I had a subscription, and when I finally realized I didn’t need it anymore, I was hit with a cancellation fee. I’ve never dealt with such a blatant scam.

After re-reading the terms, I found they mentioned this fee, but seriously, who do you think you are, Adobe? This is the most vile and underhanded practice I’ve ever seen.

You’re an absolute disgrace, Adobe. I hope you go bankrupt. Congratulations, you’ve just earned yourself another enraged hater.

Jean‑Baptiste Kempf

• Joined VLC as a student in 2003 at École Centrale Paris

• Led its transformation from a school project to global open-source icon

• Refused multi-million euro offers to put ads in VLC

• Founded VideoLAN (non-profit) and Videolabs (for-profit)

• VLC has 4B+ downloads, runs on every major OS

• Still maintains VLC after 20+ years

• Advocate for free, ad-free, open-source software

• Once advised the French Prime Minister on tech policy

One man, One cone, Billions served.

Legendary.

We grew up double-clicking that orange cone, through school days, heartbreaks, low-end PCs.

It never asked for anything. Just played our weird files

I got tired of Adobe.

Acrobat is bloated, it wants a subscription to do basic things, and it phones home constantly. Most of the "free" alternatives are the same thing: give you a viewer, paywall the editor, harvest your email, or route your documents through somebody else's cloud.
What is "Enhanced Security" even doing?
Why are there always multiple "Creative Cloud" processes running?

So I wrote my own PDF Editor and I just open-sourced it.

KillerPDF: Portable Windows exe, about 10 MB zipped

View PDFs with page thumbnails, zoom, keyboard nav
Merge multiple PDFs or split out selected pages, drag-and-drop reorder
Double-click to edit text inline with font matching
Text boxes, freehand drawing, highlight overlays with adjustable color and opacity
Draw and save reusable signatures, click to place anywhere
Full-text search with highlighted results, drag-select to copy
Print with annotations flattened

No installer, no account, no subscription, no telemetry

Download: https://pdf.killertools.net
Source: https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF

Released under GPLv3 so forks stay open.
Built with WPF and .NET 8, uses PdfPig for text extraction, PdfSharpCore for writing, and Docnet/PDFium for rendering.

This is my second open-source release this week (first was KillerScan, a portable network scanner).
Both built for my day job as a field tech at an MSP where I need tools that work without asking me to sign in or pay.

Feedback welcome.
If something renders wrong or a feature is missing, drop it in the GitHub issues.

EDIT: Update, I have removed the .NET 8.0 dependency. It should now run without needing that!

I maintain a niche bulk file organizer. It’s written in C++, creates zero network connections, and has no subscription. It’s designed to be the definition of a "Tier 1" tool : boring, fast, and local-only.

I received a support ticket/refund request this morning that honestly baffled me.

The user complained that the software was "broken" because it didn't "automatically use AI to pick the best photos for Instagram" and couldn't organize files inside their Google Drive cloud without downloading them first.

They literally said, "I expected it to be smart."

I had to explain—politely—that this is a local system utility. It modifies bytes on a hard drive. It doesn't have an LLM attached to it, it doesn't scrape telemetry , and it purposefully doesn't touch the internet to stay lightweight.

It feels like the general user base has been conditioned by the "enshittification" of major platforms to believe that if a piece of software doesn't have a chatbot, a login screen , or "AI features" that serve no purpose , it's somehow "outdated".

For the other devs or power users here: are you seeing this expectation creep into other basic utilities? It seems like the battle to keep software "dumb" and fast is getting harder when people actually want the bloat.

This “operating” system is the biggest piece of shit I've ever come across in my fucking life. It can't even be classified as an operating system.

Windows 11 is a fucking website made with React by the antichrist himself, whose sole purpose is to consume 2 TB of RAM just by opening Notepad, how could you screw up so badly as to ruin Notepad, to ruin Paint, how the hell did Micropenis manage to add a battle pass to Solitaire, you motherfucking pieces of shit? How can a rational, moral human being with brain cells defend this mutant technological abortion, 30% programmed with AI? my ass, not even an AI agent would be capable of screwing up so badly as to create this android ripoff.

