List of recommended Windows software

This page is for good quality software on Windows, based on the contributions of /g/ users. This page is not for solidifying preferences or ideology; it is considered to be "value-free" and thus permitting of both reference to open source software and closed source software, for-profit and not-for-profit. This is not your soapbox, your ballot box, or pulpit. Stay constructive and avoid politics and arguments.

Package manager

Windows 10 and 11 come with WinGet, the Windows package manager. Using a package manager gives you the benefit of being able to download and install a lot of software via commands rather than having to navigate to a website, download it and run an installer. If you don't want to use the Microsoft Store, take a look at Chocolatey or Scoop.

For an all-at-once installation to install all of your favourite software in one go (useful on a fresh install of Windows), check out winutil.

*nix environment on Windows

If you're feeling a bit limited or alienated with Windows' command line tools, you can set up a native *nix environment on Windows.

• The Windows Subsystem for Linux, allows you to run a Linux container inside Windows. Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE are officially supported, but there's a guide for using a custom distro.
• If you don't feel comfortable with containerization, Cygwin is a good alternative. Cygwin offers a large selection of GNU coreutils and extras, natively compiled for Windows.
• MinGW-w64 is a port of the GNU Compiler Collection and it's utilities for Windows.
• The native Windows build of Git provides a shell with simple *nix programs like cp, mv, rm, etc. and other basic coreutils you might need. Read the page for details.

• Powershell 7 is not POSIX-compliant but it is adopting increasingly POSIX-like syntax, so if you want to tough it out, consider updating to the newest version. Additionally, Windows Dev Home adds native sudo for Windows.

Communications

Before being v&, weeaboo nonces often use communications software to exchange nude images with police officers posing as kawaii lolis.

Web browsers

Main article: Web browsers Firefox

Firefox is free software developed by Mozilla. It is highly extensible via addons and included as the default browser in many Linux distributions. It is often criticized on /g/ and /tech/ as "SJWfox" because of some Mozilla developers outspoken campaigns on social and political issues.

Chromium

Chromium builds are based off the underlying code of Chrome. While nearly identical to Google's browser, they lack proprietary components like automatic updates and Widevine DRM. However, non-Ungoogled Chromium still phones home to Google.

Otter Browser

Otter Browser is a FOSS web browser that aims to recreate the best aspects of the classic Opera (12.x) UI using Qt5.

Pale Moon

Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox that maintains support for the older XUL addon/theming standard. It retains the "Australis" UI, and uses its own "Goanna" rendering engine, forked from Gecko, which performs poorly with some CSS/JS-heavy sites. Does not support current Firefox addons, and has its own addons (see also: JustOff addons).

Tor Browser

Tor Browser (formerly known as Tor Browser Bundle) is a package of a modified Firefox extended support release, NoScript, HTTPS-Everywhere, Tor, TorButton and TorLauncher. It automatically routes traffic through the Tor network and deletes history and cookies when closed.

SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey is a continuation of the Mozilla suite. Unlike most modern web browsers, it is an Internet suite, complete with bundled programs for email, IRC, and web design. It is compatible with most XUL add-ons.

K-Meleon

K-Meleon is a FOSS web browser for Windows. It uses the Gecko rendering engine just like Firefox, but sports a native Windows UI. It is absurdly configurable. Also very suitable for resurrecting Pentium M and older systems because of it's speed.

Email clients

Desktop email clients provide off-line email storage and additional features over most web-mail clients.

Betterbird

Betterbird is a fork of the more well known Thunderbird. After Mozilla followed in the inglorious footsteps of GNOME where features are removed and bugs closed as wontfix, Betterbird stepped up and delivers fixes and features. It is compatible with most Thunderbird addons.

Claws-Mail

Claws-Mail is a lightweight FOSS (GPL) email client based on GTK+. Supports PGP, vCalendar (Outlook compatible), RSS/Atom feeds, spam filtering and more via a well-maintained collection of first party plugins. Sending HTML emails is not supported. Reading HTML emails is usable but much improved by enabling WebKit or LiteHTML rendering engines.

