Are there any Windows-exclusive programs you use?

Foobar2000.
By far the best, most customizable local music player app ever. Plus it's ~~open source~~ free.
- Plus it's open source.
  no it's not.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000
  The core is closed source, whereas the SDK is licensed under the Three-Clause BSD license.
  
  My bad, thanks for the correction.
- I loved Foobar2000 back in the day. I’m glad it lives on.
  
  Yep. A couple of years ago they released the 2.0 version, which supports 64-bit architecture and allows for dark mode support as well.
- Oops, I just commented about Foobar2k before seeing this comment.
  Just want to mention that it does run on Linux as a Snap (though then you have to have a Snap installed, lol). I'm sure it runs fine with regular Wine too.
  
  Lol, Snap.
  Wish Canonical would just kill it already
  
  I haven't had much luck installing via wine or bottles at all. Hasn't ever worked properly for me. I'm not bothered enough to install the Snap either, lol.
  I have a Windows VM that I run it in instead, please deadbeef is good enough for my Linux system.
- This is the one Windows app I just cannot find a good alternative to. Deadbeef comes the closest, but even it is laggy when searching my library, sometimes crashes when I add too many files, and has a mediocre search function.
  
  Tell me about it.
  I also use deadbeef because of the plug-in support, although I haven't experienced much lag myself.
  The media library management definitely doesn't come anywhere close to FB2K, though, sadly.

The only thing I need on Windows is the Adobe suite for my uni graphic design stuff. I could use GIMP, darktable, Krita, etc, but my lectures teach us how things work on the Adobe suite. I use FOSS when it is for personal stuff though.
- Adobe CS is the industry standard in some fields. You should absolutely learn them if you’re in school for that.
- The FOSS equivalents sadly aren't quite up to par with Adobe for professional work yet.
  
  We keep saying that but part of me wonders if it is a skill issue
- https://github.com/Gictorbit/photoshopCClinux
  I have been using this on linux during my studies. But there are also newer versions "packaged" by other people on github.
  I'm sure the rest of the adobe suit can be installed in the same way with some tinkering.

wsl
- I wonder what the state of wsl on wine is
  
  ... wine on wsl on wine
- confused noises

SolidWorks, fusion360, codesys (plc programming) and many other enterprise grade software sadly only really work on Windows. They do however work okay through a VM but annoying to deal with.
Games now work surprisingly well on Linux so i have no problems there except Sims4 that my girlfriend plays seems to be windows only when bought through origin gamestore
And dont suggest frecad for cad work. Sadly It's seriously not even close to being competitive.
- You can get Fusion360 to work okay-ish in Wine. Probably not good enough for professional use but for my hobby use case it works well enough (sometimes a bit laggy but usable). this does most of the heavy lifting in getting it installed.
  
  Hell, it's a bit laggy in Windows so that might not even be a Wine problem.
  
  Thanks I'll check it out
- Unsurprisingly it is the gigantic EA application which breaks Sims 4 most of the times. It crashes, Steam notices non zero exit and gives up.
  EA isn't so managed so they don't even reach MS to stop pushing alpha/beta updates to stable version of their apps via Winget. So you can guess how much they will care about Linux issues. I mean Steam guys won't really hack their binaries to fix it so it is up to them.

Anymore, Wine can run anything I care to run.

Sadly, a few. I'd love to know if anyone knows any excellent Linux-equivalents for these:
MakeMKV¹: For ripping DVDs & Blurays
Bulk Rename Utility – For bulk-renaming files
Exact Audio Copy – For accurately ripping audio CDs
Logitech G Hub²: *For controlling peripherals' LED profiles & DPI presets
Mp3tag³: The best fucking metadata editor ever made, that's what!
Paint.NET: For raster image editing (more feature-complete than MS Paint but less complex than GIMP).
Playnite⁴: Platform-agnostic game launcher/manager
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Star Wars MMO that was better pre-7.0.
Mod Organizer 2: A mod management software that is open-source but not available on Linux? Heresy, I say!
 
