An operating system is only as good as the apps you can run on it, but some apps go beyond that and end up defining the operating system. You seek them out, usually on day one of setting up a new PC, because Windows just feels incomplete without them. Here are three such apps that are so good that they define their entire categories — earning them the title of “greatest of all time.”

Most of us put a lot of thought into the big applications we base our workflows around — the video editors, the note-taking apps, the image editors — and almost none into the system-facing apps we use every day. However, those applications make up a huge chunk of our day-to-day experience and deserve more thought than they get. This is especially true right now, as tons of high-quality free and open-source apps have emerged that easily offer a better experience than most of your system defaults. Here are three such FOSS apps to replace your Windows defaults.

I've been an Arch user for five years, and it's been a love-hate relationship. I love having access to the AUR (Arch User Repository) and the hundreds of thousands of packages it brings with it, along with access to bleeding-edge updates as soon as they drop. But at the same time, I hate it when a buggy update just wrecks my system, not to mention the current malware mess with the AUR and all the headaches that come with it.

Conventional wisdom says that if something costs money, it's probably better than a free alternative. However, that logic completely falls apart when it comes to software — especially with free and open-source software (FOSS). The space has matured to the point where many free apps don't just compete with their paid counterparts — they beat them outright. Here are my top five picks for legendary open-source software that give their expensive paid alternatives a run for their money.

Claude and ChatGPT are where most of us started with AI, and once you discover what they can do, it’s only natural to put them to work beyond the chat window. That means plugging them into other tools and harnesses through their APIs. But once you do, Claude and ChatGPT stop being a simple $20 subscription and start behaving like metered utilities that can quietly run you hundreds of dollars a month, depending on what your automations are doing.

I know I can’t be the only one who hates how almost everything has become a subscription now. Fortunately, the issue is primarily isolated to popular mainstream software — there’s still a lot of niche software that’s just as good, if not better, that hasn’t moved to the subscription model. This is particularly true in the open-source space, which is filled with genuinely excellent apps that can help you ditch many of your paid subscriptions without losing most of the benefits. Here are three such FOSS apps that I personally used to replace some of my paid subscriptions.

Have you ever wondered why Arch Linux users can’t stop mentioning that they use Arch, by the way? Did you want to try Arch Linux yourself, but then saw the technically demanding installation process and told yourself, “Oh, that’s why”? Well, I’m happy to tell you that Arch Linux is no longer as hard to install as it used to be — and hasn’t been for some time now. Even if you don’t come from a technical background, you can install and set up Arch in an afternoon.

Arch Linux has a reputation for being an operating system you build for yourself rather than one that comes built for you. That’s genuinely its biggest strength, since you get to build a hyper-personalized system where every component is there because you chose it. At the same time, it’s also its biggest weakness, because you need to know how to build and manage the thing. That said, not all Arch distros are the same, and some require more babysitting than others. As such, here’s my list of the top 5 Arch options and Arch-based distros, ranked from the neediest to the least needy.

The cd command, short for “change directory,” is one of the most fundamental commands on Linux. It’s how you navigate the Linux terminal — moving between different working directories. That said, cd is an old-school way to navigate the Linux file system, and several modern alternatives have emerged that make the process faster and easier. Here’s a modern cd replacement that can help you navigate your file system with less typing and less guesswork.

For most people, a 25-year-old video patent expiring sounds like a piece of legal housekeeping that has nothing to do with their computers. But for Linux users, it removes one more obstacle that has historically made something as basic as playing a video more complicated than it should be. Here’s everything you need to know and what this means about your media usage.

If you’ve tried to build a second brain — one place to store all your ideas and retrieve them when necessary — you probably already know that it’s easier said than done. I’ve made multiple attempts at building a second brain myself, but ultimately failed because of all the effort required to maintain it. What finally made it stick was Obsidian, its Daily Notes feature, and a handful of free community plugins.