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?
“Everything” - find any file on your machine instantly. No need to update an index, it uses the NTFS master file table directly.
It is my pet peeve that instead of using the MFT, they gave us the bloody abomination they call windows search.
I mean, make it a hidden tool like regedit, for all I care. It’s really not that hard.
Microsoft made NTFS, but not even Windows uses it properly. For example, the : character is perfectly valid in NTFS file names, but not in Windows. If you mount an NTFS volume in Linux without specifying the windows_names option, you can very easily make it unusable in Windows. It’s a sick joke, but nobody’s laughing.
Wizfile as an alternative to this which I prefer
Also Wiztree from the same devs as a WinDirStat alternative
Note that there’s a severe vulnerability that was only patched very recently in 7zip. I’ve seen recommendations to fully uninstall it and then reinstall the latest version.
Report: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-11612
7-zip doesn’t have an integrated installer so yes you have to uninstall the old version and install the new one.
Paint.NET has filled a “I need an image editor with some packed in features that isn’t as complicated as Photoshop for some quick work” niche for me for years. From simple crops and edits to some layer-and-effects work.
I did not know Aseprite was free if you compile it but they deserve the money anyway.
Pixelorama is completely free and is a pretty good alternative to Aseprite
KeePassXC, or any kind of KeePass-compatible client. It uses strong encryption to store passwords, passkeys, and arbitrary data. Also does TOTP. Not using a password manager in current year is stupid.
QOwnNotes - a note-taking app that uses plain markdown files. None of that stupid metadata-inside-markdown-inside-database bullshit.
I can confirm both these. Although Qownnotes is a bit of mess in UI, it does its job well. I wanted something simple that will just load bunch of locally saved md files and this is the best I could find so far.
If you want a similar markdown editor, Obsidian does much the same, but with a much nicer single-panel UI. The client is free (as in no-cost), but closed-source.
I’m kind of hesitant with it since it’s not FOSS. To be honest I never really understood why anyone makes free (no $$) software but not open source it. I might give it a try though.
If you want something efficient and free of bullshit you probably first need to change your OS to a GNU/Linux distro
“Free, efficient, no bullshit” is kind of the default for Linux software.
not unless you count UX as partof the “efficiency”. A lot of oss software has top-notch functionality, but horrible ux
Yeah that front still needs improvement, but I will say things have gotten a lot better, especially in the past 5 years. Regardless of personal opinion on their approaches, projects like GNOME, Inkscape, GIMP, KDE (sort of, the settings app is still confusing as hell), even Blender’s recent UI updates have been pretty solid. There’s still a lot of room to improve though, and plenty of older software still hasn’t seen much of its UX addressed.
I don’t think this is generally true at a higher rate than for any other software. Multi-billion dollar companies will have more polished UX, but step outside of the major flagship apps and things quickly degrade. Even the best in the business have plenty of problems, you can’t design a perfect UX that will please all users.
VLC. If it can’t play it, nothing can.
If vlc fails , ffplay via way of ffmpeg should, if THAT fails, you are going to have a tough time
