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!
Alternative to lively, screen play
My list:
- winget
- CopyQ
- InageGlass
- ShareX
- BitWarden
For package management I’ve been really liking scoop.sh
Not everything in there is FOSS but scoop itself is! And you can install neovim, vscodium, bitwarden, Firefox, etc very easily.
How does it compare to chocolatey? Thanks.
it doesn’t trigger UAC because the installation directory is different
Some items trigger UAC (installing tailscale, for example)
I love that everying lives in ~/scoop. It’s well organized and somewhat portable (until you import the nonportable bucket)
It definitely looks like the first program that should be installed when doing a clean install of Windows!
I recently found out about winget, how is winget different from scoop? Apart from of course, the number of packages and that anyone can contribute to it.
I felt like winget was too limited. When I last used it it didn’t support installing multiple apps at the same time. scoop feels much more like traditional *nix package management to me, which I like.
Winget is from Microsoft for one (and already installed with Windows). It basically just downloads the regular windows installer and installs it like usual without the need to click user feedback prompts. Scoop is more of a package manager.
With winget, one nice thing is you can even update packages not installed with winget originally. You can see which apps on your computer have updates available with a single command.
It’s great when you’re updating someone else’s computer they haven’t updated random things in years (typical windows users).
Scoop essentially uses portable apps and everything is in your scoop folder which is great.
I use both. Scoop first and winget for everything else. I use winget to update Libreoffice on all our work computers (because the devs won’t work on auto updates).
One great thing about scoop is that downgrading an app is very easy. You can also manage multiple versions of a runtime, for example, you can install multiple Node.js versions and switch between them with
scoop resetcommand.
Oof, just actually installed AltDrag, I can’t live without being able to grab my windows with the super key from anywhere (although in this case the alt).
Thanks for letting me know that there is a fork still maintained.
You can also change it to use the super key, (which I did too).
WinMerge, the best diffing tool out there.
- 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
KCEKDE Connect?yep, thanks!
Playnite for launching games
It will open up anything. Battlenet games, steam games, emulated games… you name it. Supports themes too!
www.playnite.link
BC uninstaller
Too god to be real
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)
I prefer simplewall over tinywall. I can’t remember what I didn’t like about tinywall though.
I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why the built-in firewall is undesirable. It isn’t that I can’t speculate on some possible reasons, I just didn’t realize there were so many 3rd party alternatives.
I think they both use the built in firewall, they just have a sane interface over it. And notifications
winget
I have to say it, Rufus.
To install linux
Came here to say this exactly!
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
puTTY, my favourite terminal program for windows.
I’ve been enjoying wezterm as a terminal emulator replacement for windows terminal. It offers nerdy fine grained customizability and an emoji/nerd font character picker. For most purposes WT seems to be fine though.
-
GIMP (Image editor)
-
putty (Secure shell/terminal emulator)
-
WinSCP (Secure FTP client)
-
QBittorrent (guess.)
-
7zip (All in one compressed archive manager)
-
Firefox
-
Notepad++ (text editor with syntax highlights)
-
Handbrake (Video transcoder)
-
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.
That’s a good list!
I use the same, except I use LibreWolf (privacy focused fork of FF) and VS Code instead of Firefox and Notepad++
Yeah VS Code definitely if ya doing programming. I’m just editing config/ini files once in a while so N++ is just right for me.
Vs code
I would actually recommend VSCodium; it’s the same product but without the Microsoft telemetry.
Does it lose any MS connected features? Other than surveillance.
VSCodium can’t use the official Microsoft extension marketplace, but there is an alternative. You can also install extensions manually.
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
-
