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!
Wild, you are like from the alternate universe where Linux is dominant and nerds play around in windows. Are things better where you are from? :P
Of course! In this universe everybody uses linux phones and they are actually usable (and repairable)!
Being around the Steam Deck forums when it initially launched felt otherworldly. A super popular device launched with Linux as a first class citizen, and Windows users were desperate for drivers that improved unstable usability. It was surreal.
- 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
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.
It will never stop to amaze me how many people don’t know it’s a feature in every major DE and every Windows starting from Vista.
Even on Windows 10/11, just tap windows key and start typing without clicking anywhere.
My list of FOSS I use everywhere (these work in Win and Linux):
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Open Tablet Driver - if you’ve got the drawing tablet it probably supports it. You can customize everything and has even built-in plugin manager.
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Krita - GIMP alternative with non-destructive editing capabilities.
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yt-dlp - download videos from almost any video sharing service, even TikTok, Instagram etc.
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neovim - for quick file edits
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vscode/vscodium with vim plugin - my IDE for everything
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ffmpeg - forget handbrake - you can do even basic video editing here. Join two videos together? Done. Add audio to video? Done. Crop part of the video without reencoding it? Done. Loop a video to 10 hours without reencoding it? Done in matters of seconds.
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kdenlive - an actual video editor that is 100% FOSS, doesn’t suck and works on Windows and Linux.
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imagemagick - ffmpeg for images
I used to, but I need to get my job done, not play with configuring it for hours just to achieve what VSCode does out of the box. Plus settings sync is great.
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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.
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++
Vs code
I would actually recommend VSCodium; it’s the same product but without the Microsoft telemetry.
I use Kitty instead of Putty recently, though I don’t know if the difference is worth it.
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.
