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If Linux software was this easy to use, it would be a different world.

I use Linux when I must, but it is generally a pain in the ass. I don't enjoy upgrading to the latest version for a 10 minute job. I'm just thankful when I can get away without downloading the source and recompiling.

Even people that hate Microsoft love its convenience. Of course that is starting to change - but ever so slowly

Takeaway - Don't use a web browser for screenshots.

There is a much better tool that will store locally:
Lightscreen
Lightscreen Portable

portable notepad++ exists.

https://portableapps.com/apps/...

it is a must have on your usb flash drive of tools and utilities and bootable iso.

oh, for making that? try

http://www.easy2boot.com/

then copy all your 'non bootable' stuff over to a separate root directory on it.

are portable apps https://portableapps.com/apps/... not an option??

What fraction of Windows PCs that you have encountered are locked down so tight that connecting a flash drive you carry with GIMP Portable on it doesn't work?

When forced to work on machines that have things locked down tight, downloading and installing a new tool is not always an option.

How are you "forced to work on machines" like that in the first place? Why can't you play the "can't do the job without appropriate tools" card to temporarily decline to work on them pending approval of use of, say, GIMP Portable?

I switched to Palemoon. Still in the Firefox family, but preforms better then either FF or Chrome and is less dumbed down.

Doubt it. Show me the benchmarks. These benchmarks from a few years ago say Pale Moon is slower. These benchmarks from last year say Pale Moon is slower.

You could always install Midnight Commander.

https://midnight-commander.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Commander

Or FreeCommander. They even have a portable version on the Portable Apps site.

This has been my go-to fix for the whole Windows Explorer incompetency for about a decade now. Free for personal or corporate use, a donation gets you access to the 64-bit version and past versions of the software, but the free 32-bit current version is not function-crippled in any way. Portable version even works on computers where you don't have installation rights, and having bookmarks capabilities for corporate network folders is the best thing ever. ;-)

Enjoy!

It's too bad more people haven't tried LibreOffice, because it works flawlessly with Windows 10.

Like Windows 10, LibreOffice is free. The only difference is that it won't automatically download to your computer.

I can't believe how much money people waste on Microsoft Office. Don't let friends use MS Office!

You can even put LibreOffice on a USB stick with the free Portable Version of LibreOffice. You can't do that with Microsoft.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I also installed LibreOffice, and it works flawlessly with Windows 10.

Just like Windows 10, LibreOffice is free. The only difference is that it won't automatically download to your computer.

I can't believe how much money I wasted on Microsoft Office when I could have just downloaded LibreOffice, the Free Office Suite.

You can even put LibreOffice on a USB stick with the free Portable Version of LibreOffice. You can't do that with Microsoft.

So why is someone plugging a USB drive with FIREFOX into an "air gapped" computer?

http://portableapps.com/ was my first thought. It's a very impressive collection of portable software, Firefox/Mozilla isn't listed in my setup, Sea monkey and Opera are.

My folder is just under 6 Gigs, the software meant to be on a USB device or at least right at home.

This piece of malware might hit portableapps rather hard, just for being what it is.

First Option: Search for a computer recycling center in your area. Free Geek in Portland OR was one of the first. These typically use volunteers to refurbish donated computers set up with FOSS software and provided to charities, churches, non-profits at no cost. I was one of their Build Instructors a few years ago. The volunteers would either contribute 24 hours of service to receive a free computer, or build up 5 computers from tested parts bins to earn a computer of their own, that would be their sixth build. Typically businesses that were upgrading would contribute bunches of used computers for the tax write-offs. Free Geek would sometimes get 25+ used computers coming in on a truck.

Desktop computers that would do what you want would probably cost less than $50 at a Free Geek refurbishing store, including a wifi card. It might not be too difficult to arrange some kind of free-to-deserving-students program, probably by triangulating through an Elks or Odd Fellows Lodge.

Second Option: Instead of providing computers, provide the students with their own personal thumb drives. Let them know that they can put their own music library on the thing, in addition to the school/homework folder, and they will be enthusiastic participants. They will find ways to plug in to somebody's computer, somewhere, whether at a library or a friend's house, or a neighborhood youth center.

