qView For Linux

qView is not the type of image viewer I would recommend to someone like a professional photographer or someone who deals with tons of image edits on a daily basis.

To everyone else, though, I would say - just give it a chance. Sure, almost all OSes already provide a default image viewer and for the most part, they're decent at what they do.

qView is an image viewer that wasn't designed to revolutionize the whole scene or reinvent the wheel. Its main purpose is to provide users with a no-frills image viewer and to maximize screen space ("pure space efficiency" to quote the app's website).

You know, the type that might appeal to minimalists since it has no toolbars, and no other GUI elements that could distract from the thing that's most important for an image viewer - viewing images.

There are lots of image viewers out there that claim to be minimalist and some even claim to be lightweight, but that's not always the case. Simple or minimalist doesn't always translate to being lightweight.

qView is special in this regard since it's remarkably lightweight (I mean, how many apps that are under 1 MB do we even see nowadays?). Not only that, but it's really fast, and I mean it. I think it's because it uses something called multi-thread preloading, and I have to say, it works really great. All this while having next to no memory and CPU footprint.

Right-click anywhere on the app's GUI, and you see a basic contextual menu. What's surprising is the sheer number of options qView has (all hidden away from the GUI).

For example, from the Settings section, you can choose between various types of title bar text, change the background color, configure the default launch dimensions for the app's GUI, as well as tweak things such as bilinear filtering, image scaling, adjust the slideshow slider, and even configure keyboard shortcuts.

Last but not least, it supports all the common image formats (BMP, GIF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and Webp).

There's no getting around the fact that qView is a very good image viewer, probably one of the best of this sort. What's really great is that it's also free, open-source, and cross-platform. The fact that it works so great on Linux (and since I tested it in a VM, it says a lot about the app's swiftness, trust me) is nothing short of impressive.

It's also a good exercise in minimalism. I like the "it's just for viewing" approach, but I like even more that the developers did provide enough configuration options to keep almost everyone happy.