![Windows Productivity Stack](


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) Source: ZDNET / Cesar Cadenas ([original article](https://www.zdnet.com/article/5-must-have-apps-i-install-on-every-new-windows-pc-and-why-they-matter/))

For a lot of practitioners in software, IT, and security, a fresh Windows install is less a blank canvas and more a deployment target.

The operating system is the base image. What matters is the tooling you layer on top—what becomes your personal "golden image" for privacy, media handling, documentation, and mental load. ZDNET’s recent rundown of five must-have Windows apps reads like a consumer guide, but under the surface, it outlines a pragmatic, low-friction stack that aligns closely with how professionals should be thinking about endpoint readiness.

This isn’t about maximalism. It’s about five opinionated defaults: a hardened browser, a universal media engine, a powerful capture workflow, an office suite that actually plays nicely with .docx, and a task system that respects context.

Let’s unpack why this set matters for developers, engineers, and technical teams—and where it fits into a serious workflow.

1. Brave: Treating the Browser as an Attack Surface, Not a Lifestyle Brand

Brave is pitched widely as a privacy-first browser; for technical users, that description is too soft. It’s more accurate to frame Brave as a policy-heavy Chromium fork tuned for:

  • Aggressive third-party tracker blocking
  • Stripping cross-site cookies and fingerprinting vectors
  • Mitigating malvertising and basic phishing flows via Shields
  • Optional built-in VPN for hostile or policy-constrained networks

For developers and security-conscious teams, the implications are concrete:

  • Safer research environment: When you’re inspecting shady SDK docs, malware reports, or random GitHub forks, Brave lowers the ambient risk without depending on every user to be adblock-literate.
  • Chromium compatibility: Extension parity with Chrome/Edge means devtools, password managers, API clients, test utilities, and CI/CD dashboard integrations all work.
  • Realistic breakage profile: Brave occasionally breaks ad-heavy or heavily scripted sites. In practice, this also surfaces assumptions in modern web design and third-party dependency bloat—data that many frontend and security engineers should be paying attention to anyway.

In an enterprise context, Brave won’t replace managed Edge or Chrome overnight, but as a secondary hardened browser on a dev machine or security analyst box, it’s a rational default.

2. VLC: The Universal Decoder in a Fragmented Media World

Calling VLC "a media player" undersells its role on a serious workstation.

VLC functions as a vendor-neutral media toolchain:

  • Plays almost anything: legacy codecs, obscure containers, raw captures, training material, camera dumps, old conference recordings.
  • Handles localized workflows: custom subtitles, playback-speed controls for long-form talks, audio EQ for noisy recordings.

Where it nudges into professional territory:

  • Test and verification: When you’re validating exported assets for documentation, in-app tutorials, or product marketing, VLC is the quickest correctness check.
  • Cross-platform parity: VLC behaves consistently across OSes, making it a comfortable standard in heterogeneous teams.

It’s infrastructure for media. You install it so you never again have to think, _"Why won’t this file play?"_

3. ShareX: Turning Screenshots into a Workflow Primitive

Windows’ Snipping Tool is fine if you’re circling a typo for HR. ShareX is the tool you install if screenshots and clips are part of how you ship.

Key capabilities that matter to technical teams:

  • Multiple capture modes: regions, active window, full screen, scrolling, and video recording.
  • Built-in redaction and annotation: instant blur/pixelate for secrets, arrows, boxes, labels for bug reports and architecture discussions.
  • One-click upload to destinations: Google Drive, Imgur, custom endpoints—ideal for documentation pipelines and async collaboration.

In practice, ShareX becomes a glue layer:

  • Capture a failing UI state → annotate → auto-upload → paste link into Jira/Linear/Slack in seconds.
  • Record a minimal reproduction of a bug → share with a vendor or teammate without context-switching across tools.

For distributed engineering orgs, tuning this flow is not cosmetic. It reduces friction in your feedback loop, which is one of the highest-leverage improvements you can make.

4. WPS Office: Compatibility as a Feature, Not a Hope

Productivity suites are rarely evaluated on the one metric that burns the most time: _"Will this open the .docx/.pptx/.xlsx file correctly on the first try?"_

ZDNET’s endorsement of WPS Office over LibreOffice centers on something many technical users quietly care about:

  • High-fidelity compatibility with Microsoft Office formats
  • Integrated access to cloud storage providers (Google Drive, Dropbox)
  • Additional AI-driven features like translation across dozens of languages

For engineers and IT staff who constantly receive specs, contracts, SOWs, and policy docs authored in Office, this focus on compatibility matters more than ideological purity.

LibreOffice’s open-source nature and extensibility remain compelling, especially where customization and auditability are required. But in environments where not everyone is a power user, WPS offers a low-friction, free default that won’t corrupt critical stakeholder documents.

This is a recurring theme in modern tooling decisions: pick the software that eliminates the most failure states with the least cognitive overhead.

5. Todoist: Lightweight Ops for Your Own Brain

A lot of task managers are beautifully designed ways to procrastinate. Todoist earns its spot in this stack because it behaves less like a productivity toy and more like a minimal coordination layer:

  • Fast capture for tasks and projects, across desktop, web, and mobile
  • Priority flags and labels for triage and context-based views
  • Integrations with Slack, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Alexa, and more

For developers and technical leads, Todoist fits naturally into workflows such as:

  • Turning Slack pings or email requests into trackable tasks instead of mental debt
  • Using labels to separate "deep work" issues, maintenance, hiring, and incident follow-ups
  • Syncing with calendars to see delivery work in the same horizon as meetings and on-calls

The free tier covers most individual needs. For teams, the relatively low upgrade cost keeps it accessible as a de facto personal SRE for your schedule, rather than another enterprise platform demanding its own rollout.

Why This Stack Resonates With Serious Users

What makes this particular set of tools interesting—beyond its consumer appeal—is how closely it mirrors what experienced practitioners quietly assemble for themselves:

  • Security and privacy by default (Brave, ShareX’s safe redactions)
  • Format and protocol resilience (VLC, WPS Office)
  • Frictionless documentation and communication (ShareX, Todoist)
  • Cost discipline (all are free or have generous free tiers)

In a world where every vendor wants to upsell you into a platform, this lineup is deliberately boring in the best way: it reduces risk, handles edge cases, and gets out of your way. For developers imaging new workstations, for IT teams defining a standard toolkit, or for security staff hardening endpoints without paralyzing users, these five tools form a solid, sane default layer on top of Windows.

Sometimes the most underrated engineering decision is deciding which problems you never want to think about again—and installing the right five applications before you write your first line of code on a new machine is a simple, effective place to start.