 
¹ Technically, it does have a Linux version, but you have to compile it yourself, and I don't know shit about that kind of stuff. Lol.
² I know OpenRGB exists, and it's good enough for my needs when it comes to LED management, but it doesn't seem to be able to control DPI presets like G Hub.
³ I tried it back in like 2016 in Ubuntu 4.x and it worked just fine in Wine, but I'm unsure if it still does as I haven't tried it since then really. Still, any Linux-native software that can do shit just as good is something I'd love to know about. :)
⁴ Yes, I know there are alternatives like GameHub, Lutris, etc. but frankly none of them seem to come close to Playnite in terms of UI, UX, and sheer functionality.
- MakeMKV: For ripping DVDs & Blurays
  MakeMKV is available on Linux as Flatpak and works out of the box: https://flathub.org/apps/com.makemkv.MakeMKV
  Bulk Rename Utility
  Probably a tough one since most people will use the command line to bulk rename files. I do use ChatGPT sometimes to create rename commands for me that are more complicated.
  Exact Audio Copy
  I use Sound Juicer now, used fre:ac before.
  https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.SoundJuicer
  https://flathub.org/apps/org.freac.freac
  Logitech G Hub I know OpenRGB exists, and it’s good enough for my needs when it comes to LED management, but it doesn’t seem to be able to control DPI presets like G Hub.
  Piper can do DPI presets: https://flathub.org/apps/org.freedesktop.Piper
  Mp3tag
  I used Mp3tag on Windows and switched to Picard, I like it even more than Mp3tag now: https://flathub.org/apps/org.musicbrainz.Picard
  Paint.NET
  Is GIMP really that complex for this use case? I use GIMP to do simple stuff like paint, rescale images, blur things, fill things, ... https://flathub.org/apps/org.gimp.GIMP
  Playnite
  I don't use anything out of Steam often but If you don't like Lutris, maybe Heroic for GOG and Epic? https://flathub.org/apps/com.heroicgameslauncher.hgl
  Mod Organizer 2
  r2modman has native support for Linux: https://github.com/ebkr/r2modmanPlus
  There's also support for one-click installation of Mod Organizer 2 with steamtinkerlaunch: https://github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch/wiki/Mod-Organizer-2
  
  MakeMKV is available on Linux as Flatpak and works out of the box: https://flathub.org/apps/com.makemkv.MakeMKV
  I was not aware of this. Thank you! :)
  Probably a tough one since most people will use the command line to bulk rename files. I do use ChatGPT sometimes to create rename commands for me that are more complicated.
  I'm still very much a Linux newbie so although I am familiar with some things on the terminal, I never even knew you could bulk-rename files with it. I knew you could rename them, but not bulk-rename them, I mean.
  I use Sound Juicer now, used fre:ac before.
  https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.SoundJuicer
  https://flathub.org/apps/org.freac.freac
  Thanks, I'll check that out!
  I used Mp3tag on Windows and switched to Picard, I like it even more than Mp3tag now: https://flathub.org/apps/org.musicbrainz.Picard
  Thank you!
  Is GIMP really that complex for this use case? I use GIMP to do simple stuff like paint, rescale images, blur things, fill things, … https://flathub.org/apps/org.gimp.GIMP
  Yes, it takes a bit longer, even on higher-end PCs, to load up, than Paint.NET. Pinta used to be a good equivalent, but I think that's long since been abandoned, though I could be wrong. It also has way more functions than I need, frankly, and that leads to a cluttered UI. I've tried to use it before, and that always ends up being the case.
  I don’t use anything out of Steam often but If you don’t like Lutris, maybe Heroic for GOG and Epic? https://flathub.org/apps/com.heroicgameslauncher.hgl
  I've heard about it, but from what I've seen it doesn't seem to be very close to a 1:1 comparison. Though admittedly I've only read about it, but it seems to not be as good. Again, I'd be willing to try it out, but there doesn't seem to be many Linux equivalents as good.
  Also, it's not that I don't like Lutris, but compared to Playnite, it's very bare-bones.
  r2modman has native support for Linux: https://github.com/ebkr/r2modmanPlus
  There’s also support for one-click installation of Mod Organizer 2 with steamtinkerlaunch: https://github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinkerlaunch/wiki/Mod-Organizer-2
  Nice! Thank you again!
   