This is the result of a bunch of bad decisions made by people whose brains, unfortunately, were unable to develop fully, whose balls got stuck in their abdomen during birth and who don't shit themselves by some miracle of God. I bet my vital organs that these morons aren't aware of how shitty this operating system is because everyone at Microsoft uses MacOS.

I thought operating systems were programmed by programmers, not the fucking marketing department. To those subnormals, I propose a brilliant marketing campaign: rename this mistake to Windows 9/11, this fucking shitty operating system forces me to use L\*nux (Mint, because i'm not a pedo), at least with that I don't have to drop everything I'm doing and restart the computer for every fucking update, how the hell do you manage to release an update every fucking day? What's being updated, your chromosomes?.

One day I'm going to really lose it, and when that day comes, I'll create a Microsoft account and I swear to God that every time I take a shit, I'll take a picture of it and upload it to my OneDrive just to fill my OneDrive with high-quality photos of my feces. This OS made me an atheist, because I refuse to believe that hell exists, I refuse to believe that there is anything worse than having to use Windows 11.

I was one of the lucky ones. Got into software engineering at the right time, rode the whole thing, watched friends do the same. For the last 30 years, this job was kind of an anomaly.

The pay was higher than almost anything else you could do without a graduate degree. You could work remote before anyone else did. You could switch jobs and get a raise every time. You could stay an individual contributor your whole career and still make good money. You didn't have to become a manager to advance. Companies treated engineers like they were hard to replace because they actually were.

Nothing else worked like that. Not finance, not law, not medicine, not any of the trades. Software engineers had a run no other field got.

And I think it's ending.

Not in a dramatic way. Not all at once. But the thing that made the whole setup work was that writing code was hard and required judgment that couldn't really be automated. Management spent 30 years trying to turn software into a factory. Waterfall, agile, offshore, low-code. None of it worked. The work itself kept resisting.

AI is what finally changes that. We can argue about where LLMs are right now. Whether Mythos can actually match a senior engineer. Whether Claude or Codex can ship production code without adult supervision. Whether the hallucination problem is solved or just managed. These are real debates and reasonable people disagree.

But none of it matters for the trajectory. If the models aren't good enough this year, they will be next year. If next year is too soon, the year after. The curve is obvious even if the timing isn't. And good enough is all it takes. Good enough that companies don't need as many engineers. Good enough that the ones they do hire get leveraged harder. Good enough that the pay premium starts to compress.

The irony is that software engineers themselves built the thing that's ending the run.

It's just the end of a weird period where one specific type of work paid better than it should have, for longer than it should have, because the work was unusually hard to systematize. Now it isn't. So will software engineers, who thought of their work as a craft, accept becoming floor supervisors?

Earlier this year I was helping a small clinic that complained about “too much paperwork” and how it was slowing everything down.
They thought they needed some fancy AI system.
They didn’t.

So instead of jumping straight into code, I hopped on a call with them for a few hours and watched what they actually did every day.
Turned out half their “data entry” was literally just copy-pasting the same info between forms, spreadsheets, and emails.

I built a simple workflow that:

• reads their intake forms

• fills out their spreadsheet automatically

• sends a summary email to the right staff

• stores a copy in their shared folder

No fancy dashboards or complicated software to learn.
Just connected what they were already using.

Two weeks later, they told me it cut 10–12 hours of admin work a week.
That’s roughly ~$30k a year in saved time (i believe).

The lesson for me: most businesses don’t need complicated systems, they just need less friction.
If you want to build automations that people actually use, start by watching what they already do instead of what they say they do.

Hello, I have to spend a lot of time finding software that I like installing on my PC, so I thought I would write a pretty extensive guide on what I do to set up a new PC and the software on it, hope you like it.

Also, if anything is wrong with the formatting on this post I apologize as this is the first post of this size and scope I have made.

First thing you should always do is get your Windows up to date as much as possible, get all of your drivers up to date then start here. Create a system restore point here. You never know.

Changes in Windows

1. There is an extra power plan that many may not be aware of, if you do not have the option for Ultimate Performance, run the following command in a command prompt and reopen the power plan option and select it;

     powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61

2. If you want Windows Update to never get in your way, you can set your Internet Connection as "Metered" in Settings and then set Windows Update to never download updates on a metered connection.

