Ecosyste.ms: Awesome
An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.
awesome-windows-opinionated
An awesome & opinionated list of best applications and tools for Windows
https://github.com/jzelinskie/awesome-windows-opinionated
- ASIO4ALL - Likely, you _really_ don't need this, but if you want an ASIO driver, this is the one.
- EAC - This is how you should rip music if you still own any physical music.
- EqualizerAPO - This is a system-wide EQ tool. There are other projects that provide better GUIs for it, but this is the core EQ that they all share.
- Foobar2000 - This is the only native music player you should be using. Various plugins available for things like transcoding, tagging, replay gain, improving the UI, scrobbling, etc...
- IRCCloud - This is a paid service that's like an IRC bouncer on steroids. This client is just an electron app, but it's my preference for IRC.
- Riot.im - This is my preference for Matrix. You can use it to connect to IRC, but I find the gateways too laggy.
- Visual Studio Code - Text Editor. This isn't 2005 anymore: forget Notepad++.
- WSL - Linux in Windows. Install your distro of choice and here's the rest of your dev tools. Why bother with native Windows dev tools?
- Windows Terminal - Official Microsoft Terminal Emulator. I would recommend ConEmu, but I'm going to lean first-party when that solution is good enough.
- Calibre - Slow af, but the best converter for ebook formats if you're trying to load something onto a Kindle or Remarkable.
- LibreOffice - The open source office suite. But do you really need one? Google Drive or Office 365 is crossplatform, cloud hosted, and real-time collaborative.
- Sumatra PDF - Lightning fast PDF reader. But do you really need one? Your browser also opens PDFs.
- NextDNS - Secure DNS with configurable adblocking. An alternative to [PiHole](https://pi-hole.net) if you want someone else to host it for you.
- Viscosity - Best all around OpenVPN client. I actually recommending using the client your provider recommends, because they often implement additional security features that are outside the OpenVPN standard.
- AIDA64 - The best stress-testing tool.
- CrystalDiskInfo - Check the healthiness of installed storage devices. Has alternative versions that change no behavior but adds pictures of anime girls to the UI.
- HWiNFO64 - Inspects the installed hardware and sensors (voltages, temperature) of the current system. This is basically CPU-Z, GPU-Z, Speccy, and HWMonitor rolled into one.
- MSI Afterburner - Create profiles that alter fan curves, voltages, clock speeds, etc... for your GPU. This does not require an MSI GPU.
- 1password - Password Manager
- 7-Zip - Supports every major compression and archive format. No reason to use anything else or any additional software.
- DisplayFusion - Various utilites for managing multiple displays. I normally use it to set up wallpapers and mostly disable the service, but the other utilities can be very useful.
- EarTrumpet - Windows Volume Mixer replacement. I have no idea why the native Windows mixer doesn't look/function exactly like this.
- PowerToys - Various power user utilities written by Microsoft that should just be built into Windows. Alpha quality.
- ShareX - Windows Snipping Tool on steroids. What if pressing Printscreen uploaded to imgur and put the direct link in your clipboard?
- WizTree - Visualize what's eating space on your harddrive. This uses metadata in the NTFS filesystem so that it can run orders of magnitude faster than the other tools. I have no idea why Microsoft doesn't use this strategy everywhere and abandon full-text indexing so that they can save thousands of cpu/disk hours, especially on laptops.
- Davinci Resolve - If you aren't already dedicated to a paid video editor, this by far the best free one and is entirely GPU accelerated so the previews are very performant.
- Handbrake - Video transcoder. This is mostly useful for the default profiles that are web-optimized.
- MPC-HC - The highest quality video player on any OS. The upstream project died, but one of the authors still maintains it. Some users have moved on to a completely different project, [mpv](https://mpv.io), but the GUIs for that suck.
- madVR - This is a DirectShow video renderer that is the only external filter you need for MPC-HC.
- OBS - Swiss army knife for streaming or recording video.
- VLC - Backup video player that supports the most features. For example, you can set the Renderer to cast videos directly to your Chromecast.
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