  Edit: Fixed quote markup.
- On ¹ see here or here
  
  Thank you! I was not aware of this!
- I’m old and don’t really sail the high seas these days but does Handbrake not rip DVDs and BluRays?
  
  Handbrake will rip DVDs, but not Blu Rays. That's were good ol' MakeMKV comes in.
  I rip with MakeMKV (which will do DVDs as well) and then convert/encode the MKVs with Handbrake.
  I do the conversion/encoding because the ripped files can be 35-50 GBs for regular Blu Rays (UHD Blu Rays are even bigger!) and I can get them down to 3-8 GBs with minimal quality loss.
  I then toss the smaller MKVs on my jellyfin server.
  EDIT: Handbrake CAN rip Blu Rays but only if they arent copy protected. MakeMKV is able to rip protected Blu Rays and DVDs.
- For an audio tagger I use Kid3
  
  That looks promising! I'll check it out! Thanks!
  Does it work only on audio files or can I use it to tag video files too? Despite the name, mp3tag can work on a large handful of both audio and video files, not just mp3 files.
- Have you tried Asunder for CDs?
  
  I have not! I may have to check that out! Thank you!
- For MakeMKV you can just use the flatpak.
  
  I didn't know it was on Flatpak. Thanks! :)

Lots of firmware and driver updater programs seem to require Windows or Mac and I can't get them to run with wine. For example, I need Win to update the firmware on my car stereo and my 8bitdo game controllers. I also need it to run the tax software my CPA uses.
- I don't know about car stereos, but at least for 8bitdo controllers, you can update the firmware via fwupd. And if the firmware isn't available on LVFS, you can download the blob install it manually using fwupd: https://ladis.cloud/blog/posts/firmware-update-8bitdo.html
  I did this for my 8bitdo Ultimate Bluetooth controller, and it worked great.
- Yeah needed it for my monitor. I didn't want to figure out USB passthrough so I just installed Windows on a > 50,000 powered on hours HDD and booted from that. Then once I was done I put it about as far away as I could from my PC.
  
  USB passthough is a single click for future reference. Just make sure you install virtio from the fedora project for windows VMs

It's a requirement for my Business Comms course to use Word, to the point where the prof will walk around to ensure you have Word open. The online version is awful and often drops sentences when I type so I dont use it. I could never get the darn thing working over WINE or Cassowary, so I have a VM that basically just runs that.
- I hate to be a widows advocate but they do keep improving the online version all the time so if you have not tried it in a long while maybe try again to see if some of the issues have been fixed. I feel like it gets better and better every time I (accidentally) open documents in the browser. It's still crap in general but that's more of a general word thing.

I use Foobar2000 for music. It is feature packed and so customizable. It's available as a snap using Wine (I think it's the only snap I have installed, in fact).
I really wish there were a Linux binary available but it has been Windows-only forever. The closest Linux player I've seen is Deadbeef, but Deadbeef's library plugin does not work at all like Foobar's (the later stays updated by monitoring the music folder and shows things by tags, not folder structure). Apparently the Deadbeef plugin is being updated to be more Foobar-like, but it isn't there yet.
- I did try running foobar under wine but it just sucked, I have also tried deadbeef but its really lacking features and the GUI sucks. I ended up using musicbee through wine, it was a hassle to setup but now it just works for me and I like it better than foobar.
  
  Have you tried Strawberry? It's not gonna be a foobar replacement, but I've found it very capable.
  
  How's performance on MusicBee for you? Mine is slow for the components (AMD 7900XT/Ryzen 7950X), but I suspect it might be because of the high resolution album artwork (1200x1200).