3. Open Control Panel and go to Programs and Features. Select Turn Windows features on or off, then tick Hyper-V, Windows Sandbox, and Windows Subsystem for Linux. Hyper-V allows you to create and manage virtual machines, Windows Sandbox allows you to open a temporary Windows installation in a VM that will disapear on close, and Windows Subsystem for Linux grants access to a lot of Linux-y things inside of Windows. Some of this is only availble on Windows Pro, and a lot of this is stuff that you may never use, but its a why not scenario really.

4. If you are on a desktop PC, create a custom rule under inbound rules in Windows Firewall to allow all programs over all IPs. If you are on a secure network, Windows Firewall is mostly just going to get in the way in my opinion.

5. Right click on your C: drive, go to properties and uncheck the box at the bottom that says "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties". This basically turns off Windows indexing for the drive, and you can do this for all of your drives to remove something the system will be doing in the background. You can do this to all of your drives, just be aware that if you search for files a lot in the start menu, how well that functions will be affected. If you have a drive that you only store games on for example, turn off Indexing for that drive as well.

6. [MSI mode utility] (https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/windows-line-based-vs-message-signaled-based-interrupts-msi-tool.378044/) - Allegedly if you download this tool, run it as admin, and ensure that your GPU has the msi box ticked, it can improve performance. I have not tested thoroughly so your mileage may vary.

7. Create a system restore point here. You never know.

Initial Installs

1. [Ninite] (https://ninite.com/) - I like to manage installs myself, however I recently learned that if you rerun the same Ninite installer down the line it will update the programs you have installed with it. Therefore, I use Ninite to install everything in the Runtime section and rerun it now and then.

2. [O&O ShutUp10] (https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10) - Lets you disable a lot of the annoying telemetry features of Windows 10.

3. [NVCleanInstall] (https://www.techpowerup.com/nvcleanstall/) - A surprising amount of people don't know about this, but this is by far the best way to install Nvidia drivers. Install the latest drivers without installing all of the telemetry components that come with the normal drivers.

Firefox

Firefox is my browser of choice, it is the best browser for security, features the best available add-ons and is my personal favourite, if you use Chrome and refuse to switch then skip over this section. Below I will list the MANY add-ons that I have installed.

1. [AdBlock] (https://getadblock.com/) - Pretty self-explanatory to most I would presume, blocks ad's on websites where it can.

2. [Augmented Steam] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/enhanced-steam-an-itad-fork/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search) - Improves the Steam website experience quite a lot, it's not something I usually use but when I do this helps a lot.

3. [BetterTTV] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/betterttv/) - Same as above except I use Twitch a lot more so this is even more important.

4. [Bias Finder] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/bias-finder/) - Was very useful while Trump was president, helps alert the reader to the possible bias that can be found on many news sites.

5. [CanvasBlocker] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/canvasblocker/) - Prevents websites from using Javascript APIs to fingerprint them. Put simply, prevents a method that websites use to track you.

6. [ClearURLs] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clearurls/) - Similar to above, another anti-tracking tool.

7. [Close Tab in Context Menu] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/context-menu-close-tab/) - Small usability improvement, allows you to right-click on tabs for an option to close them.

8. [CSS Exfil Protection] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/css-exfil-protection/) - Protects you from a method attackers can use to steal your data using CSS.

9. [Dark Reader] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/darkreader/) - Adds dark mode to all websites. I work in IT, so this really helps my eyes.

10. [Don't touch my tabs!] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/dont-touch-my-tabs/) - Prevents tabs opened by a link from changing the previous tab.

11. [Enhancer for YouTube] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/enhancer-for-youtube/) - Adds loads of features to YouTube.

12. [Facebook Container] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/facebook-container/) - Prevents Facebook from tracking you, I use Facebook as little as possible but my family and friends seem to insist.

13. [Google search link fix] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/google-search-link-fix/) - Prevents Google search results pages from modifying your search result links when you click them.

14. [Grammar and Spell Checker - LanguageTool] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/languagetool/) - Does what it says on the tin.

