Post computer software that you think is good

[Xaomey]

I'm from Linux and Windows 10 is running on my laptop right now,i did some research on Google and i got the following:
Security: Windows Firewall / Windows Defender (it really is sufficient, REALLY)
Document Editor: Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Adobe Acrobat, Foxit PhantomPDF
Remote Connectivity: Cerberus FTP Server, XAMPP, RealVN
Email: Thunderbird w/ Thunderbird Tray,YoMail
Video Editing: MAGIX Vegas, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects
Web Browsers: Firefox, Google Chrome,SRWare Iro.
System Utilities:Wintools.net,Autohotkey,Perfec tDisk.
Image Editing:Adobe Photoshop,Adobe Illustrator.
Do you have anything else to add? Of course, I'll take your advice.

[The_Ditto]

Editor: Notepad++ (I live off this thing, it does so much, lightweight, easy to work with .. love it)

Winmerge: (Nice tool for complex/mass file/dir comparisons .. has plugins to handle Word docs, Excel, bin files, and more).

Screen capture: Greenshot (Found this gem a while back, love it ... very simple, but very easy to snap a region and add text/arrows/highlight .. or even obfuscate a section you want "redacted" .. ;)

MS Excel (I know haters are going to hate, and I myself dislike most of MS software .. however, Excel is always 1 I give them a nod towards "doing right" .. this sucker is powerful .. I've created everything in here from task trackers, to character sheets, to Suduko solvers .. ;) Just recently I used Excel to create over 1,000 statements for a project we needed to create objects, a task which would have taken a month or more .. took only a few hours ... If you're not proficient with Excel, I strongly advise you to get proficient with it .. it can save you hours on most jobs . ;) )

WindirStat - neat little util I found a while back .. gives you a nice graphical layout of your disk space/usage .. lets you home in on large files/wasted space quickly and free up disk space if you need.

[shawnhcorey]

Graphics & Image Editing:

Raster based:

• GIMP
• Krita
• Pinta
• MyPaint

Vector based:

• Inkscape

3D:

• Blender
  

[factotum]

Compression and decompression tool: 7-zip. It unpacks a surprisingly wide variety of compressed archives, and the .7z archives it creates itself generally have rather better compression than the more usual .zip. It will create .zip files, of course, should you need a bit more compatibility.

[halfeye]

JASC went out of business after producing Paint Shop Pro 8. They produced a huge number of CDs in a DVD case, and they didn't sell at full price, it's adequate. The name was bought by Corel, I dunno what that software is.

If you find PSP 8 for £30 or so on the back of a shelf somewhere it's worth it, plenty of people still use it, I can't say whether it works on Win 10, it's fine on Win 7 though.

[Radar]

I second GIMP and Inkscape for graphic editors - they are really solid and free, which is a nice perk.

For 3D graphics there is this thing called PovRay, which is based on a script language to set up scenes. Takes time to get into it, but it is quite powerful and versatile.

Libre Office works pretty well, but it still has a lot of little annoying quirks that make MS Office the first choice for an office package, but if it is for occasional and nonprofessional use Libre is more then good enough. For me, I write most of my documents in LaTeX anyway (Overleaf is a great web service for that by the way).

File manager: FreeCommander all the way. It may be just me being used to the old ways of DOS, but being able to do everything with the keybord is pretty important for me and this program has very easy controls. Also has a built in FTP and other functions. The fact that I do not need to run a console separately for text commands is also nice.

Email: Pegasus Mail. I doubt that many people have even heard about this one, which is one of the selling points in terms of safety (nobody tries to exploit any potential holes in it). At the same time a well built, heavy-duty free mail manager with many tools to filter and organise your mail.

Media player: VLC - I have yet to find some format or input source it could not work with.

[shawnhcorey]

Libre Office works pretty well, but it still has a lot of little annoying quirks that make MS Office the first choice for an office package, but if it is for occasional and nonprofessional use Libre is more then good enough.

Have you tried AbiWord, another FOSS word processor? I tried it but don't use it much. I heard it is closer to Word than LibreWord. You may want to investigate it.

Media player: VLC - I have yet to find some format or input source it could not work with.

I second VLC. I use it for both videos and music.

[Bohandas]

GIMP- Art program

VLC- Media Player

Starburn- Disk burning software

Winaero Tweaker- System tweaks/customization

Notepad++- Text and .xml editing

Audacity- Sound Editing

Classic Shell- Tweaks GUI

7+ Taskbar Tweaker- Tweaks GUI

Always On Top Maker- Allows you to set windows as always on top

DVD Styler- Burning video DVDs

Pale Moon- Web browser

Winmerge- Text editing and comparison

[jayem]

Media player: VLC - I have yet to find some format or input source it could not work with.