For work I heavily rely on the Adobe creative suite (Photoshop and Premiere Pro specifically). I maintain Linux servers (and develop for them) and maintain Linux desktops at both home and for work, but the lack of any alternatives to Photoshop specifically has resulted in me still daily driving Windows (VMs really hamper workflow with regards to GPU passthrough and although I've successfully set up Looking Glass on my workstation in the past, running 2 gpus isn't practical). Yes I've tried the alternatives and while Premiere Pro has usable alternatives, Photoshop does not. GIMP is incredible given that it is FOSS but the UI and feature set is almost unusable (for me at least).
- I found photoGIMP helped a bit on the UI aspect, but it still does have a lot of weird quirks that are just easier on photoshop
  
  thanks, I'll check out photoGIMP. been trying desperately to make GIMP work as I wanna ditch Windows before they stop supporting 10, sooner if I can. I made the switch on everything else already.

yes, but I don't use VMs or dual boot. I've been able to get everything I need working in Wine, which is a lot more seamless

Games work quite well in a VM, with GPU passthrough. I use a Windows VM for VR games. The non-game program here being the drivers for my VR headset, which only work on Windows. The games themselves would probably work fine on Linux, so that's not the issue, but without drivers it's a no go.

I have a copy of Microsoft Office 2013 on a Windows 11 VM.
- the ghost of libreoffice is calling your name...

The only reason I have windows is to test apps that I write.
The apps are cross platform. I use it in Linux. But I also have users in Windows, so I just fire up a windows VM for testing releases. Thats it.

I use LTspice and some ham radio software. Everything runs on wine, so I don't bother with a VM.
I used to dual boot for some games back before wine worked well.

Except for video games, all software I use daily is open source and cross platform by now, but when college demanded for me to use Adobe software, I would boot my Win 10 VM. I also boot that VM to test if the software im developing works well on Windows. I also run my Logitech mouse software in a VM with USB passthrough.
Besides games, I think the only Windows program I run with wine is a tool to extract the BGM from the official Touhou games.
Before I had a 3DS, I would use a Windows tool on my VM to decrypt my totally legally acquired ROMs
- Try Piper for your Logitech peripherals.
  
  Looks like my mouse is supported, thanks I'll try this out

Current releases of AutoCAD, Revit and Solidworks.

Only for very specific terrible chip vendor software which I hate but have no choice but to use because certification reasons.

Xbox app for game pass. But i would cancel that if i didnt also needed windows for Sunshine streaming. Linux REFUSES with everything its got, to make hardware acceleration work.
Oh and geforce now, which is still since release broken on linux when using hardware acceleration since colors close to black are just black. So darker games do not work.

Some industry hardware stuff sadly ...
Datalogic DL.Code, Siemens TIA, etc.
If someone has a solution I'm all up for it.
Was some time ago, that I tried with wine, so maybe something has changed

excel for vba support
- Yeah, that makes sense. I’m not an irrational hater of Microsoft — maybe a little — but Excel is very good. The people who need Excel, often genuinely need Excel, specifically.
  And Numbers on the macOS ecosystem is shockingly bad. Like, I’d rather barebones Gnumeric from 10 years ago for my purposes.
  
  I ain't no hardcore Excel user so can't speak for others, but I've been able to completely switch to Excel Online and use Office Scripts and Power Automate for tasks for which I used VBA previously. In fact, Power Automate has been great for doing stuff like updating workbooks through scheduled or event-driven flows, without even having to open Excel. I can see VBA going away soon with these technologies.
  With the state of O365 these days, there's zero need for me to have a native MSO install, and this no need for a Windows VM either (for day-to-day/personal stuff). The only reason I still keep Windows VMs though is for occasionally testing random things for work.

WSL2 is pretty good. j/k
- I used it a lot while developing a Linux program for a raspberry pi with a colleague and was blown away how fun and easy it was to use.... Untill I started daily driving Linux and realised how much stuipd window wsl setup and work I could have skipped by just using Linux directly.... Lol I was missing out. Now I just daily drive Linux and never looking back to wsl
  
  Mah man! The only people recommending WSL for Linux development are the ones that have bought into the Microsoft ecosystem, don't know any better and crucially also dont care to know any better
  
  I like WSL for what it is. My desktop is still Windows. I'm looking to switch but still have a lot to figure out before I can do that and not a lot of time to dig into it (part of why I'm reading this thread is for ideas).

Visual Studio (Not VS Code), C# is fantastic these days cross-platform wise and a pretty solid general language
But the non-ms IDEs for it...are lacking...and MS just terminated MacOS support for VS (Not that it really mattered the macOS version was a bastardized version of VS anyways) so I don't think their flagship is coming (officially) to Linux anytime soon.
- Really? JetBrains Rider is great IMO. Though you do have to pay for it.
  
