Here are some that I found very useful over the years.

• Barrier: KVM software
• Calibre: e-book management
• Jellyfin: Plex-like media center
• Mumble: VoIP

I advocate for ImageGlass, a very good image viewer and editor. Mpc or vlc for videos.

Can anyone recommend me something that falls somewhere between Paint and GIMP?

<3

Disclaimer, haven't used Windows in years, but back in the day when I did, I swore by cygwin to give me a sane environment to interact in. That and Firefox + GIMP + Libreoffice usually gave me a pretty happy day to day interaction.

Greenshot (GPLv3) is a powerful screenshot tool with its own basic image editor.

Qclip

Bulk crap uninstaller

Vlc

Irfanview (is it proprietary?)

Gimp, Krita, Inkscape, KDEnLive, Blender, OBS

Nonfree: XNViewMP, Startisback++,

This isn't a FOSS apps list but a Free (as free beer) software list for Windows with a bunch of cool FOSS apps https://alternativeto.net/list/29653/my-windows-setup/

winget

BC uninstaller

Shotcut is a great easy to learn video editor I have used a lot.

Lite xl (ide) KDE connect (file transfaring) KDEnlive (video editing software) Mpv (media player) Librewolf(better out of the box experience than Firefox ) I don't care about cookies add-on (Firefox addon) Gimp or paint.net Obs(video capture) libreoffice(office stuff) Nomacs(image viewer) BC uninstaller Alt drag (moving winows)

What I honestly miss the most is my window manager/compositor hyprland

CudaText for text editing/programming
MPV for playing videos
7-zip
Firefox + uBlock Origin + Bitwarden

Adding to all the awesome software already mentioned here, WinCompose! You can have a compose key, for typing accented characters wothout changin your keyboard layout, for example.

chocolatey to actually install things almost well.

I've been enjoying wezterm as a terminal emulator replacement for windows terminal. It offers nerdy fine grained customizability and an emoji/nerd font character picker. For most purposes WT seems to be fine though.

WinMerge, the best diffing tool out there.

puTTY, my favourite terminal program for windows.