Midi, at least on the install. Although I think there was a codec for that but it (along with many other players) I think essentially had a recording of each note with each instrument.

I like any of the Notepad++ types, and they are my default script editors.

[AMX]

Midi, at least on the install. Although I think there was a codec for that but it (along with many other players) I think essentially had a recording of each note with each instrument.

That's how MIDI works - it's not actually a recording format, it's a control protocol for electronic instruments.
So if you want to play that in software, you need samples for what sounds the control signals are supposed to produce.

On topic:
O&O ShutUp10 - privacy

[jayem]

That's how MIDI works - it's not actually a recording format, it's a control protocol for electronic instruments.
So if you want to play that in software, you need samples for what sounds the control signals are supposed to produce.

The old sound cards used to be able to be an arbitrary electronic instrument fairly simply (a mix of pitch, simple envelopes and harmonics), which I'd have expected to be almost effortless in software, and would have been fine for my use case (although I guess I can understand that being too low quality and the other being too high on storage for it's expected use).
Also for games I'm really looking forward to the day when speech synthesis can handle "<GuildLeader:Angry>Go away [player name]", as easily as you can do for skeletal animations. Then RPG's would be able to respond to changes (you wouldn't need to preserve quest givers, you'd just need a backup person).

abcde is used for my CD backups.
Blender for when I want to play at 3D modeling.
Python for scripting

I've not really found a nice image editor. Gimp is impressive

[factotum]

The old sound cards used to be able to be an arbitrary electronic instrument fairly simply (a mix of pitch, simple envelopes and harmonics), which I'd have expected to be almost effortless in software, and would have been fine for my use case (although I guess I can understand that being too low quality and the other being too high on storage for it's expected use).

Depends which sound cards you're talking about. Ones like the Soundblaster AWE32 also used sound banks for its MIDI playback. Anyway, it's not like "soundfonts" (which are what you need to get VLC to play MIDI files) are exactly hard to find and it takes a few seconds to configure VLC to use them.

[Xaomey]

Thank you all very much.

[gomipile]

Blender is good for basic video editing, also.

[veti]

Editor: Notepad++ (I live off this thing, it does so much, lightweight, easy to work with .. love it)

Second that. Notepad++ is one of the first things I install on any computer, whether for home or work. Would hate to be without it.

Also endorse Greenshot.

MS Excel (I know haters are going to hate, and I myself dislike most of MS software .. however, Excel is always 1 I give them a nod towards "doing right" .. this sucker is powerful .. I've created everything in here from task trackers, to character sheets, to Suduko solvers .. ;) Just recently I used Excel to create over 1,000 statements for a project we needed to create objects, a task which would have taken a month or more .. took only a few hours ....

Excel is... Okay, I guess. It gets a bad rap because it gets misused a lot. Just remember that it's basically for simple analysis and presentation of data, not for long term storage or maintenance. And if you find yourself trying to cross reference more than a couple of sheets, or writing formulas with more than four or five levels of parentheses, then you should seriously consider learning SQL instead.

And never, ever use Excel to edit a CSV file. Not if you intend to keep it as CSV, anyway.

In the same vein, I quite like MS Word. Like Excel it suffers from the fact that approximately 93% of its users not only don't know what they're doing, but also firmly believe that they do know everything they need to. It's just way too easy to use badly.

[Bohandas]

The problem with MS Office is that it has a garbage interface, that's why Libre Office is better; it does the same things, without the ribbon (plus, Libre Office is free. Why would you pay money for an inferior product when you can get Libre Office for free)

[veti]

The problem with MS Office is that it has a garbage interface, that's why Libre Office is better; it does the same things, without the ribbon

While I share your feelings about the ribbon, I don't think it's true that Libre does the same things. Admittedly it's a few years since I checked, but back then it couldn't match MSO for any but the simplest use cases.

There's a reason why the corporate world has stayed with MS, and it's not because they enjoy paying for it.

[halfeye]

There's a reason why the corporate world has stayed with MS, and it's not because they enjoy paying for it.

Actually, it might be. If you pay for a product you've got someone to sue if it fails, and for some people, that means their rear is covered in a way it wouldn't be if they used something from someone their company couldn't sue.

[leafman]

As another option for a text editor, I use UltraEdit at work. It isn't free like Notepad++, but it has some powerful features.

[crayzz]

Zim, for creating wiki style documents on your desktop.

[myra]

Apps (Which I use on) my desktop pc:

VLC
Winrar
NPAV Antivirus
Sublime
Github Desktop
Chrome
Spotify
steam
openshot video editor

[factotum]

There's a reason why the corporate world has stayed with MS, and it's not because they enjoy paying for it.