  You have to pay for visual studio too if it is for business use (the license is also SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive than rider)
  My coworker uses VS and it seems like the IDE is doing nothing - every time I open one of his projects in rider 85% of the code is highlighted with suggested optimizations and refactors that VS thinks is fine
  
  Admittedly it's been awhile since I last checked on it, when I last checked it was missing a few of the hot nice features like hot reload (Which, you'll need to take from my cold dead hands, because I love it lmao)
- Yeah I second Jetbrains Rider. It’s fantastic on Linux and dotnet development has never been better with it. The only lacking thing is WPF but there’s open source alternatives that are actually cross platform and integrate just as well (AvaloniaUI).
- My experience has been very much the opposite. Windows is terrible for any development, even windows applications.
- Rider has just been better in every way imo. I haven't touched VS in years.
  It does cost but you also get a permanent licence for the version you paid for so you can pay for a year and keep that version.

There are some programs I still use that are designed for Windows, but use cases are "niche" or at very least specialized:
Guitar Pro 8 - Guitar Tab software
Line 6 HX Edit - Helix Settings Editor
Line 6 Powercab Edit - Amp Settings Editoe
Line 6 Updater - Firmware Updater for Line 6 Products
Steelseries GG - Configuration Software for Steelseries Peripherals
Numerous VSTs and other Audio Plugins
These are just what I remember I use off the top of my head.
I do use Guitar Pro 8 with Wine, but the others won't work through Wine. I did try to use the others with a Windows KVM through QEMU but I ultimately gave up and left one windows workstation because of my issues with my Nvidia RTX 3090.

!boinc@sopuli.xyz if I am donating GPU power to science research. There is a BOINC client for Linux but packaging is a hot mess (though getting better) and compatibility with graphics drivers is hit-or-miss. So any crunching rigs I have w/ GPUs all run Windows.
- That seems inefficient

I run Scrivener, which is a writing software that's only for Mac & Windows (well, there is a Linux version but it's ancient), but I just run that through Wine rather than a VM. That's about the only thing I haven't found a good equivalent for on Linux though.

Adobe Lightroom Classic. I have darktable installed on Linux, but I haven't mastered it yet. Lightroom is the software for photo editing, unfortuntately.

Nope.

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).
Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)

non-game, non-niche
Nope, that's actually strictly my reason for having a dedicated Windows rig. Games, and niche homebrew apps.
- Same. I went through all the trouble of converting my server machine to debian and then found it's crazy convoluted to host an Arma server from Linux.
  I made a VM to host it.

Family tree maker. https://www.mackiev.com/ftm/
- Why not Gramps which is open sourced and works flawlessly in Windows, Limux, and macOS? 🙂

Yeah. I use quite a few windows exclusive programs. I know it is a long list but can't be helped. Good support and stability beats ideology and these apps provide me that. Here is the list:
I hope this list is helpful to others as well ☺️

Anyone using ReactOS for this?

QFIL aka Qualcomm Flash Image Loader but only because the rooting of my XR headset (Lynx) https://lynx.miraheze.org/wiki/Rooting_Process relies on it.
I've done it successfully so now I understand a bit better how it works. I could try to use instead https://github.com/bkerler/edl which looks even more complete and reproducible.

GenoPro. I don't use Windows for it, as it's packaged with wine as a snap.

Directory Opus

I have a Windows computer in the basement to run one program: The virtual cycling platform Zwift.
But someone made a docker image for it, so even that is tenuous. I fired it up on the Linux system I'm typing this on, and it worked fine.
I'm not very familiar with Docker and the like, though. What if the person that created it decides he's no longer interested in maintaining it?
- Don't worry. The chances of zwift having major updates and breaking anything is small.
  I'm mostly joking, but they've been around for a decade and not a ton of progress to show for it
  
  They broke the coffee break with last week's update.... Sigh.
  Overall I really like zwift, but sometimes I just want to slap them. Like the newer teleport feature for the robopacers. Great idea. But if you look at the menu in the app, the groups are highest power to lowest power, but then within the groups, it's low to high. What were they thinking?!

