In my last report I gave a list of useful utility software I use regularly. Everything in that list is cross-platform for Linux and Windows. For this report I'll be going over everything I've found to make Windows 10 more useful and get out of the way as much as possible.
I'll be linking things as I go along but everything will be listed at the bottom as well.
My previous version of Windows was 7 and after that in the last 4 years was Linux so my everyday knowledge of Windows 10 itself was pretty much none at all. The most I knew was from screenshots, snappy headline article or simply hearsay; The way Windows 10 loaded up the start menu with junk and all the extra Windows Store related apps that behaved a lot like Snaps from Ubuntu. Something that attempted to replace the base software, such as a calculator with the "store" version, I personally dislike this approach for something as straight forward as a calculator, or any basic pre-loaded program for that matter. First thing I looked up was the editions Windows came in as that will at least give me a direction. The de facto Home, Pro, Education & Enterprise showed up but also noticed this one in particular called LTSC, It's an enterprise version that is heavily stripped down to the point where it even lacks the store. Well sign me up!
Yeah getting a hold of a real copy isn't possible unless you're a certified enterprise customer as it's for ATMs and so on. Well that just fueled me further. Finding the direct ISO link from Microsoft themselves isn't exactly hiding anywhere so that was easy. As it was the evaluation copy, I wasn't cracking into anything and about all Microsoft will do is slap a watermark on the bottom of your screen, silently judging you. Once it was booted up, it was so... empty, I loved it. No store, no preinstalled garbage, just so very empty. Another detail is that the LTSC version will not download feature updates, you know the ones that break everything in sight. Only security updates for this version, slightly less breakage. But I knew in the back of my mind that something like this could break a game or a program as it could be missing a module or service it depended on and that would get annoying quickly. Just this looming thought that would be waiting to bite me later bothers me.
From here I took my older Windows knowledge and what I'd do before would edit the registry or something along that lines, there has to be something like that for 10 right? So I searched for Windows 10 modifications to find everything was Powershell! Powershell all the things!
First promising script that came up is a de-bloat powershell script from https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater this was great to find as it gave me some insight as to how far Windows 10 can be stripped down. I kept looking and found https://christitus.com/ who made a guide using the Sycnex script but then also made his own https://christitus.com/windows-10-scripts/ later on with details he was looking for. Reading over the details he added gave me a whole bunch of new information and programs to use for Windows 10. One of the major useful things with running powershell scripts is that with a new install of Windows 10, I don't even have to open a single browser to get started with downloading Firefox, then go to ninite and make a collection to download then fuss with Windows while it downloads. It does it all, right away. With the script I was able to get an LTSC-ish version of windows from a home edition no problem!
Another nice detail of the Chris Titus script is that you can tell windows to not load in the newest feature upgrade of Windows for 3 years, let everyone else run into whatever new problems arise, only security updates! Gee why would anyone not trust the newest updates? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/nvidia-staff-suggests-rolling-back-windows-10-update-to-fix-game-issues/ My tinfoil hat hums with excitement over this script. In all seriousness, with the wide scope in the ways people use their computers, updates that are just a new set of features perhaps just a small amount of users will use anyway is not really that beneficial to inconvenience everyone gets. This is a great feature I think more people should use to prevent a lot of headache over these sorts of snags.
Some of the following stuff is within https://christitus.com/windows-10-scripts/
O&O Shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 All the privacy and telemetry stuff can be quickly disabled within this program, an extra thing I love to use this for is to disable auto download of drivers, I find that super handy for fussing with hardware and need to install older drivers. Or more in my case, keeping Windows from downloading the "newest" driver to muck everything up that was running perfectly fine before.
Chocolatey https://chocolatey.org/ A package manager, for Windows! This was a huge thing for me as in the back of my mind I was dreading the thought of all these programs I'd have to either download a new executable for every now and then or for it to annoy me with an auto update pop-up. This is such a quality of life thing that brought a sigh of relief for me, I really dreaded about it as this was something Linux distros do a fantastic job at. Now do be warned this isn't perfect as there are some programs in here that are wildly out of date, not very many, just something to keep an eye out for. But then there are major advantages as it helps you find the download to a program that might be a major pain in the ass to find on the official website.