These are not mutually exclusive.

I'd suggest talking with your IT people about whether they could put together a bundle of portable software that would handle homework requirements. I used a customized version of Portable Apps Suite several years ago, to provide clients of a workforce entry job training program with something they could develop their resumes on (and which also provided a number of useful reference files, including lists of community resources). Some of the advantages of this approach are that it encourages students to seek out community resources, and since all students are using the same software it is easier for the instructor to provide support. And again the concept that they could put their own music on the thing created instantaneous and enthusiastic buy-in.

Also people tend to use multiple machines (sometime even not own) so in order to use KeepassX you still need to transfer its data file somehow. You could keep this file on a pendrive probably with portable version of the app.

and

Also I would love to have some offline device for my sensitive stuff like financial, medical and so on - I lone for something in form of small ipod-like MP3 player that can be fed with data and when prompted for authentication I could choose my credentials from it and display it would generate QR code with token that could be scanned via webcam to authenticate.

The other day I went to portableapps.com to rebuild a new toolstick when I remembered they sell pre-loaded flash drives also. Seeing as part of that purchase would support portable apps I figured I would check out the prices in their shop.

It was then I saw they have a new (to me) encrypted flash drive that looks and reads to be pretty impressive.

Flash drive #2, the Carbide:
http://portableapps.com/shop/h...

Or if you just want the drive from the source without the portable apps involvement:
http://worldsbestflashdrive.co...

I only just purchased one for myself last Friday so it hasn't arrived yet, but now I intend to do similar to what you had in mind - my portable keepass app and database, and important documents like taxes and medical records.

May be worth looking into for those occasions LastPass isn't suitable, primarily for me being document files.

Also for what it's worth I fully agree with your comparison of keepass and lastpass strengths, and am saying that as an avid keepass user. I'm not here to convert you, just wanted to share a third option that I'm still a bit excited for finding.

http://portableapps.com/

Which is what you get at http://www.portableapps.com../ Apps like WinSCP, Putty and a whole bunch of others have been modded to run from ONE locatiion and to NOT fuck with the registry...I see they even have Wireshark in portable form... not sure how they get past the fact you need Winpcap running as admin also to actually *do* live captures on a running system...

7-zip is my favourite.

Does nearly all of the formats I come across.
Open Source, LGPL (where possible) and fully cross-platform.

In my toolkit via Portable Apps everywhere I go.

My cunning strategy breaks down with Windows, though. Notepad is so nasty to use that I find myself installing textpad or cygwin on the machines where I do most of my work.

One option here is to run a portable editor -- emacs also works in this mode -- from a shared drive or usb stick. You can try them all and if you don't like any of them, just delete the directory -- no uninstallation, system files, or registry settings to worry about.

meh, get yourself the portable version of Firefox which will run on anything without leaving a trace (or an internet history).

You're still SOL with Windows phone though, what were you thinking!

"I'm doing some volunteering for a street kids charity in Senegal, West Africa, and they need a new database to store all their information for the kids, and to help the funding organizations like UNICEF. The charity staff have a few computers running Windows 7. Being a die-hard OSS geek I'm more inclined to knock up a MySQL backend with a Django (or similar) front-end and run the whole thing from a reliable VPS. But it needs to be understandable by the non-geeks in the charity — there is no IT expertise here. Is there anything that can allow me to design and edit databases, tables, and forms but doesn't require an MS license?"

I'm not nearly the expert as all the other experts here so maybe someone will explain why this is bad idea. If the database is really small enough it could be handled locally with something like MS Access that it may as well be something that be handled with a SQL front end in HTML to add/edit/delete/view the database details. And for this I personally would use XAMPP portable for windows (no installation required instance of apache/mysql/php).

