one of the terminals 
It seems there isn’t a lot of choices as to file managers, not tied to any DE. I personally never liked pcmanfm much, and as someone above mentioned it has theming problems.
Anyone looked at double commander? I was amazed how much it was like a lite version of krusader. I don’t recall a huge amount of dependencies either. I’ve also always either used yakuake (drop down terminal) on kde or tilda on any of the others till I ran deepin and saw it had a drop down terminal built into the alt-f2 hotkey which I found very elegant vs just a single line runner.
double commander is cool but it is kind of a mess visually. It tries to stuff a ton of functionality into a fairly flat menu system. Wouldn’t be my first choice for a default.
If you want to try it is in the repos as doublecmd-qt5 and doublecmd-gtk2
I think at first wms will probaly follow i3-wm set of packages for now, but we’re open to suggestions too.
Here are the packages for each DE/WM (search for i3)
terminator is listed twice in i3 packages (15th from the top and 5th from the bottom)
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For a data point on terminals, here are some memory usage numbers on some of the terminals mentioned in this topic:
7.7 MiB + 16.4 MiB = 24.2 MiB termite
12.7 MiB + 23.6 MiB = 36.3 MiB xfce4-terminal
20.1 MiB + 49.0 MiB = 69.1 MiB qterminal
27.6 MiB + 44.8 MiB = 72.4 MiB alacritty
32.3 MiB + 50.7 MiB = 83.0 MiB kitty
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Installing Libreoffice to have a PDF viewer is too much from my point of view.
You have some smaller viewers like evince, okular, epdfview, qpdfview etc. which open some other document types too.
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