Here are my five stages of rice image viewer:
1. Normie
These newbies have just installed Linux and use the default image viewer that comes with the DE. Since it already there, why not use it, right?
2. Beginner
After installing Arch Linux (or Manjaro and pretending to use pure Arch) and setting up WM. The average r/unixporn enjoyer decided to install SXIV after hearing that it was better than FEH from a Youtube video. But soon they realized that to configure SXIV, they had to edit the source code, and compile it themselves. Some continues to use it and adopts the Suckless philosophy, others noticed the Suck**** inside of it and go on their journey to find a faster, lighter and easier to configure image viewer.
3. Minimalist
MPV is a media player that is as powerful as VLC but extremely lightweight/minimal. It's also secretly a good image viewer, use MPV Image Viewer to turn MPV into a perfect image viewer.
Of course if you only use MPV as then it's pretty bloat, but if you already used it as a media player then it's definitely lighter than having a dedicated image viewer (also who have an image viewer but not have a media player, right?). You can think of an image as a video, but it has no sound and only have one frame, so use the media player to view image still satisfies the UNIX philosophy "Programs that do one thing and do it well".
4. Extreme Minimalist
You can drag and drop media files into your web browser and it will play it. Realizing this, they quickly uninstall MPV and follow the path of suffering, path of extreme minimalism. There are a few formats it doesn't accept but it still be an acceptable solution... Or not, Using the browser can only view images in a very basic way, its experience is quite annoying. "Have I gone too far?", "Is this too minimalistic?" they thought.
5. Lazy
After rice Linux - minimalist style for a while, they start to get tired and have a different view of minimalism. They realize that using DE is very minimal in terms of time and effort. To be honest, DE is not that bloat, It has some features that although we don't always use, but having it is still very convenient in some situation. And if I don't install or configure anything but just use the default stuff from the DE, the dotfiles will be a lot more minimal!
And so they decided to go back to installing DE and use the default image viewer that comes with the DE. Since it already there, why not use it, right?
📢 Honorable Mention
Image Glass: It's only run on Windows but it's is the best image viewer for Windows, it's well design with enough feature to even do some light modification but not too bloat.