Chris Titus Tech’s debloat tool (source code)
NAPS2 (Not Another PDF Scanner) does exactly one thing, scan stuff, and it does it incredibly well. Bypass all the garbage software that came with your scanner, plus it supports batch processing and profiles.
Helps me run my business
Everything. A very small and fast search and indexing program, much better than windows search
ObsidianMD - Note Taking Tool that allows you to connect your notes together.
I wouldn’t call that a Windows tool, it’s more a (cross-platform,)
second brainfeatureful note-taking appYeah it is, OP was talking about Programs that people don’t talk about to often that are useful. But yeah it’s cross-platform.
Took me about 4 fucking seconds of scrolling to find someonr basically shouting “UsE lInUx” (using it myself and find this attitude highly annoying)
Keep to the question and let people use what they want, which leads me to:
Qbittorrent, best torrent client imo
Files app by yair, pretty nice looking file manager with tans and other goodies
For me, there are exactly 0 people talking about Linux except you.
This, people who use Linux will always let you know they use it especially if you didn’t ask
VoidTools’ Everything. Indexes your whole filesystem (across all drives too) and allows you to search your whole filesystem for matching filenames, save search presets for later, and even allowing RegEx search queries if you need files of names matching some pattern.
The 1.5a version even allows content indexing!
content indexing
Do you mean separating video, audio and document file types?
No, I mean you can search for the contents of text files, like PDFs, DOCX, TXT, etc. not only the file names. Sometimes you know what you read but don’t know the name of the file and in this case you can look for what you remember and find your file this way.
Another pro for everything is that you can index remote storage as well, you can’t do that with the windows provided indexing. I use this a lot for work, since I usually do not have the patience to look through the file structure of our server to find something.
A lot of great free and open source software works with windows. Librewolf web browser, kdenlive video editor, Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Freetube is a great YouTube front end. Youtube-dlp is an excellent command line tool for downloading videos and music locally from lots of websites not just youtube For games freedoom, super tux, minetest with the mineclone2 game installed,
Snipping Tool - take custom screenshots of your screen
Windows Shift S. Select an area of your screen which you can then paste. Also, Alt printscreen captures the current window.
WIN+SHIFT+T gives you a crosshair cursor, outline what you want, then you can doodle on it, highlight stuff, etc.
Even better, try Flameshot. Open source, cross platform, and lets you do very useful simple edits, like add arrows, shapes, text, and censoring.
Does this have any screen recording features? Can’t seem to find any on the web page the editing feature is what has me thinking of trying it over shareX but i love screen recording with sharex too
No, it’s just a screenshot program
Have you tried the built-in recorder from the game bar?
I’m a Greenshot user here. Similar ability to edit and customize default actions when hitting print screen. It’s the one thing I miss in Linux
Greenshot
I used to use this on XP 🥲 great to hear it’s still around though!
Why greenshot over flameshot? Flameshot works on Linux
I use a ball mouse and so I can’t adjust the width of the drawing tools easily. Greenshot is a little less slick much easier for me to use.
Wasn’t aware it was available for Linux. I’ll check it out
ShareX is great for this! https://getsharex.com/
The Snipping tool is so useful when I’m trying to explain to someone what’s going on, on one of my screens without taking a large 3 monitor screenshot.
Microsoft PowerToys is a fantastic program if you like to tweak your experience with Windows.
It lets you do things like set up individual zones within your monitor that act like picture in picture or another monitor. It has a robust color picker, which helps greatly when it comes to photoshop and template creation. I also use the text extractor very often to extract text from pictures, which it copies to the clipboard.
The best, and technically the worst, is it lets you change settings that you can’t normally do in Windows.
While it could get someone YOLO adminning in trouble, thankfully it has a lot of warnings before you mess things up too badly.
Those are the features I use, but there are too many useful features to name in one go.
I can’t live without powertoys. Fancyzones is a must. Power rename is also great. I don’t understand why this stuff isn’t just built into windows now though.
Great call! I haven’t used that for almost 20-years it seems like. Back to it!
WUB or Windows Update Blocker.
It’s one of the first things I put on a new after the initial Windows update.
It safely turns and completely turns off Windows updating and the services involved with updates.
It’s practically a necessity if you use a metered or paid internet connection, or connect your laptop to a cell phone for an internet connection via a hotspot.
Windows doesn’t listen to its own settings about metered connections and if it deems something worthy of killing your data plan for the month, it’ll do so without your knowledge.
The best part is that when you’re ready to download critical updates or something from the Windows store (Whatsapp, Minecraft, Power Tools, etc.) then it’s as simple as a button press to reactivate updates without restart.
Does this really work? I have a little windows miniPC that runs some home services. And I hate that it just updates and reboots (or sometimes just ends up shutting down) whenever it’s feels like it. I don’t have the energy at the moment to clear it down and rebuild from scratch with Linux so this update blocker sounds bloody amazing.
I have been using WUB, and some other extremely helpful tools that this company makes, for a few years at this point.
The part that I LOVE about WUB is how complete and exhaustive the shut-off is for the ease of use.
There’s no editing files, no editing anything, just download and press a button to turn on update blocking (while protecting the services that could mess up by blocking). Press another button to unblock everything as good as a fresh install.
It’s as if it was never blocked when updates are toggled on, and it’s as if Windows update is completely removed with the blocking is toggled on.
This sounds awesome my pc’s default to Windows default display drivers whenever Windows update runs so I have to manually unplug my pc from the WiFi run ddu then reinstall my drivers I’ll be sure to use this m8 fanks
PowerToys.
Seconded for PowerToys. it does so many useful things.
If I would have been asked to choose one really useful piece of software on Windows it would be Agent Ransack. I use it to find strings in a bunch of files, even compressed ones. I believe it can do much more but I use it for this purpose on daily basis. There’s a paid version but the light one is free and does all I need. https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/
GIMP for image editing and memes
WizTree is like WinDirStat but a lot faster.
Imma back you up on that one. Used the later for years until I found WizTree.
Notepad++ for any text file that needs to be opened, and VLC for any video file that needs to be opened. Both are great.