Store it on dropbox (probably symbolic link that folder back to c:\xampp), setup a a robocopy script to syncronize that directory to a thumb drive (etc) every night at midnight or whatever. For something really fancy create a script to compress the directory to zip file with 7-zip every day/week/month/whatever. Perfect. Done. This way you could move the whole thing to a different PC quite easily, a support person could remotely install and login to that dropbox to synchronize over the whole XAMPP installation for troubleshooting, it's backed up, the world seems flush the MySQL people...and XAMPP is mostly or entirely open source stuff/free-as-in-beer. Other than the initial front end work it seems like the easiest/fastest way to get this all done based on the stated requirements.

Until the day comes ... we need the ability to go backwards with all software.

Portable apps offer this and related features for a large body of applications on the Windows desktop.

Disclaimer: I use apps in this format a lot. I met the founder a few years ago at OSCON -- I'm making the extra effort to plug the project here because he's a friendly, dedicated, focused guy.

Excellent list!

FYI, most of these programs (i.e., 10 out of the 12, if you count the alternate text editor Notepad++) are available as Portable Apps that you can keep on (and even run from) a USB thumb drive.

Might save you some installation and configuring time :) I'd bet plenty of programs on your full list are available too...

Frankly, the first thing I 'install' on a Windows box is a USB drive containing my Portable Apps, including Firefox, Libre Office, pdftk, FreeCommander, Lupas Rename (portable version), 7-Zip, FileZilla, Gimp, Dia, Irfanview, Notepad++, VLC, Audacity, WinDirStat, AutoHotKey and of course PStart to help manage them all :)

Yes, there is no excuse for not installing a free program - except that you may not have Admin rights on the machine or other IT issues.

That's why they invented portable apps.

One of the great things about using a Mac is you can backup and move a whole program by just copying it!

Except all of the programs that cant be copied and need to be installed via installers (or install kernel extensions)

Try that on a windows PC?

Turns out its so easy that Microsoft let you do that since Windows 1.0. Tons of windows apps work just fine by copying them around. The most popular example I can think of is Steam. I first installed it ~2006 and I have just copied the Steam folder everytime I upgraded the OS. (Steam installs a service but it detects that you've moved it and re-installs it if its missing). For more apps just Google 'portable apps'. e.g. - http://portableapps.com/ The Application Bundle in OSX is just a folder. I don't see anything technically special about it.

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/google_chrome_portable

Won't do squat until you start it.

When the question is wether to use a single password on multiple sites or writing all the passwords down, i vote for the second option.

Usually such things can be avoided, if the person is taught a password generating algorithm which modifies the password per site.

But writing them down (the safer with tools the better) is a lot better than re-using passwords all the time.

This is where password manager programs like Keepass are useful. Remember one password => access to rest of passwords.

For wider usability, you can 'dual' encrypt the database (so it requires both a passfile and a password) then store it on the cloud service provider of your choice...

" their mail is unusable on my system "

You Are Doing It Wrong.

I read my accumulation of Yahoo and Gmail and other accounts using Thunderbird (on Linux) and Thunderbird Portable (on Windows, I copy it from my USB key, use it, then cut/paste it back for speed or leave the program folder on permanent installs. Can't beat the ease of backup!)

I don't see Yahoo or Google mail pages or deal with their annoying layour, let alone their adverts. Doing so would not serve me.

Fuck 'em with George Carlin's proverbial Big Rubber Dick. :-)

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/thunderbird_portable

I rather liked the original Windows installs of Phoenix too. You just unzipped it to whereever you wanted it. Want to uninstall it? Delete the directory. That was it. Nicely minimal. Wish more applications were like that.

You can get a "portable" version of Firefox that is packaged in a single folder from PortableApps.com

I use Thunderbird Portable for webmail download (and doing Portable migrations from Outlook). It's a kickass tool.

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/thunderbird_portable/

Thunderbird Portable allows Windows users to sync and have both the stored messages and program files in one folder. Archive folder to CD or DVD and a future sync can't destroy them. Copy folder to desktop (or wherever) when migrating and you are good to go. Runs fine from USB keys.

Next job: use Portable Apps http://portableapps.com/ from a thumb-drive, and you won't have to worry about it.

