Notepad++ - This piece of software is a very advanced form of Notepad. Fuck that basic Notepad shit that Windows or any other OS gives you. This one is all you’ll ever need for basic note-taking needs. But it does a hell of a lot more. One thing I love about it is that, if for any reason I put my PC to sleep, it crashes, power outage, I can run this again and everything I’ve ever written and no matter how many tabs - it’s all retained.
AIMP - The definitive media player that you’ll ever need for just playing stuff (music only, sorry if I mislead those thinking it can do video). Winamp and all the other software are just around for nostalgia (though Winamp has it’s uses where you need it to play specific formats like video game music such as SNES with .SPC). One feature that attracted me to it was, it used to infuriate me when I am playing something and something crashes in any other media player. And you boot up that media player and you have to play your playlist all over again or that song from the beginning.
Not AIMP, if I accidentally close it, crash or whatever, I can bring it back up and it’ll have the song or whatever on Pause so I can resume. Why isn’t shit like this more implemented in software?
For keeping track of investments I recommend: Portfolio Performance
https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/
Takes maybe 10min to learn the basics in the beginning, but it’s worth it. Nice robust open source software which does its job flawless.
If you’re looking for a temporary email service for anonymous online registration, tempmail.so is a decent choice. https://www.tempmail.so/
Greenshot
Irfanview
Audacity
OBS
Lab Chirp: simple but powerful sound effects generator
Stickies (zhorn software): Networkable sticky notes
Agent Ransack: File content search
Audacity
You may want to switch to Tenacity. Audacity was purchased by a company in 2021 that super promises not to try to sneak telemetry into the program. Again. For the third time.
Tenacity is a fork of Audacity without any of that nonsense.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t updated my Audacity version since 2012 😅 but I’ll remember this thank you
Notepad++ is also great for searching text strings in many documents and collating the results in a single window.
Fan Control.
Free as in beer but definitely not free as in speech.
It’s a niche thing, but if you play electric guitar and need a virtual amplifier and effects, you’ll like Guitarix very much. Just thinking that is a community project blows me away every time
Notepad ++ is invaluable for writing code, I’ve used it for a long while now.
Also great is paint dot net which is a super advanced paint application that is borderline as good as photo shop, particularly when you add on all the community-created functionality.
Revo uninstaller is the first thing I put on a new machine before I delete all the bloatware that comes with a fresh install of windows. You would be surprised what is left over when you only use the built in ‘remove a program’ process.
Lastly, browser based but free and excellent, is sketch up, which is an architectural rendering application great for designing restaurants and retail spaces. A little bit of a learning curve but very smooth and functional once you get the hang of it.
Edit - VLC goes without saying right?
Notepad ++ is invaluable for writing code, I’ve used it for a long while now.
Not to pick an argument, but as a dev VSCodium has been a significantly better experience. It’s a good text editor, it’s got good search functionality, can be used as an IDE, and has good support through extensions.
And more of a shallow reason, it’s got much better dark mode support.
Bitwarden, Kdenlive, Firefox, OBS, Steam.
Steam
Freewhat?
Do you pay for steam?
Yes, about 30% of the purchase price of every game.
Lots of free games on there. Valve themselves just recently gave away half life 2 for free.
I can tell Dr steve doesn’t game!
Buying games through steam is optional. Steam itself is the game manager. I run many of my non steam games through it and don’t pay a dime for it. Alternatively I can buy steam games through 3rd party stores. The steam client on your machine is free.
They just get statistical data instead, then. I know some folks don’t care about companies knowing your activity and other telemetry data, but I’d probably still count that within the “bullshit around” exclusion criteria that OP defined.
To be fair, you can just refuse to take part in that. They’ll keep asking, every now and then, and you can keep saying no.
Not the optional hardware survey, but they automatically collect other data just through usage of Steam and applications run through Steam.
Bitwarden
It’s a FOSS password manager that you can self host, or use their cloud infrastructure. Their free plan is more than enough for basic users, and their paid personal plan is less than $1 a month and is packed with features.
