Free Software Essentials?

[NEANDERTHAL]

I just got a new Win 10 laptop. What are some good pieces of open-source (or otherwise free) software/games to install?

[Red]

You best upgrade to Windows 7 first

[Impboy4]

11 minutes ago, Red said:

You best upgrade to Windows 7 first

Downgrade*

[Blastfrog]

Aside from games, what exactly is it that you're looking for?

 

12 minutes ago, Impboy4 said:

Downgrade*

That's subjective.

[HavoX]

GIMP

foobar2000

Notepad++

7-Zip

 

The End

[Remilia Scarlet]

I'm not sure which of these have proper Windows versions, as I've mostly messed with them under Linux.  But most of these should:

• There's an open source implementation of Morrowind called OpenMW that's in development that looks pretty cool.  From what I last remember, it's playable to completion.
• Oolite is essentially an open source Elite game.  Not as visually cool as Elite: Dangerous, but still fun if you like that kind of game.
• Micropolis is the original Sim City, which was open sourced in 2008 and ported to modern systems.
• Stepmania is an open source dancing game like Dance Dance Revolution (dance pad not required).  I've put far, far too many hours into that thing...  Definitely has a Windows version.
• OpenRA is an open source remake of the original Red Alert engine.  It has some nice enhanced features.  Definitely has a Windows version.
• Marathon is open source these days.  Definitely has a Windows version.
• Cinelerra is pretty cool for nonlinear video editing.  Kdenlive also looked nice, but I personally stick with Cinelerra.
• qBittorrent is a pretty decent Bittorrent client.  Definitely has a Windows version.
• You can't go wrong with Putty for SSH stuff.  Definitely has a Windows version.
• Audacity is good to have for simple to moderate audio editing.  Definitely has a Windows version.
• If you need an X11 server and don't want to go through the hassle of installing Cygwin or similar, there's Xming.  I use it dang near daily.  Definitely has a Windows version, otherwise I wouldn't even mention it :-P
• Handbrake is excellent for video encoding.  In fact, we used it almost exclusively at work.  Definitely has a Windows version.
• PySol Fan Club is a solitaire game on steroids.  It has a ton of variations on simple klondike solitaire and other card games.  Definitely has a Windows version.
• Geany is a nice text editor if you need to do programming work but don't want a full IDE.  Definitely has a Windows version.
• Audacious is my go-to music player.  It can be made to look like good ol' XMMS/Winamp 2, or you can change it.  It even supports Winamp2 skins IIRC.  Definitely has a Windows version - in fact I'm listening to music with it as I type.

[Memfis]

Tyrian 2000 is now free and it's an addicting game with a kickass soundtrack.

 

ShareX is a cool program that allows you to capture screenshots and immediately upload them to imgur.

 

XnView is great for dealing with images, especially stuff like batch processing (resize hundreds of photos in a few clicks).

[MFG38]

OpenOffice.

 

Fuck Microsoft for what they've done to Office. I ain't paying a three-digit figure (or a two-digit one annually) for an admittedly great but mostly useless bundle of software just so I can write shit into a document.

[Gez]

HxD is the best free hex editor I know.

I would also recommend something like notepad2 or notepad++ or pnotepad for text editing.

7zip is a no-brainer, just get it. IrfanView and GIMP for image stuff. 

 

For games, get ScummVM it has several free games. Also get GZDoom to play its growing number of free IWADs. ;)

[Remilia Scarlet]

2 hours ago, MFG38 said:

OpenOffice

Or LibreOffice ;^)

[Impboy4]

15 hours ago, Blastfrog said:

That's subjective.

It's not subjective, it's a fact.

On topic:

Build N' Shoot is a freeware FPS/Building game like Minecraft that is Windows compatable.
OpenDungeons is a Dungeon Keeper-like open source game which has a Windows version as well as Linux.
PaintXP is a freeware program which gives you the old Paint from Windows XP. Works on all versions of Windows.
XMPlay is a media player which has a lot of plugins you can download to play additional audio formats. Has a Windows version.

[rehelekretep]

stuff i have that i like:

 

Postbox (email client)

Foobar2000 (music)

Mp3tag (music file tagger)

Audacity (basic music file editor)

GIMP (image manipulator/editor)

VLC (video player)

Avidemux (video editor)

JDownloader (automated mass downloader, e.g. Youtube files, software links etc.)

Advanced Renamer (a batch file/folder naming software)

IrfanView (image viewer and batch editor (resizing etc.)

7Zip (.zip/rar etc. archiver)

[fraggle]

Google Chrome, MPlayer Classic, Cygwin, 7-Zip, DOSbox, PuTTY

 

Although I haven't had a Windows machine for years at this point.

[Agentbromsnor]

On 12-8-2017 at 8:40 PM, Impboy4 said:

It's not subjective, it's a fact.

Windows 7 is still more compatible, so I'd definitely consider it an upgrade. The first order of business when purchasing any new machine is to rid it of the malware that is Windows 10.

On-topic:
FireFox ESR (fuck Chrome)
LibreOffice
Paint.NET
VLC Player is pretty good, though I'm torn between it and MediaPlayer Classic.

