So I was setting up this new laptop, and after security updates I went on cleaning the trash through Powershell, and after removing all unwanted packages I was going to let a note on the desktop and there was no Notepad in the context menu… oops, I messed up I thought, I must have removed stuff I shouldn’t, so just to be safe I did a factory reset and this time read very carefully every package before removing, and again no Notepad! And I notice there was no Paint nor Calculator either… so turn out new Win11 is shipped with Outlook, Maps, Solitaire Collection, People (whatever the hell that is), and even some IE, Zune and Skype legacy packages, but not with Notepad?! You actually have to download it from Microsoft Store… and now they all come with Copilot lol
Anyway, this sounds like a great opportunity to look for some FOSS alternatives!
What do you guys use and recommend?
cudatext as a notepad replacement. It’s closer to a full featured text editor, but is very quick to startup with no extensions installed.
I have no idea about replacing paint, but irfanview for simple viewing, cropping, resizing, swapping formats, etc.
For calculator stuff I sometimes just open the Python REPL. If you know the language (even a little bit) it does all the things and more. Every time I try to use the Windows calculator it annoys me trying to find the right button and them accidently putting another operator instead of equal or vice versa.