Open a terminal and type xcalc, it's pretty nifty!

Also a tiny text-editor called xedit in that same suite of utilities.

but I usually use galculator for years now, very small and fast and does what I need.

I use this in my .bash_functions file works well

# https://github.com/addyosmani/dotfiles/blob/master/.functions#L1-L17
# Simple calculator
function calc() {
        local result=""
        result="$(printf "scale=10;$*\n" | bc --mathlib | tr -d '\\\n')"
        #                       └─ default (when `--mathlib` is used) is 20
        #
        if [[ "$result" == *.* ]]; then
                # improve the output for decimal numbers
                printf "$result" |
                sed -e 's/^\./0./'        `# add "0" for cases like ".5"` \
                    -e 's/^-\./-0./'      `# add "0" for cases like "-.5"`\
                    -e 's/0*$//;s/\.$//'   # remove trailing zeros
        else
                printf "$result"
        fi
        printf "\n"
}

It is not too happy with negative results but I will live with it.

zeus@9600k:~$ calc 2^4
16
zeus@9600k:~$ calc 2*4
8
zeus@9600k:~$ calc 2/4
0.5
zeus@9600k:~$ calc 2-4
bash: printf: -2: invalid option
printf: usage: printf [-v var] format [arguments]

zeus@9600k:~$ calc 2+4
6

Never look in the repo first for packages to solve your problem, when it might be solved using resources already onboard and a tiny shell-script.

Yad + dash = your friend!

qlipper - simple clipboard similar to parcellite. Uses about 20 MB and works without dbus-bin or dbus-daemon installed.

links2 or dillo for graphical web browsers. Any of the big ones are too painful when you only have 2 GB RAM and 1.33 GHz Atom CPU. Sometimes lynx or w3m will suffice.

claws-mail - 49 MB compared to thunderbird's 307 MB.

But Parcellite is light, fast, and simple, just a nice list of copies, I don't need all the extra functionality. Plus it's ten times smaller than copyq and doesn't drag in a mountain of QT depends like copyq does. Simple gtk2.

At what point would I need a "clipboard manager"?

When you  want to access previous items that have been in the clipboard using a history function to not be limited to the last entry in the paste buffer or as some of them offer it have preexisting entries that will paste when wanted as they are selected for use. I will add my vote for CopyQ a lovely program that works without problems for me for many years now.

copy-on-mark and paste-on-middle-mouse-button just works.

CopyQ might be useful, although its manual (man copyq) seems misleading
_https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ/issues/225#issuecomment-1925401588

$ cat ~/.config/autostart/copyq-autostart.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/bin/copyq --start-server
Hidden=false
Name[en_US]=CopyQ autostart
Name=CopyQ
Comment[en_US]=Advanced clipboard manager
Comment=Advanced clipboard manager
# Workaround / fix for issue #1526 that prevents a proper autostart of the tray icon in GNOME
X-MATE-Autostart-Delay=3

cat /usr/share/applications/com.github.hluk.copyq.desktop | grep Desktop -A15

EDIT:

Workaround for MATE Desktop: Start CopyQ in the tray 

Create a new Desktop launcher for CopyQ with a text editor (nano or mousepad):

nano ~/.local/share/applications/copyq.desktop

mousepad ~/.local/share/applications/copyq.desktop

$ cat ~/.local/share/applications/copyq.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=CopyQ
# Start CopyQ in the tray  / Workaround for MATE Desktop
Exec=bash -c 'copyq && copyq exit && copyq --start-server' 2>/dev/null
# Exec=copyq --start-server show
Icon=copyq
GenericName=Clipboard Manager
# Workaround / fix for issue #1526 that prevents a proper autostart of the tray icon in GNOME
X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=3
# The rest is taken from Klipper application.
Type=Application
Terminal=false
X-KDE-autostart-after=panel
X-KDE-StartupNotify=false
X-KDE-UniqueApplet=true
Categories=Qt;KDE;Utility;
Comment=A cut & paste history utility
Name[en_US]=CopyQ-fixed 

@EDX-0 : nsxiv is my current image viewer. Neofetch was my old tool, screenfetch seems smaller and faster but it's played out with the thickness of a line, both are very good.
You made me discover copyq ! thanks a lot, a great tool ! Thank you for sharing.

One of my friends send me a link, a great job made by Mayfrost : https://github.com/mayfrost/guides/blob … NATIVES.md
The web page is very old and deserves to be refreshed but it is exactly what I wanted to know. I would like to do same page with current programs

for a fetch program i use neofetch which i've been tempted to take maintenance of for a while but have not (i mean i've been maintaining a fork of pywal since 2021)

for screenshotting i like flameshot since it already packs everything i need to do the light editing of screenshots, but is not like i could not use maim with imagemagick like i was doing before.

for clipboard manager i have found nothing better than copyq, it just works, supports images and has vi-like bindings by default

for window management i personally like awesome tho i'm not the biggest fan of lua tho i did re-write my neovim config in lua a while ago...

for file management i use both thunar and vifm, most stuff i do in vifm but having thunar as the default is my preference for when the browser opens a file dir

i use webmail but lately i've been thinking of installing thunderbird, used neomutt for a while but it wasn't doing it for me tho, even using luke smith's muttwizard script to set up neomutt it didn't feel "complete" enough so i went back to using webmail