Bulk Crap Uninstaller https://www.bcuninstaller.com/ From the start you've always needed something to help uninstall a program all the way, just one of them Windows things that never seems to go away. Select all the garbage and just be careful not to hit the dumb restart button in that ONE program midway through.
Hourglass https://chris.dziemborowicz.com/apps/hourglass/ Sometimes you just need a simple clean timer and not a phone app.
Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ The default notepad in Windows just never cuts it, Notepad++ out of the box just works. Bonus feature; It keeps all your tabs in memory so even if you close it and haven't saved, they are still there. Used this in the past and still works well today.
Looking at the next few items on my list is invoking a bit of a rant. I'd like to bring up WSL, Windows Subsystem for Linux. When first looking at this I was overjoyed as I'd be able to keep doing the fussy terminal things I knew how to do now within Windows in a Ubuntu terminal shell. Yes! Well also, no. How I imagined it working was a bit like the command prompt or powershell within Windows, but it's more of a self enclosed environment with it's own rules that don't play nice with Windows. First I had to hunt down what directory it was even installed in. Fine, I thought, just make a shortcut and that's done with that. I was using it originally as a quick n dirty way to use youtube-dl along with ffmpeg to do converts or export out an audio track from multitrack video as I record in OBS with both a system sound and a mic sound track in separate channels and like to master the mic audio separately. It was unusable, the moment I did any edits to a file in explorer I was unable to touch it with the WSL Linux terminal.
Looking through Chocolatey I found that youtube-dl and ffmpeg can be directly installed, so that's what I did and now I just go into powershell, most of what I know of bash seems to work just fine in powershell so fairly effortless on my part. Some time after this though I started messing with building custom keyboards using QMK, now you could setup a build environment within Windows itself to build the firmware or wait several minutes for the QMK site to build it for you, or even better, just download the QMK MSYS CLI https://msys.qmk.fm/ It's just Arch Linux in a tiny bottle and it's adorable. Built from the base of https://www.msys2.org/ This works way more smoothly than the WSL does, but keep in mind it won't have all the packages you might be used to. At this point for me updating things through Chocolatey and using powershell just worked right away. Wanted to mention MSYS it as I'm sure someone might find it useful for a quick n dirty terminal. Improvements will keep happening to WSL along with being able to launch GUI apps. That will be fun to play with in the future but for now getting things going in powershell seems to be working just fine.
Something I did want is a dedicated program for SSH, so here is old reliable; PuTTY https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ used this in the past mainly for COM serial stuff with repairing routers so I already knew about it.
The Gnome desktop spoiled me with fantastic addons and sadly the customization levels of Windows 10 is way less than it used to be from say XP days, even 7 was limited but not as much as 10. One tool in particular was the aptly named "screenshot tool" from oal https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1112/screenshot-tool/ a nice and simple screenshot tool that isn't going to make a loud shutter sound and flash the entire screen white. Why do you do this all Linux desktops? I don't understand. Well to my delight there is ShareX https://getsharex.com/ While it has a lot of extras that I'm sure are super useful, I'm able to set it up to be simple, and was even able to setup my original hotkeys, PrtSc for the whole screen, no prompt or sound or flash just take the damn screenshot and save it as png. PrtSc + Shift to screenshot a region of my selection and PrtSc + Ctrl to screenshot my active window. I'm sure later I'll setup another modify key to copy directly to the clipboard.
Now for something I'm delighted yet upset for not finding earlier, VeraCrypt https://veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html Now I don't mean the software it self, I was already aware of it and used it for drives I was traveling with. I was also aware that I could use it to encrypt the boot drive of Windows but for whatever reason I automatically thought that this involved some massive setup before even installing Windows. Nope, you can encrypt the drive Windows is installed on at any time. The reason this upset me so much was that one of the major reasons I refused to use Windows any more is that while upgrading my laptop to Windows 10 it required me to make a Microsoft account to keep my system encrypted so Microsoft could "keep it safe and backed up for me" I didn't like that at all and found later that bitlocker at one point simply relied on the encryption of the disk itself https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/flaws-in-popular-ssd-drives-bypass-hardware-disk-encryption/ rather than generating it's own keys. Sure this has been fixed now but at the time it just fed into my tinfoil hat. But don't worry there is always a new way to mess it up somehow! https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-secure-boot-update-triggers-bitlocker-key-recovery/
Coming back to my laptop I wanted some way to encrypt it, so looking again at the options in the Veracrypt manual only to discover it essentially does what bitlocker in Windows does. You'll have to make sure you laptop can boot from 3rd party certs but it works the same way. Encrypts the drive via the SSD hardware but with it's own keys. There is the fact you'll have to enter in a password at boot or from hibernate that is separate from the Windows login but I'm already used to that from the way Linux handles an encrypted boot drive. You'll find this function in System -> Encrypt System Partition/Drive. What would of been my move if I knew of this option before all this 4 years ago? I really don't know but glad to know about it now.
