You needed to merge two PDFs last week. You Googled "merge PDF free." You clicked the first result. You uploaded your tax return and your pay stub to a website you had never heard of. It merged them in 3 seconds. You downloaded the file and moved on. You never thought about what happened to your documents. They were uploaded to a server in a country you cannot name. Processed by software you cannot audit. Stored for a duration nobody disclosed. Your tax return. Your pay stub. Your salary. Your signature. On a stranger's disk. Forever. You did this voluntarily. In under 10 seconds. Without reading a single word of fine print. There is a tool that does everything those websites do. On YOUR computer. Your files never leave your machine. It is called Stirling-PDF. 77,100+ stars on GitHub. 25 million+ downloads. The #1 PDF application on all of GitHub. Here is what it does: → Merge PDFs. Split PDFs. Compress PDFs. Rotate and reorder pages. → Convert PDFs to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and images. And back again. → Add passwords. Remove passwords. Flatten forms. Sanitize metadata. → Sign PDFs with a drawn signature, typed name, or digital certificate. → OCR scanned documents with Tesseract to make them searchable. → Add watermarks, page numbers, headers, footers, and stamps. → Redact text and images permanently. Crop, deskew, and repair. → View and annotate PDFs directly in your browser. → No-code automation pipelines to batch-process thousands of files. → REST API for every tool. Automate every operation. → Desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. No browser needed. → One Docker command to self-host everything. Here's the wildest part: Adobe Acrobat Pro costs $19.99 per month. That is $239.88 a year. Acrobat Studio: $24.99 per month. That is $299.88 a year. Smallpdf Pro: $108 per year. iLovePDF Premium: $60 per year. A 10-person team on Adobe pays $2,660 a year to edit documents. And every single one of those tools processes your files on THEIR servers. Stirling-PDF processes everything locally. Your files exist on your machine. The server sits on your hardware. The network stays inside your walls. 77,100+ stars. 6,700+ forks. 175 releases. 4,900+ commits. 48% TypeScript and 43% Java. MIT-licensed core. Self-host it. Fork it. Ship it. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

Your brand new Windows laptop came with dozens of apps you never asked for. - Ads in your Start menu. - Telemetry tracking every click. - Bing hijacking your search bar. - Microsoft Copilot you can't turn off. - Recall taking screenshots of everything you do. One script removes all of it. It's called Win11Debloat. Not a sketchy optimizer from a pop-up ad. A lightweight PowerShell script that strips Windows down to what it should have been from the start. Here's what it removes: → Bloatware apps — Candy Crush, TikTok, Instagram, Clipchamp, Teams, and dozens more → Telemetry — diagnostic data, activity history, app-launch tracking, targeted ads → Ads — tips, tricks, suggestions in Start menu, Settings, notifications, and lock screen → Bing — removed from Windows search, your search bar searches your computer again → Microsoft Copilot — disabled and removed → Windows Recall — the AI that screenshots everything you do, disabled → Edge clutter — ads, suggestions, and MSN news feed, disabled Everything that actually works stays. Your apps. Your files. Your settings. Nothing breaks. One command. That's it. Your laptop is clean. Works on Windows 10 AND Windows 11. Microsoft spent years adding things to Windows that nobody wanted. This script spent years removing them. 43,800+ stars on GitHub. MIT Licensed. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)