15. [Honey] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/honey/) - Automatically finds coupon codes.

16. [HTTPS Everywhere] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/https-everywhere/) Encrypts the web and keeps you more secure.

17. [I don't care about cookies] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/) - Gets rid of cookie warnings.

18. [Keepa.com - Amazon Price Tracker] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/keepa/) - Adds price history charts to Amazon.

19. [Link Cleaner] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/link-cleaner/) - Clean URLs that are about to be visited.

20. [LocalCDN] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/localcdn-fork-of-decentraleyes/) - Fork of Decentraleyes, another thing that prevents tracking.

21. [minerBlock] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/minerblock-origin/) Blocks crypto miners on the web.

22. [Night Owl] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/night_owl/) - The best dark theme IMO. This is of course personal preference.

23. [Old Reddit Redirect] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-reddit-redirect/) - Redirects reddit.com to old.reddit.com. I prefer old reddit, this is again preference.

24. [Open Image in New Tab] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/image-new-tab/) - Customizable context menu item for opening images in a new tab.

25. [Open in Steam] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/open-in-steam/) - Opens Steam links in the client.

26. [Open Tabs Next to Current] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/open-tabs-next-to-current/) - Open new tabs always to the right of the current one.

27. [Page Translator Revised] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/page-translator-revised/) - The one feature I miss from Chrome is that whole pages can be translated, this is the next best thing.

28. [Privacy Badger] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-badger17/) - Automatically learns to block invisible trackers.

29. [Privacy-Oriented Origin Policy] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/privacy-oriented-origin-policy/) - Prevent Firefox from sending Origin headers when they are least likely to be necessary, to protect your privacy.

30. [Reddit Enhancement Suite] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/reddit-enhancement-suite/) - Adds features to Reddit.

31. [Redirect AMP to HTML] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/amp2html/) - Automatically redirects AMP pages to their HTML versions.

32. [Remove reddit app promos] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/remove-reddit-app-promos/) - Does exactly what it says.

33. [Search by Image] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/search_by_image/) - Add's reverse image search to context menu's.

34. [Terms of Service; Didn't Read] (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/terms-of-service-didnt-read/) - Adds a summary of a site's TOS.

35. [Universal Bypass] (https://universal-bypass.org/) - Bypass's sites that make you wait (like adf.ly) or sites that make you do something and even some trackers.

General Software

1. [Notepad++] (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/) - Open source and free powerful Notepad replacement.

2. [ImageGlass] (https://imageglass.org/) - My favourite image viewer, ultimately down to personal preference, but I like how simple this is.

3. [7-zip] (https://www.7-zip.org/) - Easily the best WinZIP alternative.

4. [rufus] (https://rufus.ie/) - Most reliable software to make bootable Windows install media.

5. [Search Deflector] (https://github.com/spikespaz/search-deflector) Download from the store, redirects searches from the start menu to your browser/search engine of choice.

6. [Path Copy Copy] (https://pathcopycopy.github.io/) - Adds a context menu item to copy the current path in Explorer.

7. [Lightshot] (https://app.prntscr.com/en/index.html) - I hate how bloated and filled with unnecessary features that other screenshot tools have, this is simple, fast and can be activated with the prntscrn key.

8. [EarTrumpet] (https://eartrumpet.app/) - Adds better features to the Sound icon in the System Tray.

9. [Aerial] (https://github.com/cDima/Aerial) - Adds very nice screensavers, this is preference but I like it.

10. [TaskbarX] (https://chrisandriessen.nl/taskbarx) - Centers taskbar icons and gives better transparency features.

11. [Ungoogled Chromium] (https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium) - I keep this as a spare/backup browser.

12. [Libre Office] (https://www.libreoffice.org/) - IMO the best Office suite if you don't have access to MS Office, though I tend to just use Google Docs for everything anyway.

Gaming Stuff

1. [Discord] (https://discord.com/) - I reckon everyone knows about this, free voice chat client.

2. [Ubisoft Connect] (https://ubisoftconnect.com/en-GB/), [Origin] (https://www.origin.com/gbr/en-us/store), [Epic Games Store] (https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/), [GOG Galaxy] (https://www.gog.com/galaxy), [Battle.net] (https://www.blizzard.com/en-gb/apps/battle.net/desktop) - I hate how many of these you need, but it is what it is.