There are plenty of RSS programs but here is QuiteRSS https://quiterss.org/ nice and simple, just the way I like it.
Normally PuTTY is enough for a quick SSH but there are times I need to look around files in detail which is where WinSCP https://winscp.net comes in. Sometimes Samba breaks, sometimes I just need to look at the jails directory structure to find why something isn't working. Very handy tool.
The default image viewer in Windows was always lacking, and with the debloat script letting me go full nuke option on everything Windows store app related, it removes the default image viewer anyway. In it's place comes IrafanView https://www.irfanview.com/ does the job just fine and is skinable. I also like being able to make a quick selection, copy it and paste it into a chat program fairly quickly. Another notable image-viewer is ImageGlass https://imageglass.org/
Sidebar Diagnostics https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics is a hardware info panel. It puts itself all the way to the right which fits how I put the taskbar along the left side of my screen rather than the bottom. Minor note, if you run games in a non-native resolution the sidebar likes to freak out and after closing the game I'm unable to move a window all the way to the right side as if it's still the old resolution. You'll have to refresh the desktop resolution or refresh rate to get rid of that problem.
For my PDF viewing I use SumatraPDF https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf It lacks a lot of official related things like digital signing Adobe Reader does but you can always install both and leave SumatraPDF as the default and use the Adobe one when that sorta thing is needed.
And finally for viewing more in depth detail of hardware info stuff I use both CPU-Z and HWMonitor from https://www.cpuid.com/
While this is mainly for my own personal reference for in the future I hope someone else finds this useful in some way. A lot of the time when messing with computers the biggest hurdle is simply finding what you're looking for which results in a lot of wasted time. This gets even worse as the software being promoted or talked about from others, is just the well known names anyway. It might do what you need but often times it comes with a truck load of stuff you don't need. Photoshop is a great example, there is so much "stuff" that comes with using it, even outside of Photoshop itself the Creative Cloud program is entirely unnecessary. But because it's so well known even to the point where something being photoshoped is a verb listed in dictionary's puts it in a prime position to be what you use because that's what "everyone" uses.
Now I wouldn't blame anyone for expecting me to say just go open source and grab Krita or GIMP and ditch the Adobe stuff for good. I enjoy using primarily open source stuff as often times I don't have to worry about the rules being changed in some future version for a subscription model. This isn't always the case though and easy to spot if it is. I'm still using FL-Studio after what I think is 8 years now, paid for it once and they offer all future version for free. This is getting more rare but is still something you can find out there. My point being that use whatever you're most happy with, if it's getting in your way more than you'd like then perhaps take a visit to https://alternativeto.net/ and see if there is something else.
Windows 10 Debloater - https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater
Chris Titus Tech - https://christitus.com/
CTT Windows 10 Script - https://christitus.com/windows-10-scripts/
O&O shutup - https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Chocolatey Package Manager - https://chocolatey.org/
Bulk Crap Uninstaller - https://www.bcuninstaller.com/
Hourglass - https://chris.dziemborowicz.com/apps/hourglass/
Notepad++ - https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
QMK MSYS - https://msys.qmk.fm/
MSYS2 - https://www.msys2.org/
PuTTY - https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
Gnome Screenshot Tool - https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1112/screenshot-tool/
ShareX - https://getsharex.com/
Veracrypt - https://veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html
QuiteRSS - https://quiterss.org/
WinSCP - https://wintcp.net
IrfanView - https://www.irfanview.com/
ImageGlass - https://imageglass.org/
Sidebar Diagnostics - https://github.com/ArcadeRenegade/SidebarDiagnostics
SumatraPDF - https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf
CPU-Z & HWMonitor - https://www.cpuid.com/
Disclamer, I'm not being paid or affiliated with any group or anyone mentioned here.