Windows is so smart and clever, it caches traces everywhere.
There are .db files with a thumbnail of every picture that goes through the machine.
The registry is stuffed full of filenames and filepaths you might not be interested in sharing.
There's a virtualstore folder full of junk, there are savepoints every time an update is applied, and so on.

You really do have to nuke it from orbit to be sure.
Even if you use portableapps.

Remove or destroy your workstation's hard disk. If you feel they might object to this, replace it with a new one and re-image the machine. Next job: use Portable Apps http://portableapps.com/ from a thumb-drive, and you won't have to worry about it.

"Why not? it is better than those other two you mentioned."

Not better than Thunderbird if you want portability and the easiest backup (copy the program folder) of any email client.

I install it on Windows whether or not the goal is "USB drive portability".

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/thunderbird_portable/

Just copy the program folder and your backup is ready to run elsewhere. Even my non-geek friends like it since it's easy for them to use. It's easy for them to archive too. Burn the program folder to DVD and a sync later on won't trash your archive even if you deleted messages from the server.

Sure, you can export messages from a conventional client for backup, but then you have to import them to read them. Too much like work for me.

Why not go the whole hawg and use vim?

http://portableapps.com/apps/development/gvim_portable

If you'd like to go all out, you can try something like Eclipse Portable which is available in the C/C++, Java, etc variants. It's technically labeled as a Development Test but it's 'stable' and being added to the main app directory shortly. There's also a test of BlueJ Portable available which is geared towards learning. If you'd like to just try something smaller, you can always start with something like SWI-Prolog Portable. There are a number of text editors available in the Development section of the Portable App Directory a few of which can kick off compilation right in MinGW Portable for you. And, if you're so inclined, you can help out test and code some of the apps requested or tested out in the Development forums or section of the PortableApps.com site. If there's anything else that would help out budding programmers, please just let us know!

If you'd like to go all out, you can try something like Eclipse Portable which is available in the C/C++, Java, etc variants. It's technically labeled as a Development Test but it's 'stable' and being added to the main app directory shortly. There's also a test of BlueJ Portable available which is geared towards learning. If you'd like to just try something smaller, you can always start with something like SWI-Prolog Portable. There are a number of text editors available in the Development section of the Portable App Directory a few of which can kick off compilation right in MinGW Portable for you. And, if you're so inclined, you can help out test and code some of the apps requested or tested out in the Development forums or section of the PortableApps.com site. If there's anything else that would help out budding programmers, please just let us know!

If you'd like to go all out, you can try something like Eclipse Portable which is available in the C/C++, Java, etc variants. It's technically labeled as a Development Test but it's 'stable' and being added to the main app directory shortly. There's also a test of BlueJ Portable available which is geared towards learning. If you'd like to just try something smaller, you can always start with something like SWI-Prolog Portable. There are a number of text editors available in the Development section of the Portable App Directory a few of which can kick off compilation right in MinGW Portable for you. And, if you're so inclined, you can help out test and code some of the apps requested or tested out in the Development forums or section of the PortableApps.com site. If there's anything else that would help out budding programmers, please just let us know!

If you'd like to go all out, you can try something like Eclipse Portable which is available in the C/C++, Java, etc variants. It's technically labeled as a Development Test but it's 'stable' and being added to the main app directory shortly. There's also a test of BlueJ Portable available which is geared towards learning. If you'd like to just try something smaller, you can always start with something like SWI-Prolog Portable. There are a number of text editors available in the Development section of the Portable App Directory a few of which can kick off compilation right in MinGW Portable for you. And, if you're so inclined, you can help out test and code some of the apps requested or tested out in the Development forums or section of the PortableApps.com site. If there's anything else that would help out budding programmers, please just let us know!