7-Zip

SLADE
Steam (not a fan of Steam at all, but it's how people play modern PC games these days, so meh)

Edited August 14, 2017 by Agentbromsnor

[Edward850]

13 minutes ago, Agentbromsnor said:

Windows 7 is still more compatible

Is it though? Especially as we can prove the opposite with this forum alone.

[Agentbromsnor]

1 hour ago, Edward850 said:

Is it though? Especially as we can prove the opposite with this forum alone.

Just consider the fact that Windows 10 builds on an entirely new kernel compared to Windows 7 and Vista. Windows Vista and 7 are most definitely more compatible.

[Remilia Scarlet]

As much as i despise Windows 10, its kernel is still based on Windows NT like 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 all were.

[Agentbromsnor]

3 minutes ago, YukiRaven said:

As much as i despise Windows 10, its kernel is still based on Windows NT like 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 all were.

My point is that it's not based on NT 6 anymore. That's literally ten years of development.

[Edward850]

12 minutes ago, Agentbromsnor said:

Just consider the fact that Windows 10 builds on an entirely new kernel compared to Windows 7 and Vista. Windows Vista and 7 are most definitely more compatible.

Okay, I've considered it. Problem is the kernel is not used directly to run user-land software. So now you need to show me a piece of software that runs on 7 but not 10.

Keyword there is user software, drivers don't count for obvious reasons.

[Remilia Scarlet]

They just made a version jump from 6.x to 10, not because it's entirely new, but just to keep the version numbers lined up with the Windows releases.  Calling it an "entirely new kernel" is very incorrect.  It's just an iteration, just as Linux kernel 2.x up to 3.x wasn't an entirely new kernel.  NT version 10 was still built upon the 6.x line.

 

http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/microsoft-confirms-windows-10-will-also-be-version-10-internally

[rodster]

Inkscape

Visual Studio Code

[fraggle]

3 hours ago, Agentbromsnor said:

My point is that it's not based on NT 6 anymore. That's literally ten years of development.

I'm not up on Windows kernel developments, but I assume that the NT kernel used in Windows 10 is an evolution of the same codebase they've been using for years at this point (anything else would be highly surprising). Are there real, practical compatibility issues with Windows 10? What can you do with Windows 7 that you can't do with 10?

[Empyre]

3 hours ago, fraggle said:

What can you do with Windows 7 that you can't do with 10?

Play a game that depends on Direct X 9 or earlier. Unreal Tournament 2004 sure looks ugly with the generic Direct X renderer that is your only choice in Windows 10. You shouldn't exclude drivers. They make a big difference.

[Edward850]

... What? DirectX9/older works demonstrably fine in Win10. The heck is a "generic direct x renderer"? You can't render DirectX generically, it can't share APIs.

 

And of course you have to exclude drivers. They aren't expected to have forwards compatibility due to different/new hardware, and they also are not user software (although oddly enough, Windows 7, 8 and 10 share a lot of drivers this time around, unlike Vista and 7).

 

There is also no such thing as a "choice in drivers" (well there can be, but in Windows you don't exactly have a selection of, say, wifi drivers), which makes me think you don't understand anything you just wrote.

Edited August 15, 2017 by Edward850

[inbtwn]

I have a HUGE plethora of FREE games and software, listed on my personal website (but not hosted because that would take a tremendous amount of disk space).

 

You can find them here:

Games: https://spriteclad.com/games.html

Software: https://spriteclad.com/software.html

 

Let me know if you pick up anything from here!

[Blastfrog]

I just found out that this existed yesterday: http://www.popot.org/get_the_games.php?game=SDLPoP

 

It's an open source reimplementation of the DOS version of Prince of Persia. I'm having a blast playing this, PoP1 is one of my favorite games of all time.

[Woolie Wool]

15 hours ago, Edward850 said:

Okay, I've considered it. Problem is the kernel is not used directly to run user-land software. So now you need to show me a piece of software that runs on 7 but not 10.

Keyword there is user software, drivers don't count for obvious reasons.

MechWarrior 4, whether Vengeance or Mercenaries, doesn't work in Windows 10 except for one particular distribution of the freeware Mektek modded version of Mercenaries (but not other zip files, and certainly not the original retail 2CD release, which I have).

[Edward850]

By any chance does it use SecuROM (or equivalent)? Windows 8/10 did disable zero-ring access to CD drives, as it was pretty much an open vector for malware more than it did anything for anti-piracy (plus Sony pretty much proved it to be destructive). However in that scenario that's still a driver thing (the software works but it will never pass the CD check), not user software. It also isn't free software by any stretch.

[Woolie Wool]

As far as I know, it only has a disc check. I installed Vengeance off of CD-R backups of my own retail CDs to a Windows 98/2000 machine recently and it ran fine.

[Edward850]

Probably related then. Things like Direct Play still work exactly as is, and in some cases work better than 7 did. Kaiser, Quasar and I have run into some odd situations where for whatever reason only Win10 seems to be able to start up some older games where 7 and 8 failed. However I suspect it's not related to the OS specifically but the services installed by default. For me it's only ever the disc checks that are a wild card.

 

Graphics cards also play a part, or just having newer hardware with Win10 does muddy the situation. My 2GB video card works with only a limited handful of older games (too much VRAM), and needs dgvoodoo to get anywhere, but of course isn't a Win10 problem.

Edited August 15, 2017 by Edward850