Runs in your browser, Android, iOS, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and has native desktop apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Super easy to set up and use, no BS, works damn near perfectly. I’ve been using it for years and I love it, it’s the only password manager I recommend to folks now days.
Bitwarden’s recent licence “oopsie” has shaken folks trust in them a bit. Not that it’s not a good software currently, but now we know what may happen at a moment’s notice.
Well !foss@beehaw.org and !linux@programming.dev for more, but off the top of my head:
Linux, VLC, FFMPEG, HandBrake, KDE (everything KDE), qBittorrent, Momentum (Flipper0 firmware), CHIRP, Vim, and more!
You’re so right about KDE, I didn’t realize just how much great stuff KDE makes until I was looking for a markdown editor this week at work, and KDE ghostwriter nails everything I ever wanted. Cross platform too so I can use it on my personal Linux machine too
Had to scroll THIS far to see FFMPEG? Shame, shame.
Ah yes, gotta download “Linux” for myself.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
Why are you interjecting to me?
It’s a copypasta
Sure, but why are they pasting it to me?
If you must know, it’s because I listed “Linux” rather than listing every distro by name, and your comment “oh I’ll just download linux” as if you can’t download a linux distro which is foss and based on the foss linux kernel seemed just as pedantic to me as the copypasta, and so my immediate reaction, which I’d argue was natural and hilarious, was “haha copypasta time.”
But why male models?
How do you know they don’t refer to Alpine Linux?
“agent ransack” for file searching in windows
“Everything” for searching
WinDirStat, Notepad++, Greenshot and Filelocator pro lite (aka agent ransack) are my default programs to install on windows machines.
Check out WizTree, it does the same thing as WinDirStat but is leagues faster. Like not just “this is faster”, like “holy shit that was fast”
Also WizTree sounds like you are whizzing on a tree. Or maybe your some kind of tree wizard. Either way it’s great.
I second WizTree, it takes <10s to scan an entire drive and the visualization is neat
EMACS:- No I’m not kidding, Yes it has a learning curve but the real fun is AFTER you figure it out & find out that it can do more than just edit texts
- You can play music
- You can turn it into an Email client
- Browse the internet
- A fully-fledged IDE
- There’s Tetris in it
- Even have it function like Obsidian
- Have Vim-keybindings (For VIM-users)
Emacs is a part time job!
As a vim user, I’m always super envious of emac’s orgmode.
As a vim user who recently started with Emacs, if you ever want to try it, use evil-mode to get vim motions.
EMACS is a great OS, all it lacks is a decent text editor.
If I had a nickel for everytime someone said that I’d be a billionaire
Funniest is when a vim user says that, since emacs includes a vim.
I tried Emacs once a long time ago, and recoiled from the weird key combos. Especially how you have to first enter one combo and then a second one for what you actually want to do.
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it feeling pretty clunky.Yeah I definitely prefer vim bindings over emacs. Though as other commenters have mentioned, it’s totally possible to use vim bindings with emacs. I’ve never tried it but if the other features attract you it might be with trying.
Why would you want any of that in a text editor…?
Because it all connects together, and you can program them jointly to help solve tasks.
Having email and version control inside emacs makes it easy to set up an email based patch system.
Of course this system will then benefit from the existing code highlighting, introspection, and an integrated debugger.
Integrating it with your time planner means you can automatically add commits to your journal as a way of tracking what you’ve been working on.
The old joke always was emacs is a great operating system, it just needs a good text editor.
The real downside for me is everything is just a little bit janky. It all almost works perfectly and the code is right there to fix it, if you can be bothered. Generally I can’t.
Well it’s not really a text-editor, it’s a productivity environment (That is poor advertisement on GNU’s part)
& these are all extensions, the real question is Why WOULDN’T you want it in a text-editor ?
Maybe better to recommend Doom Emacs, if no BS is a requirement. It takes time to make friends with vanilla Emacs.
TestDisk and PhotoRec. TestDisk can recover broken drive partitions, PhotoRec can recover deleted files even if the partition table is borked.
Micro-team checking in!
Terminal based text editors are garbage in the eyes of most people
Notepad++ is the simplicity of notepad with a few extra features to make it exactly what most people neef
