Awesome OpenBSD Desktop 🐡

January 1, 2026 · View on GitHub

Awesome OpenBSD wallpaper

Awesome OpenBSD Desktop 🐡

A curated list of awesome applications, software, tools, and resources for using OpenBSD as a daily driver. Inspired by the various Awesome lists that exist for a wide variety of tech ecosystems and the robust, secure, and quality codebase of OpenBSD.

➡️ If you want more of these OpenBSD visuals, go check here to get one of these wallpapers for yourself!

Contents

Desktop Environments

  • Xfce - A lightweight desktop environment, popular on OpenBSD due to low resource usage. Available as xfce-4.20.
  • GNOME - A modern, full-featured desktop environment. OpenBSD 7.7+ includes GNOME 47.
  • KDE Plasma - A polished, highly configurable desktop. KDE Plasma 6.4 is available in OpenBSD packages.
  • MATE - A continuation of GNOME 2, providing a traditional desktop experience.
  • LXQt - A lightweight Qt-based desktop environment. Available as LXQt 2.3.0.

Window Managers

  • cwm - OpenBSD's native calm window manager. Lightweight, keyboard-oriented, and included in base.
  • fvwm - A virtual window manager for X11, included in OpenBSD base.
  • twm - Tab window manager, also included in OpenBSD base.
  • i3 - A tiling window manager, completely written from scratch.
  • dwm - A dynamic window manager for X11 from suckless.
  • spectrwm - A small dynamic tiling window manager for X11.
  • Openbox - A highly configurable stacking window manager with extensive standards support.
  • bspwm - A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning.

Terminal Emulators

  • xterm - The standard terminal emulator for the X Window System, included in base.
  • st - A simple terminal implementation for X from suckless.
  • Alacritty - A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust.
  • kitty - A fast, feature-rich, GPU-based terminal emulator.
  • foot - A fast, lightweight, and minimalistic terminal emulator.
  • rxvt-unicode - A customizable terminal emulator (urxvt).
  • Zutty - A high-end terminal for low-end systems.
  • xfce4-terminal - The Xfce terminal emulator.

Text Editors

  • vi - The classic visual editor, included in OpenBSD base (nvi).
  • ed - The standard line editor, included in OpenBSD base.
  • vim - Vi Improved, an advanced text editor with a complete feature set.
  • Neovim - A modern, extensible Vim-based editor with Lua scripting.
  • helix - A post-modern modal text editor written in Rust.
  • kakoune - A modal editor with multiple selections and orthogonal design.
  • emacs - An extensible, customizable, self-documenting editor.
  • nano - An easy to use, modeless text editor.
  • micro - A modern, intuitive terminal-based text editor.

Web Browsers

  • Firefox - A free and open-source web browser developed by Mozilla.
  • LibreWolf - A privacy-focused Firefox fork with telemetry removed and uBlock Origin included.
  • Chromium - An open-source browser project. Supports VA-API hardware acceleration on OpenBSD.
  • Ungoogled Chromium - Chromium with Google services and telemetry removed. VA-API supported.
  • Iridium - A privacy-focused Chromium-based browser.
  • Lynx - A highly configurable text-based web browser.
  • w3m - A text-based web browser and pager.

Email Clients

  • Thunderbird - A free, full-featured email application.
  • mutt - A small but powerful text-based mail client.
  • neomutt - A command-line mail reader based on Mutt with added features.
  • aerc - A pretty good email client for your terminal.
  • alpine - A fast, easy to use email client.

File Managers

  • Thunar - A modern file manager for Xfce.
  • PCManFM - A lightweight file manager with tabbed browsing.
  • Dolphin - KDE's feature-rich file manager.
  • Midnight Commander - A powerful console file manager (mc).
  • ranger - A console file manager with VI key bindings.
  • lf - A terminal file manager written in Go, inspired by ranger.
  • nnn - A tiny, lightning fast terminal file manager.
  • vifm - A file manager with ncurses interface providing Vim-like environment.

Multimedia

  • mpv - A free, open-source, cross-platform media player.
  • VLC - A versatile multimedia player supporting most formats.
  • ffmpeg - A complete solution for recording, converting, and streaming audio/video. Version 8.0+ in ports.
  • Audacity - A free, open-source audio editor and recorder.
  • GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program for image editing.
  • Inkscape - A professional vector graphics editor.
  • sndio - OpenBSD's native audio and MIDI framework.
  • cmus - A small, fast, and powerful console music player.

Office

  • LibreOffice - A powerful, full-featured office suite.
  • Calligra - A KDE-based office suite.
  • Gnumeric - A fast, accurate spreadsheet application.
  • AbiWord - A lightweight word processor.
  • Zathura - A minimalistic document viewer with vim-like keybindings.
  • Evince - GNOME's document viewer for PDF and other formats.

System Monitoring

  • top - Display and update information about the top CPU processes, included in base.
  • systat - Display system statistics, included in base.
  • htop - An interactive process viewer for Unix systems.
  • btop - A modern resource monitor with a sleek interface.
  • glances - A cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python.
  • iftop - Display bandwidth usage on an interface.
  • bandwhich - Terminal bandwidth utilization tool.

Security Tools

  • OpenSSH - A suite of secure networking utilities, developed by OpenBSD and included in base.
  • LibreSSL - A TLS/crypto stack forked from OpenSSL by the OpenBSD project.
  • pf - OpenBSD's packet filter firewall, included in base.
  • doas - A simpler sudo alternative, developed by OpenBSD and included in base.
  • signify - Cryptographically sign and verify files, included in base.
  • GnuPG - A complete implementation of the OpenPGP standard.
  • nmap - A network exploration tool and security scanner.
  • tcpdump - A powerful command-line packet analyzer, included in base.
  • Wireshark - A graphical network protocol analyzer.

Miscellaneous Tools

  • tmux - A terminal multiplexer for managing multiple terminal sessions.
  • fzf - A command-line fuzzy finder.
  • ripgrep - A fast line-oriented search tool (rg).
  • fd - A simple, fast alternative to find.
  • bat - A cat clone with syntax highlighting.
  • eza - A modern replacement for ls.
  • fastfetch - A fast system information tool (replaces archived neofetch).
  • starship - A minimal, fast, customizable shell prompt.
  • zoxide - A smarter cd command.

Desktop Setup Guides

Resources

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read the contribution guidelines first.

Feel free to fork this repository, add your contributions, and send a pull request to expand the Awesome OpenBSD Desktop list!