If you'd like to go all out, you can try something like Eclipse Portable which is available in the C/C++, Java, etc variants. It's technically labeled as a Development Test but it's 'stable' and being added to the main app directory shortly. There's also a test of BlueJ Portable available which is geared towards learning. If you'd like to just try something smaller, you can always start with something like SWI-Prolog Portable. There are a number of text editors available in the Development section of the Portable App Directory a few of which can kick off compilation right in MinGW Portable for you. And, if you're so inclined, you can help out test and code some of the apps requested or tested out in the Development forums or section of the PortableApps.com site. If there's anything else that would help out budding programmers, please just let us know!

If he wants an IDE then he can use Sharpdevelop portable which gives him half a dozen languages he can work in from the IDE. HTH.

So use a browser that doesn't need to be installed on the machine where you lack admin rights...

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

Try it yourself and see if it is better or worse.

Hell Firefox has a portable mode that you can just install on a Thumb drive and run without even installing it.

So does Chrome.

Firefox installs system-wide and requires admin rights to update. This is somewhat annoying.

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable.

'Nuff said.

Why should a browser need admin privileges? It's just code that executes.

You might find that your "locked-down corporate image" can run any number of applications that don't require admin access, including apps at http://portableapps.com/

You have to get into SRP if you want to prevent users from running executables you don't know about. If you don't want to get into SRP (I wouldn't blame you--it's messy) then if they can write to a directory and execute from that directory, they can install software.

It is not the software's responsibility to ask for permission from the corporation in order to execute. It is your responsibility to ensure that only the software you approve executes.

If you're ticked off against Chrome, then I hope you don't find out about PortableApps. Oh, oops.

Rule #3 of IT that should never be broken: Never, ever, ever, EVER give a regular user administrative rights on their machine. Ever. Chrome breaks this rule with a wrecking ball.

Chrome isn't able to give anyone any rights. It uses the rights the user already has. Maybe you should look at the people you configured that machine (maybe a mirror would be helpful?).

It's bad enough that as an admin I am constantly harassed by Windows 7, "Do you want to allow...?" Yes, I'm a fucking admin, just install the damn thing!

If you can't find out how to disable the UAC, you're in the wrong job.

If you want no-admin required FF updates you can use portable firefox. Install in once and then just run updates as normal. A nice bonus is that it keeps everything under one directory so moving to a new PC is copying a folder over and adding a desktop link, much more convenient than the old way of moving FF profiles (I haven't tried the sync feature of 4+).

Keepass is available as a portable app, that runs from a thumb drive:
http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/keepass_portable

I highly recommend you try out some portable apps, it's like having your whole computer on a thumb drive!

If i cant install Chrome on a computer its useless to me for browsing nowadays.

Might I introduce you to "Portable Apps"? They even have Portable Chrome, so you just put in the jump drive and start running your own standalone session of Chrome.

The only challenge I've found with it is that if you don't have a snappy thumb drive, the write-back to the history can be pretty sluggish. I've taken to a plain old batch file which copies everything to %temp%, runs it from there, then copies it back when the app is done. I've also added some 7zip action since it's faster to write back one big 7z than a bunch of little files.

The other thing I've seen is that it seems to manage the sync via Windows certificates or something. Whenever I run sync on a computer, it doesn't know my sync account and settings. When I bring the flash drive to a new computer, it's lost the account info again.

If i cant install Chrome on a computer its useless to me for browsing nowadays.

Might I introduce you to "Portable Apps"? They even have Portable Chrome, so you just put in the jump drive and start running your own standalone session of Chrome.

The only challenge I've found with it is that if you don't have a snappy thumb drive, the write-back to the history can be pretty sluggish. I've taken to a plain old batch file which copies everything to %temp%, runs it from there, then copies it back when the app is done. I've also added some 7zip action since it's faster to write back one big 7z than a bunch of little files.

The other thing I've seen is that it seems to manage the sync via Windows certificates or something. Whenever I run sync on a computer, it doesn't know my sync account and settings. When I bring the flash drive to a new computer, it's lost the account info again.

http://www.sourceforge.net/
http://www.portableapps.com/
http://www.freshports.org/
http://www.getdeb.net/

Or just man up and install linux and use the repositories. Failing that, go to the program's WEBSITE and download it there like you are SUPPOSED to!