Instant Messaging (IM) clients

Element

Element is a free and open source cross-platform instant messaging client and the flagship implementation for the Matrix protocol. It's a solid Discord alternative, with support for voice and video calling. DMs are end-to-end encrypted by default. Bridges to other messaging services, such as Discord, Jabber, iMessage and more are available with third party bridges. Unfortunately, however, it is an Electron app.

Pidgin

Pidgin is a free and open source instant messaging client developed in C. It is based upon Libpurple and offers support for Jabber (XMPP), Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, GroupWise, Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE and Zephyr out of the box. Support for additional protocols like Matrix and Signal is offered through third-party plugins. Plugins are available for OTR, OMEMO and many other features. Beware it stores passwords in plain text by default.

File:Discord.png Discord

Discord is a non-free VoIP and instant messaging client, widely used for gaming. It is absolutely chock-full of spyware but it is the main platform that normies use.

Gajim

Gajim is a FOSS cross-platform GUI Jabber client written in Python. It supports OMEMO and not OTR.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) clients

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

HexChat

HexChat is a continuation of XChat and makes both its source code and binaries available to users of all platforms it's created for. Like its parent software, HexChat is licensed under the GNU GPL. It includes all the basic features one would need, and can be ideal both for new users and IRC veterans. Has built-in plugins for Lua, Perl and Python scripting.

ChatZilla is an IRC client addon for XUL clients such as SeaMonkey and Pale Moon. Great for people who want basic IRC features without having to install an additional application.

Terminal/Command prompt

Irssi

Irssi is the father of rice clients and easily accessible for all systems. The author of the Metacity window manager for Linux describes his software as follows: "Boring window manager for the adult in you. Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like Cheerios." Irssi is the terminal IRC client equivalent of that sentiment. Irssi is extensible through plugins.

Weechat

Weechat is Irssi with more rice, scripting languages, ideal defaults and development. It is rising in popularity as a preferred client on /g/. Weechat also includes plugin functionality.

Support by browsers and mail clients

• Thunderbird has support for IRC and other IM services.
• Opera had similar chat support which was dropped in 10.10.
• As mentioned above, SeaMonkey can support IRC.

Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) clients

Jitsi

Jitsi Meet is a Discord/Skype alternative using standards compliant FLOSS. It supports text encryption with OTR and audio/video encryption with ZRTP. The downside is it is a web app.

Mumble

Mumble is free and open source audio chat software. It is superior in audio quality and latency by always being the first client to use latest technologies, such as the Opus audio codec.

Google Voice

Google Voice runs in a web browser and requires a plugin for full functionality. There does not appear to be official desktop software for this. The botnet never felt so good. Free phone numbers, calling, texting, and integration into Gmail.

Search utilities

Everything

Everything is a proprietary freeware search engine that instantly locates files and folders by filename, by monitoring file system changes in real time and indexing them.

Launchy

Launchy helps you navigate your start menu, programs, folders and more, amazingly fast, simply by typing in the name of your program and folder. Loads instantly by simply pressing a hotkey (default is alt+space). Customizable and allows you to add other things like website bookmarks and commands. The perfect program to replace windows search with.

File compression utilities

File compression software is widely used by various software distributors and archives to mitigate bandwidth and storage space requirements.

7zip

7zip is a free and open source file archiver developed in C++ by Igor Pavlov. Its primary feature is lossless compression in the 7z format, based upon the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm. In addition to the handful of formats it is capable of creating new archives in, 7zip can retrieve files from archives in virtually any format that one is likely to encounter.

NanaZip is a derivative of 7zip which has some extra features like icons on the context menu, extra options in many dialogs and the ability to minimize to tray while extracting.

PeaZip

The PAQ and LPAQ methods are capable of an impressive degree of lossless compression, but the time and system resources required are equally impressive.

