What are some free alternatives to Proprietary programs that are used everyday?

Now you know my feeling Elfin. Try doing that in a folder with thousands of files. Window's own file manager is trash, it legit takes the application to "think" before listing all of the files. Everything doesn't seem to care. If I wanted to, I could queue up that entire folder's contents into the program and it wouldn't even blink. Everything updates realtime as well. It will automatically refresh the database whenever you create new files or delete files too!

I'm glad you find it very helpful as well, because it's legit helped me since I began using it over 5 years ago!

You can actually do something "similar" to bookmarking. You create an "Everything File List". I can DM you an example of what I mean.

I was mistaken Elfin. Yes, there are bookmarks in Everything. I misread your question and I sent you a video in a DM showcasing the bookmark feature.

Also, Everything is not open-source. 😅

Plex Servers are a godsend

What about mega?

What's mega? Not the cloud service? That's not free.

Maybe not entirely, but it gives a heck of a lot more space for free than, say, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox do. I think I have something like 105GiB available in Mega, whereas I only have 17GiB available in Google Drive.

so if u can get bonus's which gives u extra free storage soo u can get 5Gib more if u install the app on the pc , on the phone and verify ur phone number and invite someone (5Gib per each bonus)
you start off with 15Gib free
no adverts and a subscription if u want it but dont need it and no forcing on u (top tier is around 35* dollars a month for 16tb of storage or 7* a month dollars for 1tb)

*converted from pounds

On Google Drive you have 15GB by default, on MEGA you have 50GB, I think (or GiB maybe, not sure). But yeah, I guess it's referrals and such that caused wafflecoffee to have more.
Edit: Oh. I did some research to make sure, and I guess I was mistaken. Huh, this sounds rather bad. :$

I would like to issue a public announcement:

I would highly recommend against using Audacity. Audacity has been owned by Muse for a bit now and recently they have released an update with a new privacy policy. Now Audacity collects information on you without any ability to stop it (except shutting off your network connection).



This is a very unfortunate move they made on a very popular audio recording/editing program. Luckily you can circumvent this by a few ways:

1. Do not upgrade to the latest build of Audacity.
2. Use a "Forked" version of Audacity that is community-ran. It's still open source, it just lacks the telemetry.
3. Use a different program in it's place, such as Ardour, Wavepad, etc.

I cannot say that I'm surprised, since this seems to be a very popular trend with many companies these days. It's just very sad to see one of the most beloved programs out there get the "corporate 'Whack!'" with telemetry... :\

(Credit to WaffleCoffee for catching a major spelling error in my post, thank you so much for catching it!!! ^^

I’d be careful grouping Muse in with this category of ‘corporate whack’.

Most companies are using your data to sell you things. They’ll collect data on your favourite dog breed, your kinks, your wain’s favourite baby food, whatever you’re using their platform to access and they’ll put you in a category; said category then gets advertising spots worth a few bob, your data might even get sold on to someone who’d be better suited to categorise you, and that’ll be as far as it goes. You are not interesting, your life as a whole is not that interesting, you’ll be sorted into some mundane category and you’re nothing but a money vehicle delivering from Point A to Point B who needs help getting to Point B. The FBI and the CIA aren’t keeping tabs on you with it and if they are building a profile on you they’re definitely not doing it through this route.

Unlike Audacity, most companies are not giving away your data to numerous amounts of mysterious third parties, and they’re certainly not giving it away to the Russian Government with the intent of weakening western national security.

I feel like this might warrant its own thread, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, here is an article about the matter, for other people who do not fancy watching a YouTube video to gather information.
https://mashable.com/article/audacity-spyware-privacy-policy
This does sound mildly concerning, so if I ever have to install Audacity on a new machine, I think I'll get version 3.0.2.

I agree with this post. This could potentially deserve a thread of it's own, but I'll let someone else do it since I do not have the interest, nor time, to do it myself. I am just merely asking others to take caution when downloading Audacity from the official website. --- Things have changed since my recommendation about the program a few weeks prior to today.

I'm glad to see you are taking the precautions that you feel are appropriate 607!

There is 0 reason for Audacity to have telemetry. No one was asking for it and the program was not in dire needs of it in any way, shape, or form. If it legit is of 0 interest to them, why implement it in the first place? It's just a waste of electricity, time and resources if "useless" data is being collected and processed by massive data centers if it's not going to be used for anything. Most companies collect telemetry data for a purpose, and Audacity is... unfortunately... no longer an exception to this rule...

I spoke to people who have used Audacity for over a decade (as have I) and they're confused why it's even being implemented (again, so am I...). Telemetry and tracking is one of the main reasons why Windows 10 is hated, and now there's a reason to hate Muse for doing this.

I'll stick to the community-ran fork of Audacity that preserves the original image of Audacity, without telemetry...

(Or I'll switch to Ardour. I'll have to think about that, since Ocenaudio is suiting most of my needs anyways)

I just wanted to bump this to emphasise that everyone using Windows should get Everything. It is so useful. Don't know whether you saved something on your SSD, or your hard drive, or not at all? Using Windows' file explorer, it would take you an hour or two to find out. Using Everything, it will take you less than 20 seconds, if you've used the program before. And even when you run it first time it is extremely quick.

Yes, definitely.

Also, while we're on the topic of Windows add-ons: PowerToys.

That's cute! I installed it.
I think I could probably get some use out of PowerRename.