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)!
Well Android is Linux based… so maybe this is a similar universe.
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.
deleted by creator
- 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
KCEKDE Connect?yep, thanks!
If you liked windirstat i warmly recommend wiztree ( not sure if open source tho).it’s the same but faster. like FASTER faster
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):
-
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.
-
Krita - GIMP alternative with non-destructive editing capabilities.
-
yt-dlp - download videos from almost any video sharing service, even TikTok, Instagram etc.
-
neovim - for quick file edits
-
vscode/vscodium with vim plugin - my IDE for everything
-
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.
-
kdenlive - an actual video editor that is 100% FOSS, doesn’t suck and works on Windows and Linux.
-
imagemagick - ffmpeg for images
why not use neovim as your ide instead?
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.
Lite xl is also a nice IDE and very lite
It recently stopped working for me (windows key search) and it’s super debilitating once you got used to it.
-
-
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++
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.
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.
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
-
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.
Good to know!
Seconding AHK, Bitwarden, and Calibre
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.
Seconding this. It has every feature you know Windows needs but it still doesn’t have (likely because of the need for testing or being aimed at power users).
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
To install linux
Came here to say this exactly!
BalenaEtcher or Rufus for writing ISOs to usb.
Or ventoy ? More useful, and so much faster than rufus.
dd works very well if it’s a Linux ISO and you’re using the USB solely as a livecd.
It can also byte-clone discs and partitions, including ripping CDs and DVDs.
Don’t know about dd, but I’ll give an eye. https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html Ventoy has a ton of features.
dd is a fairly ancient/standard file copy utility, if you dd an ISO file to a drive, it images that drive.
Ventoy is basically a clever use of GRUB, which allows booting multiple ISOs from the same USB stick.
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)
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 reset
command.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.
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).
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.
Playnite for launching games
It will open up anything. Battlenet games, steam games, emulated games… you name it. Supports themes too!
www.playnite.link
Mostly same list as for GNU/Linux:
- Kate editor (Notepad++ and VSCodium are good here too)
- KeePassXC or KeePass 2 password manager
- Firefox or firefox derivative
- Unison file synchronizer
- Dolphin or Explorer++ file manager
- VLC for audio/video
- 7zip file (un)archiver
- Chocolatey package manager (would like to try alternatives)
have you tried the builtin “winget” as alternative to chocolatey?
Hearing and finding out Dolphin is available for windows is great. Totally downloading it to replace file explorer as we speak.
I’d recommend scoop!,
Just started trying out Scoop recently and I’m finding it fits my taste more than chocolatey so far. I appreciate the fact that it keeps apps isolated in a standard user directory, doesn’t require admin, and uses plain git repos with json manifests instead of whatever chocolatey uses. In some ways it’s similar to some things guix does, although obviously they are extremely different in concept.
PowerToys
VLC player, 7zip, translucent bar, greenshot, irfanview,
Check out https://github.com/auctors/free-lunch (list of free Windows software)
See also https://www.nirsoft.net/ (freeware, not open source)
See also https://www.nirsoft.net/ (freeware, not open source)
I’d say free(as in beer)ware