PeaZip is a free and open source archiver developed in free Pascal by Giorgio Tani. It is notable for its native PEA format and its support of cutting-edge compression technologies like PAQ and LPAQ that are not supported by other popular archivers. Like 7zip, it is capable of retrieving files from virtually any archive that one might encounter.

File sharing

BitTorrent clients

qBittorrent

qBittorrent is a libtorrent-based free and open source BitTorrent client written in C++. According to its developers, the aim of the client is to provide a free software alternative to µTorrent.

Deluge

Deluge is a libtorrent-based free and open source BitTorrent client written in Python. It is highly extensible via its plug-ins system. Deluge is notable for having originated the particular method of protocol encryption that is currently in use by every major BitTorrent client. It can be a bit of a resource hog on Windows compared to other clients.

Transmission

Transmission is a popular free and open source client that is easy to use and lightweight. For years it has been the preferred BitTorrent client on macOS and GNU/Linux, and it finally has received an official release on Windows.

FTP clients

WinSCP

WinSCP or Windows Secure Copy is a free and open source FTP, SFTP, and SCP client written in C++.

TermSCP

TermSCP is a cross-platform free, open source TUI file transfer utility written in Rust.

Direct Connect

FlyingCarpet

FlyingCarpet is an open-source AirDrop clone, Written with Rust.

Sharedrop

ShareDrop uses WebRTC to share files between two devices. Can be used in any web browser.

EiskaltDC++

EiskaltDC++ is a cross-platform program that uses the Direct Connect and ADC protocols. It is compatible with DC++, FlylinkDC++, LinuxDC++ and other DC clients.

XDCC

Filesharing over IRC; IRC Clients with support for XDCC include HexChat and irssi. See also: XDCC.

Maintenance

Disk cleaners

Warning: Most, if not all "PC cleaner" programs are at best, snake oil, and at worst, malware. Cleaning the registry next to nothing. Any app that claims to "speed up your PC" by removing junk files is almost guaranteed to be predatory in some fashion. Steer well clear!

Storage management

BleachBit

Bleachbit is a lightweight free open-source disk cleaner that can manage deletion of unnecessary files.

dupeGuru

dupeGuru is a FOSS program for finding duplicates in your computer. Supports images, audio and other multiple scan types such as filename, content and tags.

Bulk Crap Uninstaller

Bulk Crap Uninstaller is a FOSS uninstaller tool that calls the uninstaller for programs and scans and prompts for the deletion of file and registry remnants of said programs. It aims to be an open-source version of the popular "Revo Uninstaller" tool.

Disk defragmenters

Warning: Only use these programs on your hard disk drives. Defragmenting can shorten the lifespan of your SSDs

Windows Disk Defragmenter

Windows comes with a proprietary defragmentation tool that should cover most typical use cases.

MyDefrag

MyDefrag is a proprietary freeware disk defragmenter based on the standard defragmentation API by Microsoft. It also optimises file locations.

Disk image and back-up tools

Macrium Reflect 8

Macrium Reflect 8 is the last free version of Macrium Reflect. It can schedule full backups as well as incremental ones, with the paid version offering a second increment for storage saving. Versions newer than Macrium Reflect 8 no longer offer a free indefinite trial.

File recovery tools

Main article: Data recovery TestDisk

TestDisk was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table).

PhotoRec

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.

File syncing tools

FreeFileSync compares your files and folders with other files and folders from target locations, and adds or updates them accordingly

Robocopy is the built-in Windows file sync utility. It functions similarly to rsync.

Syncthing is a cross-platform file-syncing utility.

Winpinator is the unofficial Windows port of the popular Warpinator file sync utility.

System information tools

CPU-Z & GPU-Z

CPU-Z and GPU-Z are proprietary freeware that provide detailed information about your CPU and GPU, respectively.

HWiNFO

HWiNFO is proprietary freeware that provides overall system information and a litany of temperature and fan sensor readouts.

Fastfetch

Fastfetch is a cross-platform TUI system information utility written in C. Use it to look cool in desktop threads.