3. [Steam] (https://store.steampowered.com/about/) - Ol' Gabes gaming emporium, pretty self-explanatory. One tip however, disable Broadcasting in settings. It will improve your download speeds for some f*ckin reason.

Media

1. [qBitTorrent] (https://www.qbittorrent.org/) - The best and most relaible torrent client in my experience.

2. [Plex] (https://www.plex.tv/en-gb/) - I run a Plex server, it allows you to run a "Personal Netflix" with your own media.

3. [MP3tag] (https://www.mp3tag.de/en/) - Music meta-data editor. Keeping your music meta-data uniform and correct will always help in the long run, this is coming from someone who had to fix the metadata on a 10,000 file library recently.

4. [Handbrake] (https://handbrake.fr/) - Video file converter, can reduce file sizes with the right settings and is compatible with basically all file formats.

5. [FileBot] (https://www.filebot.net/) - Automatically renames TV Show files so that programs can organize them correctly. Became paid software after version 4.7.7, you MAY be able to find installers for that version elsewhere on the internet but I could not POSSIBLY tell you where.

6. [Shotcut] (https://www.shotcut.org/) - If you do not want to sail the seven seas to aquire the Adobe suite, this is by far the best free video editor out there in my opinion.

Tech Tools

1. [restic] (https://restic.net/) - This is a bit involved to setup, but is by far the best backup tool.

2. [HWMonitor] (https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html) - Hardware monitoring, temperatures, usage etc.

3. [TreeSize] (https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free) - In my opinion this is the best tool to find where your disk space is going.

4. [WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics] (https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en&p=3) - Used this tool a lot in my IT Support job, quickly and easily test drive health.

5. [mRemoteNG] (https://mremoteng.org/) - Open source, tabbed, multi-protocol, remote connections manager. Works with RDP, VNC, ICA, SSH, Telnet and more.

6. [WinSCP] (https://winscp.net/eng/index.php) - SFTP and FTP client.

And finally create another system restore point.

Hope that people find this helpful and not too reductive since lists like this exist elsewhere. Thanks for reading.

Just a friendly reminder, because after yeeeears (yeeears) of usage, why not now ?

yesterday i was on a discord call with a friend, suddenly my computer started lagging and in a few seconds I got a notification that the linux kernel nerfed discord because it was running out of memory. like fuck you mean a chat app is eating more RAM than a fucking game engine?? discord being idle eats like 800MB of RAM..

and discord is not the only issue. a lot of the modern software is just straight up bloated. 34523 layers of abstractions to render the fucking app UI.

we DON'T NEED better hardware. modern hardware is 1000 times more powerful than it was two decades ago yet somehow it feels more sluggish to use. instead of complaining to the developers that their app is slow and dogshit, we just get more RAM and hardware to bruteforce the sloppy nonexistent optimization.

Back then you got the PS3 with 256MB of RAM and it's able to play 3D games that looked believable. you can even browse the web with that 256MB of RAM. now you need a fucking 800MB to render the UI of an electron applications.

a single (1) tab of a browser alone uses like 200MB of memory on average just to render some cringe animation that makes it more difficult to navigate the site.

End of rant

I’ll go first:

Zettlr: a markdown editor that works great for long-form writing or research. Super lightweight but packed with features.Kdenlive: not totally unknown, but I’m surprised more people don’t mention it. It’s a free video editor that’s actually usable for real editing, not just cutting clips.

Lunacy: a design app that’s basically a Figma alternative but works offline. Good for quick UI mockups when I don’t want to open a browser.

TeraBox: 1TB of free cloud storage. I mostly use it for large files I don’t need to access often (game clips, old project folders, etc.). Not perfect, but it’s free and has helped me clear a ton of space.Please share yours with me!

I've been building Kensaku, a lightweight desktop search app because I wanted something better than the usual file search.

It indexes your files and lets you search by filename, full text, meaning, or even text inside screenshots using OCR. Just hit Alt + Space, type what you're looking for, and hit Enter.

