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!
BloatyNosy
Universal Debloater and PC Manager for the most up-to-date version of the Redmond OS (Windows 11)
https://github.com/builtbybel/BloatyNosy
sleek
an open-source (FOSS) todo manager based on the todo.txt syntax
https://github.com/ransome1/sleek
WinDirStat
a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows
https://github.com/windirstat/windirstat
MacType
Better font rendering for Windows
In my experience, windirstat is inferior to other similar software. It’s mostly fine but it can be very, very slow to get you results. Though honestly I don’t know if the alternatives like space sniffer or Wiztree are open source.
Yeah, the documentation is very sparse. I think it was originally all in Simplified Chinese, but some things have been translated to English. Basically it gives you tools to fix subpixel font rendering issues on windows. Using a rotated monitor? An OLED monitor? A TV? All of these are examples of screens that don’t have standard subpixel layouts, so fonts tend to have weird color fringing as a result. MacType allows for a lot of tweaks to how fonts are rendered, but I tend to just switch to grayscale rendering, which works well.
This reddit thread walks through the process with some specific configs and they have pictures to show how it changes things.
🪟Windows only:
QuickLook
clavier-plus
Cryptsync
Notepad3
shareX
PhotoDemon
eartrumpet
ImageGlass
MSEdge Redirect
🪟+:tux: Also on Linux:
Copyq
SMPlayer
Strawberry
Privatezilla: Harden your Windows privacy and security
FreeFileSync a FOSS backup and folder synchronizer, a must have.
FreeFileSync is a folder comparison and synchronization software that creates and manages backup copies of all your important files. Instead of copying every file every time, FreeFileSync determines the differences between a source and a target folder and transfers only the minimum amount of data needed. FreeFileSync is Open Source software, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Yes, Syncthing needs 2 diferents devices to sync, FreeFileSync syncronize whatever you want within 1 device, for example between 2 Disks or from a network disk to your computer disk.
Syncthing works great if there are 2 devices turned on and connected to a LAN or Internet, and FreeFileSync is totally disconected from the internet and only needs 1 device on (the one that execute it)
I use both, Syncthing to autosync all my devices and FreeFileSync to backup all those files to various disconected hard drives
Disclaimer, haven’t used Windows in years, but back in the day when I did, I swore by cygwin to give me a sane environment to interact in. That and Firefox + GIMP + Libreoffice usually gave me a pretty happy day to day interaction.
Nowadays I would swap out cygwin for WSL; the latter gives you a full Linux environment.
Git Bash also works quite well without WSL (but I think it just uses Cygwin under the hood)