Multimedia

Media players

mpv

Tip: The majority of configuration for this application is done manually by editing its configuration file.

mpv is an incredibly powerful and widely-used fork of mplayer2 and MPlayer. It features FFMPEG playback, high quality scaling algorithms, OpenGL output, proper color management, and is completely free and open-source. With yt-dlp, it can also play video and audio streams, and even .gif files!

mpv.net

mpv.net is an mpv derivative that uses more native Windows components for theoretically better performance and aesthetics.

VLC

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

MPC-HC (Media Player Classic)

MPC-HC is an open source media player on Windows with extensive file support, and no bloat or harmful software. Different renderers and shaders are also available from the community. Development is currently in maintenance mode.

Media center and HTPC

Kodi

Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is a GPL-licensed software media center featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It is highly customizable via skins and addons. There are even addons available for streaming from internet services like YouTube and Twitch.tv. It plays nearly every video and music format out of the box. The built in scrapers can pull data from sites like IMDB and thetvdb to allow sorting media by actor, genre, rating, etc. It can export this data to local files for offline use.

Jellyfin

Jellyfin is a free and open source media server based on the last FOSS version of Emby. It does not require any online accounts or come bundled with any free IPTV garbage unlike Plex, whilst retaining excellent performance.

Media converters and rippers

HandBrake

Handbrake is a free and open source video transcoder with an easy to use GUI. It can rip and convert a variety of video formats, but can not break DVD or Blu-ray copyright protection.

MakeMKV

MakeMKV can convert video from proprietary (and usually encrypted) discs into a set of MKV files, preserving most information but not changing it in any way. It can instantly stream decrypt video without intermediate conversion and decrypt Blu-rays and protected DVDs.

MKVToolNix

MKVToolNix is a set of FOSS tools by Moritz Bunkus for working with Matroska files. It can mux, split and merge mkv files with no transcoding or loss of quality. It can also add or remove audio and subtitle tracks, change track order and edit metadata.

yt-dlp

yt-dlp is a command line program for downloading videos from YouTube and similar sites.

EAC

Exact Audio Copy is a proprietary freeware CD ripper written by a German university student. It is preferred by what.cd and other audiophile communities because of its accuracy and ability to rip slightly damaged discs. It can output a detailed log file specifying the position any errors occurred. It also supports AccurateRip, cue sheet generation and ID3 tagging via freedb.

Audio players

Foobar2000

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include ReplayGain support, low memory footprint, and native support for several popular audio formats. It supports ASIO output.

MusicBee

MusicBee is basically a souped version of Foobar2k. It supports everything that you want in an audio player plus more! The GUI is very different than most, but can be customized to your will. It supports ASIO output and provides some level of compatibility with WinAmp input plugins. It is free as in free beer.

MPD (Music Player Daemon)

MPD is a flexible, powerful daemon for playing music. While mpd doesn't directly play music to you, it provides a stream of it (locally or over the internet) to which you connect to with a client (as it's a server, not a music player). It is the mpd client that provides you with all the functionality you expect from a music player. The advantage here is that you can have multiple clients connected and listening to one instance of mpd, or you can stream over the internet. Some music players listed below will be mpd clients, which means that you may need to install mpd as well (if it doesn't come included) for them to work.

• mpc is a minimalistic terminal MPD client.

Strawberry

Strawberry is a continuation of the aforementioned Clementine aimed at music collectors and audiophiles.

Audio editors

Tenacity

Tenacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder made as a replacement to Audacity which now includes telemetry. It has support for LADSPA, Nyquist, VST, Audio Unit effect and VAMP analysis plug-ins.

FFMPEG

FFMPEG is also the gold standard for audio encoding and editing, command line based.

