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?

  • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
    66·
    17 days ago

    “Everything” - find any file on your machine instantly. No need to update an index, it uses the NTFS master file table directly.

    • Joe Dyrt@lemmy.ml
      6·
      17 days ago

      This my top-used non-windows-component bestest utility for finding info on my pc. It’s da bomb!

    • shrodes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      16 days ago

      Wizfile as an alternative to this which I prefer

      Also Wiztree from the same devs as a WinDirStat alternative

      • wild@lemmy.world
        1·
        15 days ago

        Love them. Though, WizFile occasionally starts eating up a lot of CPU on my machine until I force close it.

    • FelixMortane@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      17 days ago

      I find it almost criminal the amount of people who do not know about this. Absolute life saver for work.

    • GreenAppleTree@lemmy.world
      23·
      17 days ago

      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.

      • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        17 days ago

        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.

        • Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          10·
          17 days ago

          Hey, to be fair, ‘/’ and the null character are the only illegal character for file names on Linux (which is a blessing AND a curse)

  • pH3ra@lemmy.ml
    5·
    16 days ago

    It’s a niche thing, but if you play electric guitar and need a virtual amplifier and effects, you’ll like Guitarix very much. Just thinking that is a community project blows me away every time

  • flowque@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    16 days ago

    VeraCrypt – creating encrypted partitions/disks with easy manager. I am surprised I did not see anybody to mention it.

          • DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz
            111·
            16 days ago

            Buying games through steam is optional. Steam itself is the game manager. I run many of my non steam games through it and don’t pay a dime for it. Alternatively I can buy steam games through 3rd party stores. The steam client on your machine is free.

            • Stovetop@lemmy.world
              3·
              16 days ago

              They just get statistical data instead, then. I know some folks don’t care about companies knowing your activity and other telemetry data, but I’d probably still count that within the “bullshit around” exclusion criteria that OP defined.

              • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                11·
                16 days ago

                To be fair, you can just refuse to take part in that. They’ll keep asking, every now and then, and you can keep saying no.

                • Stovetop@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  16 days ago

                  Not the optional hardware survey, but they automatically collect other data just through usage of Steam and applications run through Steam.

  • sith@lemmy.zipEnglish
    11·
    16 days ago

    Micro or NeoVim if you’re a minimalist. Emacs or VS Code otherwise (a little bit of BS maybe). And Windows terminal plus WSL if you’re on Windows.

    Interesting that people still use Notepad++. Haven’t touched it in 15+ years.

    And Python of course.

  • geoma@lemmy.ml
    555·
    17 days ago

    If you want something efficient and free of bullshit you probably first need to change your OS to a GNU/Linux distro

    • everett@lemmy.ml
      273·
      17 days ago

      “Free, efficient, no bullshit” is kind of the default for Linux software.

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        17 days ago

        I did consider posting a screenshot of just all the applications on my PC… 🙃

        But yeah, not much OP can do with hundreds of recommendations that don’t work on their OS.

      • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
        213·
        17 days ago

        not unless you count UX as partof the “efficiency”. A lot of oss software has top-notch functionality, but horrible ux

        • verdigris@lemmy.ml
          31·
          16 days ago

          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.

        • kellenoffdagrid❓️@lemmy.sdf.org
          7·
          17 days ago

          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.

  • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.netEnglish
    15·
    16 days ago

    Wireguard, I find it both simpler and easier to use than OpenVPN.

    dd. No other iso writing utility has worked as consistently, even if my usb devices would gain weird glitches after using it.

    Believe it or not I am a person who goes out of their way to avoid using the terminal, so this is very much vouching for the software itself rather than the ux it’s based on.

  • I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    17 days ago

    Ddrescue

    Hard to beat for working with dying drives, although it’s a bit tricky to get it to just do used data areas instead of the whole drive.