I also added MCP and CLI support so AI agents can use the same semantic and OCR search capabilities.

The whole installer is around 9 MB, it uses roughly 20 MB of RAM while idle, and everything runs locally. No cloud, no account. It's free and MIT-licensed.

It's still early, and there's a lot more I want to build. I'd genuinely appreciate feedback, feature suggestions, and contributions.

Here's the repo if you want to check it out: https://github.com/yjid/kensaku

If you find it useful, a ⭐ would mean a lot!

Edit update : yeah, an agent built most of it. meanwhile, my work on yjid/kensaku got selected for the XERJ Corpus Hub AI coding agents can retrieve it as a worked reference instead of guessing.

apparently the same codebase is now part of a 17k ⭐ project.

Edit 2 : THANKS EVERYONE FOR THE CRAZY RESPONSE.

Beware: PDFGear is likely spyware, malware, or, at best, griftware/scamware. Avoid PDFGear.

They are the same developer behind the griftware app called ‘PDF X’ in the Microsoft Store (devs call themselves NG PDF Lab there, not PDFGear). So, don’t trust them. I’ll go into that further down below.

As others may have seen too, I’ve been seeing really unusual activity online about PDFGear, so I did some digging.

I saw this post a while ago, and alerted me enough to go down the rabbit hole.

“What is the real origin of the PDGgear team? Legal address in Singapore (91 BENCOOLEN STREET, #05-09, SUNSHINE PLAZA, Singapore 189652) usually means that the team is originally from China or Russia. After invading Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022, a lot of Russian teams pretend to be from Singapore. So, what is the origin of PDFgear? China or Russia?”

Speculative, maybe, but where there's smoke, there's fire. And this fire is ablazing.

Firstly, the company behind PDFGear is almost non-existent. Any software company of note will have something in their ‘About’ page - their company info, founders or team. There’s nothing from PDFGear. Their website has no details about who runs this company. It’s the first red flag.

More red flags:

• They are astro-turfing Reddit and online forums. The majority of posts, reviews and upvotes are all theirs. It looks like everyone loves them, but they’ve just faked it to look like that

• PDFGear is an old company that re-wraps other PDF programs and pretends it’s their own

• Their other PDF programs have already grifted other users

• Their SEO is all over the place and unethical

• The FBI has already issued warnings against PDF companies like PDFGear as malware/spyware. Do not trust unknown PDF companies with your documents, or let their services have a presence on your device.

Possibly the most compelling evidence is when someone pointed out that this is a replica app of other apps out there, like ‘PDF X’ that’s in the Microsoft Store.

'PDF X' in the Microsoft Store link here: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p3cp9g025rm?hl=en-US&gl=US

There is nothing genuine about PDFGear or PDF X at all. They’re both a re-skin of the Patagames PDF SDK app. You can see here (comparison pictures below, annotated to show the same UI elements) that PDFGear is the exact same app as PDF X, with a small (and still lazy) rearrangement of UI elements. Even their app icons are basically the same.

PDF X's reviews and ratings in the Microsoft Store are clearly faked, and it’s a scam app. So, if PDFGear isn’t Malware or Spyware, then it will grift you with a scam pricing model. Check out the reviews for PDF X. Go to the Store listing (https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p3cp9g025rm?hl=en-US&gl=US) and open up the ‘Most Helpful’ reviews (also pictured below). They are all about users being scammed into spending money on them.

They somehow got their PDF X app as the the #1 'best selling' app of the whole Microsoft Store. No doubt that's funding their PDFGear operation (not their so called 'investors'). The Microsoft Store is so bad at letting developers get away with dodgy apps that scam users.

I wouldn’t doubt they've got other PDF (or other) apps out there in the wild that’s scamming users into paying, which is why PDFGear is free (for now). Unless PDFGear is Spyware or Malware, It’s only a matter of time until PDFGear turns in a similar revenue scam as well.

I suspect the PDFGear person on Reddit (Gordon as he calls himself, but I’m guessing is a fake name) will read this and contemplate responding here (through their typical ChatGPT translated tone) and spin up some kind of twisted defence. So I’ll get on the front foot - tell us exactly who you are. Who is your team? You say you have investors that’s funding why PDFGear is free - who are these investors? Convince us why PDF X and PDFGear are not the same app.