Musicbrainz Picard

Picard If you've got a collection of legally obtained music that you want organized in an acceptably uniform way, then you need to get an mp3 tagger to parse mass edits to the filenames and ID3 metadata. There are several out there, but the only one you should be using is Picard. Developed by the Musicbrainz community, Picard has been around for years and it's a feature-rich solution with a whole shitload of tools that will make organizing your hoard of mp3s easy.

LMMS

LMMS is a free and open source DAW that allows you to create melodies and beats, synthesize and mix sounds, and arrange samples. You can have fun with your MIDI keyboard and much more – all in a user-friendly and modern interface. Furthermore LMMS comes with many ready-to-use instrument and effect plugins, presets and samples. Compatible with many standards such as SoundFont2, VST(i), LADSPA, GUS Patches, and MIDI.

Image viewers

ImageGlass

ImageGlass is a small FOSS image viewer. It has support for 70+ formats and plugins. However, it has few manipulation tools compared to similar software.

nomacs

nomacs is a free and open source image viewer, which supports multiple platforms. You can use it for viewing all common image formats including RAW and PSD images. It also has support for plugins and batch processing.

Irfanview

Irfanview is a very fast, small, compact and innovative freeware graphic viewer for Windows. It features an inbuilt editor along with many other extra tools that you may need or require.

XnViewMP

XnViewMP is the enhanced version to XnView. It is a powerful media browser, viewer and converter. It is compatible with more than 500 image formats. XnViewMP also comes with an easy to use yet powerful batch conversion module.

JPEGView

JPEGView is a lean, fast and highly configurable viewer/editor with a minimal GUI.

Comic and manga viewers

CDisplayEX

CDisplayEX is a freeware comic book archive viewer that supports reading from CBZ/CBR/CB7/PDF/EPUB format with many features. It also provides native cover thumbnail in Windows Explorer, color filters, Leap Motion support and many more.

Ahoviewer

Ahovieweris Free open source Booru browser and Manga reader and also an image viewer, it supports CBZ,CBR, RAR and other common extensions, it also supports webms and it lets you Browse different boorus and download images and videos from there.

Image editors

Raster art

Krita

Krita is a user friendly program for sketching and painting, offering an end-to-end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch.

Paint.NET

Paint.NET started as an MS Paint alternative. It now integrates plenty of features such as layers and effects.

Photopea

Photopea is a free clone of Adobe Photoshop CS6 that works in-browser. All photo processing is done on device. The software is closed-source and ad-supported. The app can be "installed" from Chromium-based browsers to provide an Electron-app like experience. Ads can be disabled with userscripts

Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo is a paid, proprietary, non-destructive photo editor that provides excellent Photoshop compatibility and a similar workflow - $35

Vector art

Inkscape

InkScape is a vector graphic editor.

Vectorpea

Vectorpea Adobe Illustrator CS6 clone. Same developer and caveats as Photopea.

Screenshot Handlers

Greenshot

Greenshot Is a free program which allows you to save images of your desktop, or a selection of your desktop. Highly customizable, as it allows users to use custom hot keys to trigger screen captures, save files in custom file destinations, and many other options.

ShareX

ShareX is pretty much the same thing, although it's been in development for much longer, it's open source and there's way more lightweight tools. Plus you have workflowing options to upload your screenshots to different image hosting sites.

Video editors

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is a free and open source multi-track video editor made by the KDE Team. it's based on FFMPEG and is compatible with a variety of video and audio formats.

Olive

Olive is a free, open source video editor currently in beta seeking to provide a more modern editor workflow. it's one of the most promising free (as in freedom) video editors currently.

FFMPEG

FFMPEG is the gold standard for video encoding and editing. Olive and Kdenlive are pretty much just wrappers around FFMPEG and you can do everything they can do, without bloat, using just the terminal.

Pikimov

Pikimov is a freeware video and motion graphics editor web app with a very similar workflow to Adobe After Effects. Everything is processed on-device. It currently does not support Firefox

Davinci Resolve

Davinci Resolve is a proprietary, professional colour grading tool and video editor. It is free, with a paid version available.