I think the main reason is actually interoperability. We actually made an attempt to switch to OpenOffice (as it then was) at the company I worked for about ten years ago, and we gave up after a few weeks when it turned out that we couldn't open and read Excel and Word documents sent us by other companies because OO did an absolutely dreadful job of converting them. That may well have improved in the decade since, but if you want to open an Office document and expect it to look 100% the same as it did when the person sent it, the easiest way to be sure is to have Office yourself. This obviously becomes a self-sustaining thing--everyone uses Office, so you need Office to be sure you can work with them...

[veti]

I think the main reason is actually interoperability. We actually made an attempt to switch to OpenOffice (as it then was) at the company I worked for about ten years ago, and we gave up after a few weeks when it turned out that we couldn't open and read Excel and Word documents sent us by other companies because OO did an absolutely dreadful job of converting them.

That's easy, tell other companies that Office attachments will be screened out by your email server for security reasons. If they want to send you a formatted document, that's what PDF is for. Emailing Word documents is just a bad idea, especially in a business context. Especially between companies.

And I'm speaking as the person who actually appreciates Word.

[Algeh]

That's easy, tell other companies that Office attachments will be screened out by your email server for security reasons. If they want to send you a formatted document, that's what PDF is for. Emailing Word documents is just a bad idea, especially in a business context. Especially between companies.

And I'm speaking as the person who actually appreciates Word.

Depends on what you're sending the documents back and forth for. PDF is great for final versions but pretty terrible for drafts or living documents. At this point, we tend to use Google Docs for living documents where I work just because cloud-based with good version control is simplest for that, but Word is still pretty much the default for something you're going to be sending to someone who might need to revise it further and send it on to someone else after they get it.

Also, the intersection between "things it makes sense to send as a spreadsheet" and "things it makes sense to send as a PDF" is...small, so PDF really isn't a good replacement for Excel files in most cases.

That being said, I do have a fair amount of things at work that I have no idea why they were provided to us as Word docs instead of PDFs, like the answer keys for my assorted math curricula, and I tend to turn almost everything into a PDF before sending it out as a final version since it makes it harder for someone to print it funny accidentally.

[factotum]

Also, the intersection between "things it makes sense to send as a spreadsheet" and "things it makes sense to send as a PDF" is...small, so PDF really isn't a good replacement for Excel files in most cases.

Yeah, this. Excel was by far our biggest problem. Also, telling customers "Send it to us in PDF format" doesn't always work or even go down well--the customer usually believes they should be able to send their stuff over in any damn format they like, and it's our problem to deal with it.

It's also worth noting that Office didn't have a handy-dandy "Save as PDF" option back then anyway, so producing a PDF from a document would often involve arcane things like installing a special print driver.

[Xaomey]

Blender is good for basic video editing, also.

Well,i got it,i just list the software i have used or am using,for Blender,i will try next time.
Thank U.

[Xaomey]

Apps (Which I use on) my desktop pc:

VLC
Winrar
NPAV Antivirus
Sublime
Github Desktop
Chrome
Spotify
steam
openshot video editor

I am interested in Github Desktop and Sublime.

[Bohandas]

Editor: Notepad++ (I live off this thing, it does so much, lightweight, easy to work with .. love it)

And it's great for editing .xml files because it has options to automaticaloy color code different parts of the code, which comes in handy for game modding

steam

I mean, technically the program itself is good, but as far as game distributors GOG/Good Old Games is far friendlier to the consumer and I vastly prefer them even despite the fact that their client/launcher program (GOG Galaxy) works terribly

Blender is good for basic video editing, also.

I gound Blender to be entirely inscrutable, not good for "basic" anything

[Knaight]

Most of what I'd point out has been covered, but there is the iObit Uninstaller for file management. It does thorough removal of anything .exe or affiliated.

[Cicciograna]

No love for the KDE suite?

I am a Linux user coming from Windows, under the latter I loathed the default file manager and had switched a looong time ago to the excellent Total Commander, a twin panel file manager that did everything I ever needed concerning file management. When I switched to Linux, I found a worth replacement in Krusader, which under many aspects is even better than Total Commander.

PDF files, I handle them with Okular, very fast and efficient in their management, even when they're really large. I would enjoy more editing options, though.

I write a lot of code, and find the use of Kate invaluable: when I was under Windows, I used to use Notepad++ and was in dire need of a capable text editor for the Penguin, and luckily Kate does everything I need.

Musicwise, beyond the excellent VLC, I am very fond of Audacious for an easy to use mp3 player, and the similarly named Audacity for their editing.

For image management and limited editing, I use XnView, I have been a long time user of this small and capable piece of software, and was delighted to find it running under Linux too.