I use an old copy of Photoshop CS5 via VMWare and Windows 10 installed in it. Unfortunately the Gimp doesn't have adjustment layers and the Selective Color feature. I can't live without these two features, I need them on each and every scan of my paintings to fix colors.

notepad++ with textfx edit, textfx tools, and hex editor. I've tried a lot of other things and it is still my favorite.
I don't actually use it for coding, but I often have to futz with files received from customers/QA or test data that I create.
I have mac for work and have been mostly hating BBedit. I keep meaning to try Cate and I guess the folks that made Atom just released something new.
Edit: just remembered: I did try Cate but had really weird UI issues using any dark themes (menus, etc. all became unreadable) and gave up.

MusicBee, Stardock Fences, obligatory Adobe mention, all VR everything (unless something has changed recently, I haven't looked in while).

I have a Windows 11 VM which I keep around. I was forced to use it for iTunes because I needed to sync my old photos onto the phone (fortunately a one time process).
I also played around with RemoteApp because I wanted to use Visual Studio or Office on Linux through the Windows VM, but I have not managed to get it working.
- Why couldn't you just copy your photos? If you need special software to access them or they are stored in the cloud they are not your photos.
  
  They’re not in the cloud, they are on my NAS. I found that you can’t directly copy photos onto an iPhone to show up on the gallery, because there is some sort of database and file naming system. That’s why I had to go through iTunes because it would do it in just this way so that I can see all the photos in the native gallery app.
  Any new photos get uploaded to my NAS automatically.

Not currently running a VM or anything, but I might need to set one up for iTunes and Garmin stuff.

Gamepass

I haven't been able to get Vectric Aspire to work yet, even under wine. It's used to layout tool paths for CNC operations, so it may be a little on the niche side, but it's pretty popular there.

not for me. Teams can be a web app, packet tracer has a linux version.

Altium

Microsoft Word for my resume. I'm not sure what I can do to change that, I don't want to risk a(n accidentally) badly formatted resume losing me an opportunity...
- Convert to PDF before submitting a resume. PDFs aren't vulnerable to that kind of version difference messing things up.
  Its definitely possible some other word processor would mess up the PDF conversion, but moving the formatting issues to before you submit anything lets you fully control the problem.
- You should submit resumes as a PDF. This both guarantees it will look the same everywhere (regardless what you made it in, whether it's Word or Latex or Google Docs), and it will prevent shady recruiters from editing it, which sadly does happen.
  
  will prevent shady recruiters from editing it
  Well, it won't prevent it but it will set a low technological bar that most muggles can't seem to get past.
- Libre Office is pretty good on Linux now. That is what the family uses now. No complains. Points for not being Microsoft's data mill slave.
  
  Onlyoffice is even better for me. Super compatible with MS
- Use libreoffice and export as PDF if you can. If you can't most if not all online applications have a preview feature
- A lot of fraudsters get caught because they use the Cambria font instead of Times New Roman to make a fake word document without realizing Microsoft switched the default font in the early 2000s.

I wanted to do some stress testing on a gaming laptop a while ago and many people recommended OCCT. The laptop was still running Windows at the time, so I tried it and it seems like a good tool. It tests the CPU, RAM, GPU and power supply. I wasn't able to find an equivalent in Linux.

dsa.msc to manage domains.

Printer drivers for high DPI printing.
I'd still have to have a Windows VM even on Windows for this though, as they only work up to Windows 7.

Acrobat Reader. There are a handful of fillable forms that only really work properly in the official Adobe reader.
- There are alternatives
  
  After trying 6 or 7 different alternatives for some very important government forms, I gave up and set up a VM. I do use other PDF readers whenever I can, but if someone is using features specific to Adobe Reader (outside the PDF standard), it's effectively a closed spec and there aren't alternatives for those documents.
  
  For the life of me, I tried every single pdf reader on Linux, none gets close to Adobe reader, in terms of compatibility, tools and nice UI. Every time I found the perfect one on Linux, days later I realised my collaborators couldn't see my highlights (or something of the sorts).

I've never been able to get musicbee working on Linux.

Exact Audio Copy and Qobuz.