3D modeling

Autodesk Maya

Maya offers a comprehensive creative feature set for 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, rendering, and compositing on a highly extensible production platform. Maya now has next-generation display technology, accelerated modeling workflows, and new tools for handling complex data.

Blender

Blender is a free and open source 3D graphics suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline; modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

Office

Document readers

Sumatra PDF

Tip: The majority of configuration for this application is done manually by editing its configuration file.

Sumatra PDF is a free and open source PDF, ePub, Mobi, XPS, DjVu, CHM, CBZ, and CBR reader. Unlike most competing products for Windows, it is extremely fast and lightweight, now with 64 bits binaries.

Okular

Okular is the default document viewer for the systems that are bundled with the KDE environments. It supports PDF, PS, Tiff, CHM, DjVU, epub and many other common extensions, it also has some nice features such as annotations, drawing, highlighting and it's completely free and open source.

Word processors

LibreOffice Writer

LibreOffice Writer is the word processor in the LibreOffice suite. After Oracle acquired OpenOffice, it asked community members to GTFO [1]. Since everyone despises Oracle, the developers all jumped ship as well [2] and started LibreOffice.

OnlyOffice

OnlyOffice is a free and open source document processing suite focused on Microsoft Office compatibility. It can either be hosted as a web service or run locally.

WordTsar

WordTsar is an open-source clone of the extremely popular DOS word processor, WordStar. Comes with an optional GUI and the ability to save in some slightly less antiquated file formats (like .docx)

Obsidian

Obsidian is a free and open source Markdown editor designed for note-taking. It is highly extensible with plugins. A multi-device sync service is offered as a subscription.

Programming

To manage your programming projects, consider setting up individual developer environments with Windows Dev Home. This will prevent you from entering dependency hell, at the cost of some of your storage space.

Text editors

Notepad++

Notepad++ is free software written in C++ for Windows. It is fast, efficient and customizable.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a paid, proprietary text editor for code, markup and prose.

Neovim

Neovim is a Vim fork designed to reduce attack surface and improve editor speed. An extremely feature-rich programmer's text editor with extensive plugin support.

Emacs

Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Spacemacs

Spacemacs is a community developed configuration for Emacs, making it more accessible especially to those who are used to using Vi.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a free and open source, cross-platform text editor. It is developed by Microsoft. Despite being based on Electron like Atom, its performances are usually superior compared to the later, while delivering equivalent functionalities.

Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is Microsoft's IDE for C, C++, .NET (C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET), Python & Rust. Community versions are available for free. Full versions are usually free or discounted for MSDN members, students, etc.

JetBrains' IDEs

IntelliJ IDEA is the flagship IDE from JetBrains, and the Community Edition is FOSS. They have several IDEs for different languages, including PyCharm Community Edition for Python, which is also FOSS. Eclipse

Eclipse is a feature-rich IDE with a major focus on its plugin system. Plugins are used for everything from language support (Java, C++, Python, C#, etc.) to adding additional features or aesthetics (Git integration, Vim keybindings, relative line numbers, CMake support, color schemes, etc.). It also has a reasonable set of built-in features. Some of the more notable of these include the plugin install/update tool, a highly configurable code formatter, and a customizable UI.

Hex editors

• XVI32
• Frhed
• wxHexEditor

Security

Main article: Security

Antivirus

Tip: The best antivirus software we can recommend is common sense and good extensions like uBlock Origin / Lite. Don't do something stupid like getting your software from download.com, or that scam brothersoft website. Always look at the file name, and don't open dumb shit with titles like FurryHyperMacroHermPorn2016-DougWinger-GiddeonCorralftCockvore.zip.png.exe. It's simple, really. Still, with any good OPSEC, it is useful to have a fall-back or fail-safe. Use our recommendations should you fail to have simple common sense.

Windows Security

Formerly Windows Defender, Despite being pack-in software, the default Windows antivirus is quite competent. Does encourage you to sign in with a Microsoft account, but this can be ignored. Comes with a solid firewall and malware isolation capabilities.

