I am and all my life have been a Linux user, I have nothing against Windows or MacOS, I just like Linux, and lately I have been experimenting with Windows in a virtual machine and I don’t really know much open source software there apart from the one that is cross-platform like Firefox or Joplin.
At the moment I know:
Flow Launcher: It’s a typical rofi style launcher, although I’m not a TWM user I like to just press super and type the first letters of the program I’m looking for to open it.
Lively Wallpaper: A program to have animated wallpapers, in the style of Wallpaper Engine.
Edit: I want to clarify that I read all the comments, I only respond to some because many times I have nothing to contribute to many of them because I don’t know what to comment. Thanks to all of you for providing your lists of programs, I will be sure to try as many as I can because they are great, at least I know what to install if I use Windows one day!
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GIMP (Image editor)
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putty (Secure shell/terminal emulator)
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WinSCP (Secure FTP client)
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QBittorrent (guess.)
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7zip (All in one compressed archive manager)
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Firefox
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Notepad++ (text editor with syntax highlights)
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Handbrake (Video transcoder)
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VLC (all in one video player)
These are my top must have installed. There are others but they’re situational
Let’s not forget the various console emulators that are open source as well. All the good ones are.
I use Kitty instead of Putty recently, though I don’t know if the difference is worth it.
I just use Powershell, much easier imo
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- Firefox: best web browser out there
- Bitwarden: password manager
- ShareX: screenshot utility. Greenshot is also good, but I prefer ShareX
- WinDirStat: disk usage utility
- KDE Connect: connect Android phone to PC
- Image Glass: image viewer
- OBS: video & audio capture
- Blender: 3D modeling, animation, video editing
- Handbrake: video conversion
- VLC: video/audio playback
- Audacity: audio editing
- SpeedCrunch: calculator
- Notepad++: text editor
- Spyder (via Anaconda): Python IDE
If you liked windirstat i warmly recommend wiztree ( not sure if open source tho).it’s the same but faster. like FASTER faster
On most of my fresh installs, i usually install Tinywall, 7zip, and then a different browser like Firefox and chromium based browsers (like mull/brave)
This isn’t a FOSS apps list but a Free (as free beer) software list for Windows with a bunch of cool FOSS apps https://alternativeto.net/list/29653/my-windows-setup/
BloatyNosy
Universal Debloater and PC Manager for the most up-to-date version of the Redmond OS (Windows 11)
https://github.com/builtbybel/BloatyNosy
sleek
an open-source (FOSS) todo manager based on the todo.txt syntax
https://github.com/ransome1/sleek
WinDirStat
a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows
https://github.com/windirstat/windirstat
MacType
Better font rendering for Windows
I have to say it, Rufus.
Ventoy is the easier answer these days IMO. Just drop ISOs on your Ventoy’d usb key and choose them from a menu at boot time.
Ventoy is easy, but not perfect. I tried multum of unique images and it struggled hard. From openwrt to freedos to reboot of Hiren’s boot cd, it just couldn’t load them correctly.
Not to be argumentative, but in case you’re interested:
According to the ventoy site it supports those images, though openwrt requires a plugin and freedos seems to require using memdisk mode, though I’m less clear on the limitations there.
Oh, I didn’t know that, but still, I don’t expect to be truly universal. But as long as you are dealing with ISOs of LX server/desktop or WIN, it’s an amazing tool.
For sure. Nothing will ever be as reliable as writing the image to usb/cd/floppy.
Well, there is an option of using multiple partitions and setting up grub
Qclip
Bulk crap uninstaller
Vlc
Irfanview (is it proprietary?)
Gimp, Krita, Inkscape, KDEnLive, Blender, OBS
Nonfree: XNViewMP, Startisback++,
Irfanview is proprietary yes
Damn, it blew my mind that both Irfanview and XNView are proprietary, so there seems to be no actually maintained FOSS image viewer and light editor especially for Linux. Gwenview is a mediocre alternative but really smooth, maybe it should get all the features and replace these programs.
@Pantherina @db0 i was going to say https://www.darktable.org/about/ but i think this thread is about Windoze programs. Upppsss, sorry.
Darktable doesnt run on Winbloats? Also its a raw editing tool right?
This might be of more help…
https://www.darktable.org/about/features/
or
https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/4.0/en/darktable_user_manual.pdf
Nice links, thanks! But Darktable is for raw. Maybe thats some crazy lossless rabbithole I have to go in, but I was talking about plain old JPEG editing, conversion, color adaption, quick cutting etc.
Tried Darktable and that other one and both were very unintuitive.
Plus, XNView also works as an Image viewer. XNConvert is also great for batch processing.
Greenshot (GPLv3) is a powerful screenshot tool with its own basic image editor.
I used greenshot for a time but in the end ShareX won out for me.
Some of these are cross platform but:
7zip
Autohotkey
Bitwarden
Calibre
Handbrake
Speedcrunch
WinHTTrack
WinSCP
I prefer nanazip to 7zip because it’s just forked 7zip that’s been updated for modern windows. They’re working on a dark mode too.
PowerToys: productivity utilities like window pinning, window management, accented character typing assistant, color picker, text extractor, etc.
You forgot the best thing. Window management, aka Fanzy Zones. You can set areas to your monitor and snap windows to those instead of just left / right side of monitor. Completely customizable.