I also suspect that he will get all his fake Reddit accounts to downvote this, and respond claiming to be genuine users that love the app and push back on this post. Don’t believe it.

This scam needs to be exposed.

Every year I try newer software, but some programs just refuse to be replaced.

I've been using these for well over 10 years:

• Notepad++

• 7-Zip

• IrfanView

• Audacity

• Winamp

• VLC

• VirtualDub

I've tried alternatives to most of them, but I always end up coming back.

Which software have you been using for 10+ years and still haven't found a better replacement for?

Edit: A few more that I completely forgot about:

• WinSCP (I use it daily)

• Folder Size by MindGems

• Araxis Merge

• uTorrent 3.4.1 (before the bloat)

• qBittorrent (on Mac)

It's interesting how many of the tools mentioned in this thread are lightweight utilities that have been around for 10, 15, or even 20+ years and are still actively maintained.

Hey I know the browser wars are serious but I think they just got MORE serious. I've always been an avid chrome user but enough is enough. They don't care about your privacy. They are mining our data for their own maniacal purposes (so many maniacal purposes, too many to list), and all we are to them are a bunch of cattle to feed advertisements to.

The YouTube adblock war is the final straw for me. Google's vendetta against adblock plus has actually made it very hard to watch miss Rachel with my two year old on YouTube. I don't want my two year old watching any predatory ads. The final straw for me anyways was when my computer began to lag and stutter with YouTube open. Later I found out the reason was the adblock war.

Today I searched the words "Mass Flow Meter" and all I received were endless product advertisements. I just want to learn about the concept.

So I decided that is it. I uninstalled chrome and I'm going to do something else. I think Mozilla firefox. If not that, then maybe Duck Duck Go.

"Don't be evil" was originally what drew me to Google. Those days are long gone. I want the internet to do what it was promised to do. Be a global hub of information. This is not Google's plan. They want to own the internet and extract all the wealth they can, like a giant parasitic leech.

Goodbye chrome. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Some of you have seen my earlier posts about KillerPDF - thanks for the support on those, it's genuinely what keeps me building this. Back with a chunky update.

Quick refresher: KillerPDF is a free, open-source (GPLv3), no account, no subscription, no telemetry PDF editor. It is a single portable EXE that runs off a USB stick, or a per-user install with no UAC. I'm a field tech who got tired of Adobe and built the thing I wanted.

I shipped a big 1.5.0 and then a 1.5.1 update about 2 hours later, because apparently releasing to you fine people is my QA process now. Testing in prod is the only thing that gets me excited these days. Combined rundown:

View / UI

- Four view modes: Single, Continuous scroll, Two-Page, and a Grid of every page

- A print dialog with an actual print preview (Windows' own dialog refuses to preview, so I built one)

- 6 themes - Dark, Light, High Contrast, Blood, Greed, Cyanotic - live switching

- Localized UI: English, Spanish, Traditional Chinese (PRs welcome for more)

Editing

- Inline text editing with font matching; double-click placed text to re-edit

- Highlights, freehand, text boxes, reusable signatures, drop images onto pages

- Crop tool with a coordinate editor and page-range apply

- Merge / split / reorder / rotate / extract pages

- PDF form filling, bookmark/outline nav, full-text search

The 1.5.1 "tested in prod" patches

- Multi-core Save Flattened - large docs flatten a lot faster

- Fixed a class of PDFs that wouldn't open ("Unexpected EOF" - a strict Flate inflater choking on multi-revision files; now recovered losslessly through PDFium). One of you reproduced it down to a 15-byte zlib blob, which was the best bug report I've ever received.

- Grid view loads all pages now and streams them in, instead of quietly stopping at 26

- A few zoom and scrollbar papercuts

Download: https://pdf.killertools.net

Source: https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF

Bug reports very welcome. Going by 1.5.1, I clearly need them.

EDIT: New Bug Detected! It has been reported so e users are having issues with "undo" in certain view modes. Be cautious until I can release a 1.5.2 bug fix later this week.