Windows Sandbox Windows Sandbox is a feature that allows you to create virtual desktops for isolating and testing suspicious applications. Read the docs here. You can also use them as virtual development environments.

Any.run

any.run is a closed-source web-based malware analysis tool you can use anywhere.

Malwarebytes

Malwarebytes is a proprietary antivirus program popular in various security communities as a backup scanner. It is offered both as freeware and commercial software. The free version of Malwarebytes allows the user to manually scan for and remove malware, but a license must be purchased if the user wishes to take advantage of its scheduled scanning and real-time protection features.

Malware removal

Main article: Malware removal

Software firewalls

Software firewalls should not be viewed as replacements for hardware firewalls. The proper configuration of modem and router firewalls remains vital to securing one's network no matter what software solutions are employed.

Tinywall

Tinywall is a lightweight wrapper for the Windows firewall, providing a lot of new features like tampering protection, blocklists, or temporary firewall rules.

Windows Firewall Control

Windows Firewall Control is another lightweight wrapper for the Windows firewall. Actively developed and supported from Windows 7 to 10. If you make a small donation you get a useful Notifications System which provides notifications for outbound blocked connections.

Password managers

KeePassX

KeePassX is a light interface and cross platform password manager published under the GNU GPL.

Windows Security Utilities

Warning: Use at your own risk. Always create a restore point. The chances are low, but If you brick your computer using one of these programs you have only yourself to blame.

winutil is a multi-purpose Windows configuration utility for the removal of telemetry, bloat and other unwanted "features" from Windows 10 & 11. For more granular control, consider a open source privacy-script generating website such as privacy.sexy

Emulation and compatibility

Virtual CD/DVD drive

• WinCDEmu
• ImDisk

Virtual machines

Hyper-V Manager

Hyper-V is Microsoft's proprietary hardware-accelerated virtualisation platform. It can be used to create both Windows and Linux virtual machines with excellent performance. Hyper-V also supports advanced features like GPU paravirtualisation and network queuing.

QEMU

Tip: The majority of configuration for this application is done manually by editing its configuration file.

QEMU is an open-source hardware-accelerated virtualisation library for Windows, macOS & Linux hosts. Windows is a bit of a second-class citizen but if you're willing to read the documentation, it offers very similar performance to Hyper-V.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is free and open source virtualisation software. Be aware that it is currently owned by Oracle.

PC-98 simulators

PC-98 is a series of computers by NEC, which was a popular computing platform in Japan. There were many interesting games created for the PC-98. Your average PC-98 emulation user in 4chan is likely to be a first-generation Touhou Project player. For better reference and understanding it's recommended to see its page on Touhou Wiki and Wikipedia:NEC_PC-9801.

Since not every one is real OG enough to have one of these computers from when they were first produced or buy one off the internet, here's a list of a few emulators for the PC-98:

• Anex86
• Neko Project II
• PC98e
• T98-NEXT

And here's some games other than 2hus.

Screen capture

For basic needs, Windows 11 comes with a simple built in screen-recorder you can bring up with Win + Shift + S.

Otherwise, Open Broadcaster Software is good quality free and open source software for recording and live streaming.

What does /g/ use?

• OS: Windows 10 / 11 IoT LTSC Enterprise.
• Web Browser: See Web browsers
• IRC: Terminal based, Weechat or Irssi.
• VoIP: Discord
• File Compression: 7-Zip
• Maintenance: BleachBit
• Image viewer: JPEGview
• Media Player: mpv
• Document Reader: Your browser.
• Text Editor: Neovim, Emacs or Visual Studio Code.
• Package Manager: Winget + Chocolatey or Scoop
• Antivirus: Windows Security and/or Malwarebytes

See also

• List of recommended macOS software
• List of recommended GNU/Linux software
• List of recommended Android software

External links

• Prism Break - Lists software for different platforms that respect your freedom (and points out those which do not). Maintained by the EFF.