OS: Devuan
X session: startX
WM: CWM
GUI: GTK3
Browser: Mozilla Firefox
File Manager: SpaceFM
Audio/Video player: MPV
Text Editor: nano, Geany
Torrenting: Transmission-gtk
Image View/Desktop backgrounds sets: FEH
Terminal: rxvt-unicode
Screenshots capture: scrot
System Info: conky, inxi, top
Calendar: URxvt/ncal
SMART: GSmartControl
Other snippets: rcconf, fdupes, mediainfo, alsa-utils, deborphan, ntfs-3g, youtube-dl, jmtpfs, ncdu etc...

3D: Blender, Freecad (actually almost anything)
Design: Inkscape + Scribus
Email clients: Thunderbird, Web mail
File Managers: Thunar, Midnight Commander (MC)
Media Players: MPV, Parole
Office suites: LibreOffice (Writer, Impress, Draw mainly)
Photos: Gimp, ImageMagick, Gpicview, Ristretto
Readers: Atrill, MuPDF, FB Reader, MasterPDF
Text Editors: Mousepad, Atom, Geany, Nano, Micro
Terminals: Xfce4-Terminal, Terminator
Video editors: Shotcut, Natron
Unordered random cli-utility: htop, find, locate, fzf, flatpak, apt
Unordered random gui-utility: Galculator, SvgCleaner, Redshift, Xsane, trimage, synaptic, synapse
Virtualization: Virt-Manager
Web browsers: Firefox, Chromium, Midori

pcmanfm for file manager

geany or nano for editor

Focuswriter mainly for writing, libreoffice for other documents,

icedove-uxp for email client (this is strictly on Hyperbola... ) I prefer to use devuan for gaming more.

hexchat for irc

sakura for command line

Those are mainly what I use.  I might have other specifics but that sums up most of it.

Unless you speak of wine and emulators such as qemu, dosbox, etc...

Some of this is subject to change, I may try to use ffplay from now on aka... for videos if possible.

Web browser => Firefox

Music player => Xmms/Audacious

Video player => Mplayer/VLC

File manager => mc suffices, otherwise, basically any GUI one

Editor => Use what comes - vi/vim/nano mainly

Plus, I do like to have an image viewer & PySolFC installed

Any minimalism in my approach is just because of what I need or want to do. Aesthetically, I don't like clutter.

Agreed, for me the idea of digital minimalism is not becoming a digital monk and living in a cave as such, though with the madness in the world, sometimes that does sound appealing. I think it is about less clutter and minimising the bloat, using the tools you need but not going with out, I think we all know how easy it is to bloat our computers, and of course some OS's conveniently do it for you

It's funny as I'm writing this, looking at my Kubuntu desktop I have three different browsers open, SeaMonkey for this, Chrome for work "because I have to use it"
and Firefox for services I am logged into Youtube, Email etc.  I'm not doing very well as a digital minimalist at the moment

moc for music

Ah moc. I love moc, I use it on my Devuan minimal install.

Excellent!

OK, but it is fun too

I find very convenient to have own server, it is much natural for web development.

Yes indeed Servers are fun, I run one or two myself, I guess I was thinking. Servers are sort of a specialist area where as Desktop is more widely general use.
I guess you could say a server is more lean by design maybe? Depending on what the server is used for of course.

ruenoak

Firefox for browsing and email

apvlv for PDFs

feh for image viewing

imagemagick for image manipulation

ffmpeg for music

ffmpeg for videos

wordgrinder and sc for documents

nvim for editing

alacritty for terminal and starting stuff (Yes. I am a cave man)

transmission-gtk for torrents

ranger for file browsing, I use the (bash) shell for file management.

I wasn’t looking at the server side of things.

OK, but it is fun too

I find very convenient to have own server, it is much natural for web development.

pandoc: office ( I dont really use this that often but when i need to send a properly formatted letter i use markdown and convert it to pdf with pandoc)

Ah now pandoc, that is something I use too.

Yes it will probably become the next hipster fad Digital Minimalism, and yes I think they will probably all be using macs “bloated by design” because of their marketing.

The guy in the interview said he just uses a browser but doesn’t mention the plethora of cloud centric applications he might be using. It made me think though, for people who use their computers productively in various areas of work, and not just as overly priced electronic fashion accessories. What applications do they need?  It will vary greatly depending on what you do.
I think this person managed  various things, so yes I could see him working out of a browser with the help of plug-ins and cloud applications.

There’s no wrong answer as everyone’s  requirements are different.
My initial question was based around a similar setup as he would have. A Mac with OSX and what ever comes with it. So mine was, my Thinkpad with Devuan Beowulf 3.1 – default desktop setup.
I wasn’t looking at the server side of things.

Besides a terminal and file manager, GUI programs I use every day:

Thunderbird
Firefox
LibreOffice Writer and Calc
Audacious for music (mostly streaming internet radio)
Stellarium (I've been an amateur astronomer since the 60's)
VLC occasionally - don't do much video
Aisleriot - solitaire every day!
Image viewer - whatever comes up when I double-click an image file
Pluma or Kwrite for text files (nano or vim at command line)

I mostly use apt, but sometimes synaptic.
When I'm messing around trying things out, I use gparted to prepare and delete partitions.
I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

Pretty much everything else I do is from the command line. Mostly I use MATE, occasionally KDE, so all the associated stuff is installed.

Any minimalism in my approach is just because of what I need or want to do. Aesthetically, I don't like clutter. I am not in any way resource-constrained - with all my apps loaded up and multiple tabs in my browser, I don't think I've ever pushed my RAM usage over 3 GB. I have actually tried to see how much RAM I could use by opening multiple browsers, etc. I have 12 GB installed, barely ever use 1/4 of that. Ditto, I have acres of free disk space, so I keep lots of backups.

I guess I'm not real minimalist. Mostly, I don't worry about it.

you have given a list of types of programs, not the actual programs you use.

Indeed. Because:

It seemed that's what was being asked.

If you like:
Kwin/KDE
Dolphin
Firefox
Kmail
Kontact
KeepassXC
Filezilla
Jdownloader
Transmission-remote
Pidgin
KRDC
Libreoffice / Okular / FBreader
Gwenview & DigiKam
GIMP
Smplayer
Cantata & MPD
Easytag & Flacon
Kate
GCC, make, etc. scripted from Kate.
QCAD (I need .dwg compatibility that works)
Pre-Autodesk Eagle (I need the component libraries)
VirtualBox
Kcalc
Labplot
Lutris, WINE, DXVK etc. etc.

Konsole, bash, and all the CLI stuff therein.
All the other things I have forgotten but would miss immediately if I were to remove them