Cool Stuff

dnGrep, in it's simplest form, is grep but for Windows 10. And it also uses a GUI. There's also grepWin and Everything.

Files is an alternative to the Three Commanders, and it's UI resembles the UI of File Explorer, also has some sort of support for it being the default file manager.

Jellyfin is a person media server and client.

ReVanced is an unofficial continuation of YouTube Vanced, has a built-in ad-blocker, sponsor blocker, and much more.

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is an open-source image editor.

AutoHotKey is the most powerful automation and macro scripting language in the world. Unfortunately, only available for Windows 10.

FreshRSS is the RSS reader of choice for many, though, it doesn't have a native client, and needs to be self-hosted, or used with Cloudron.

Funkwhale is a community-driven project to listen to and share media.

foobar2000 is an advanced media player for Windows 10 and macOS + a few others.

Part of the Three Commanders, see Total Commander for Windows 10 or Double Commander for Linux kernel.

Part of the Three Commanders, see Total Commander for Windows 10 or Commander One for macOS.

Part of the Three Commanders, see Double Commander for Linux kernel or Commander One for macOS.

Process Hacker is basically Task Manager but on steroids.

Manjaro is a distribution that isn't for everybody, but it's a bleeding-edge distribution based on Arch Linux.

7-Zip is the go-to file zipper (with a GUI) for macOS, Windows 10, Linux kernel or BSD.

qBittorrent is the most common BitTorrent client used within tech circles. If you use BitTorrent or µTorrent, use this as your alternative, as the other two clients are unreliable.

The I2P network provides strong privacy protections for communication over the Internet. Many activities that would risk your privacy on the public Internet can be conducted anonymously inside I2P.

IPFS (InterPlanetary FileSystem) is a global, versioned, peer-to-peer filesystem. It combines ideas from Git, BitTorrent, Kademlia, SFS, and the web. It is like a single bittorrent swarm, exchanging git objects. IPFS provides an interface as simple as the HTTP web, but with permanence built in.

yt-dlp is a fork of youtube-dl that fixes notorious bugs within it, most notably the video download speed limit, so that you can download YouTube videos to your heart's content.

The Wayback Machine, which is operated by Internet Archive, is a database that contains copies of more than 490 billion web pages. These web pages are mainly used by individuals to circumvent censorship. This is especially useful in archiving everything from journalistic papers hosted on self-hosted (thus unreliable) websites for use in Wikipedia to circumventing revisionist history by major outlets (that have a lot to change/hide)

Kubernetes is an open-source Docker container orchestration system. It can be used to leverage the weakness of low-end hardware such as Raspberry Pi by properly distributing containers to maximize performance.

Microsoft PowerToys is a set of utilities for power-users that boosts the Windows experience.

I would be remiss for not talking about Docker here. Docker provides enterprise-grade containerization for the end-user, and it's completely free. Docker also has a wide variety of tutorials and projects surrounding it, and it is commonly used for self-hosting projects.

The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost and low-end PC. It's intended to be used for academic purposes, but it is also a favourite among hobbyists and programmers not only because of it's price, but also because of it's versatility and simplicity.

Puppy Linux is even more lightweight than Lubuntu, but Puppy Linux isn't for everyone, which is also why I've listed Lubuntu here as basically the same thing.

Winearo Tweaker allows you to make changes to Windows 10 and above (such as bringing the old context menu back in Windows 11) without poking about the registry.

ShutUp10 allows you to remove telemetry and advertising from Windows 10/11 easily, among other things, such as disabling Cortana.

Lubuntu is a fast and lighteweight operating system based on Ubuntu. It's widely used as an operating system for low-end hardware.

Privacy Guides provides you dozens of tools for increasing your privacy.

PrivacyTools can be used to find privacy tools, but some tools are outdated, so do your research.

Windows Search can't find every file or directory; this can. Everything search searches everything, and I mean, everything, to try and find what you're looking for.

WinSCP is a popular free SFTP and FTP client for Windows 10. WinSCP also has support for Wine, allowing it to be used on macOS and Linux kernel.

cURL is a computer software project providing a library and command-line tool for transferring data using various protocols with URL syntax: supporting FTP, FTPS, SCP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS and FILE.

Nextcloud is a private cloud storage service (and calendar, notebook, etc. etc.) that has support for it to be self-hosted.

Wget is a tool for retrieving files via HTTP(S) or FTP.

Tails is a privacy-focused and incredibly lightweight OS, it's so lightweight, in fact, that it can be installed entirely on a USB drive, allowing it to be a portable security OS. Tails can effortlessly be used to hide activity from people snooping about, as Tails is completely amnesic, meaning that nothing you do on Tails is saved, ever.

HexChat is a fork of XChat for Linux, and unlike XChat for Linux, it is free for all platforms. It is widely regarded as the best IRC client for Windows.

Firefox is the best browser for privacy and security outside of Tor Browser, having no speed issues like Tor Browser. Firefox is also the de-facto web browser for Linux.

If the UI of Rufus intimidates you, balenaEtcher is an amazing alternative that only spares you a few options that are seldom used by beginners.

Z-Library is an e-library that contains over 100 million books. No registration is required to download books.

Rufus allows you to format and create bootable USB drives, and is the tool recommended for flashing a Linux kernel ISO on a bootable USB to install Linux kernel.

FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge.

VLC Media Player is the Swiss Army Knife of video players. It can do anything, from seamlessly playing subtitles to being compatible with every (common) video file type under the sun.

Obsidian is a powerful note-taking application, which defines itself as a "second brain", something I can't really argue with.

QubesOS defines itself as "reasonably secure", but it is anything but. QubesOS is the most secure operating system on the planet, thanks to several tweaks, and seamless integration with Whonix via Qubes-Whonix. Qubes is especially useful for anti-government journalists or whistleblowers.

Whonix is an OS that runs inside your own via a virtual machine. If you're on Windows, you can use Whonix for added security, if, for whatever reason, you can't switch to Linux. It can also be used with Qubes OS with Qubes-Whonix for added security.

Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is the universally-recommended distribution for beginners, as it is shipped with Wayland and PipeWire, both of which increase user-friendliness.

edit: hey internet, future val here. please please please don't use rhel or rhel based distros after what happened with red hat paywalling its code

Windows Terminal is the default terminal application baked in to Windows. It allows for an incredible amount of customization, and also works with Windows Subsystem for Linux.

VeraCrypt is a tool for on-the-fly disk encryption, and has various options for disk creation. VeraCrypt allows for the use of AES, which is the global encryption standard. To this day, AES hasn't been cracked.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows you to run a Linux command line that integrates into Windows incredibly well.