Aurora OS
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Apps
Every preinstalled app, the alternatives we compared, and why each one won.
| Role | Choice | Alternatives considered | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Files | Aurora Files (our own) | Nautilus, Thunar, Nemo | Matches the desktop exactly and is lightweight. Nautilus pulls in large parts of GNOME and assumes GNOME Shell. |
| Terminal | Ptyxis (+ foot for scripted windows) | GNOME Console, Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, Ghostty | Tabs, profiles, theme-aware, and container integration: it opens shells inside distrobox, toolbox and podman containers. It is GNOME's new terminal and Ubuntu's future default. foot stays for Dev Hub's install windows (tiny and scriptable). |
| Text editor | GNOME Text Editor + neovim | gedit, Kate | Modern GTK 4, fast. neovim for the terminal. |
| Web | Firefox ESR | Chromium, rapid-release Firefox (Mozilla's apt repo) | Debian's security team maintains it, and the ESR stays stable. Chromium and rapid Firefox are available too. |
| Geary (shown as "Mail") | Thunderbird, Evolution, Betterbird, KMail, Mailspring | The closest thing to Apple Mail: conversation threads, fast full-text search, a clean single-window design that follows the system theme, and online accounts (Gmail, Outlook.com, IMAP) set up in a minute. Thunderbird is more powerful (OpenPGP, calendar, add-ons, Exchange via EWS) but heavy and styled on its own, so it doesn't inherit the system theme. It is one command away: sudo apt install thunderbird or from Flathub. Evolution is the choice for Exchange servers. | |
| Office | LibreOffice (Writer, Calc, Impress) | OnlyOffice | Fully free software, packaged by Debian, with translations. |
| Papers | Evince | GNOME 48's GTK 4/libadwaita successor to Evince. | |
| Images | Loupe | Eye of GNOME, gThumb | Fast, GPU-accelerated, GTK 4. |
| Video | Celluloid (mpv) | Showtime, Totem, VLC | mpv plays almost anything with hardware decoding. Showtime is pretty but less capable. |
| Music | Rhythmbox | Lollypop, Amberol | A complete music library and podcasts. |
| Store | GNOME Software + Flatpak plugin | KDE Discover, our own | Covers apt, Flatpak and firmware (fwupd) updates in one place. |
| Backups / snapshots | Déjà Dup / Timeshift | Borg/Vorta, Snapper | Déjà Dup for personal files (encrypted, incremental). Timeshift for system snapshots, automatic on btrfs (see Snapshots). |
| Personal | Calendar, Contacts, Weather, Maps, Clocks, Calculator, Camera (Snapshot), Sound Recorder, Scanner, Remmina, Transmission, Disks, Disk Usage, Logs, Characters, Fonts, Power Statistics, Firmware, games | — | The same everyday set Ubuntu ships (GTK 4 versions wherever they exist), listed in config/apps.manifest and tested to launch. GNOME System Monitor stays installed but out of Launchpad: Task Manager covers it. |