Just thought I’d start up a topic on something a bit different. People use computers every day, yet often we take the software that’s installed on it for granted. After all, if it comes with the computer, why install anything else, even if there a better free alternative?
Lets use this topic to discuss Free software that can be used as a replacement or to compliment existing proprietary software. It would a great opportunity to educate each other of what we use to help better our computing experiences.
Some free software which I use:
Gaim - a really useful program if you have friends who use different IM networks, as it supports MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, and a bunch of others. Gaim used to be a bit buggy, but the latest beta is rock solid. Firefox - a flexible, extendable web browser which supports tabs, live bookmarks, and lots of plugins to extend its feature set. OpenOffice.org - a decent, free alternative to Microsoft Word, Excel, and the rest of the office suite. It doesn’t feel as polished as the new Office 2007, but it does the job for creating most kinds of documents at home. Notepad++ - much like Notepad, which comes with Windows, but has lots of useful features such as line numbering and syntax highlighting. Paint.NET - not sure if this is 100% free, but if you want something for simple image editing and don’t need all the complexity of Photoshop, this is a great app.
Those were the first five that popped into my head. It would be great to hear what other people use.
WinRAR! Supports a multitude of different compression methods, and is a lot more efficient (and stable) than WinZIP.
Also, SmartFTP. If you have a need to transfer files via ftp, SmartFTP is a robust (and free) way to go. It says that you need to purchase a license after 30 days, but all that happens is you get prompted to buy the license every time you boot up the program. If you decline, you still get to use the program anyway
Oh, and an alternative to Gaim is Trillian. Most people I know use it.
In a sense. When transferring .zip files over a network, it’s very easy for it to lose information in the transfer, making it useless. Winzip makes it very hard to detect what is wrong with the file.
WinRAR offers the ability to break a file down in to smaller .rar files for easier transfer, and it also notifies you when an archive has been corrupted.
CCleaner- clean temporary/unneeded files GIMP - Photoshop alternative RegistryProt 2.0 - simple tool that warns you when an application registers itself to start at bootup AntiVir - free antivirus Free Download manager FilleZilla - FTP client/server Firefox + NoScript + Adblock + CookieSafe addons - say goodbye to popups/banner ads/malware installing behind your back SpyBot/Adaware - remove spyware/adware FFDShow - all-in-one codec with tons of options SG TCP Optimizer - gets the most out of your Internet connection Everything from Sysinternals Freeware HDTune - hard drive monitoring Speedfan - monitor voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in your computer MeGUI - free GUI for encoding 7-Zip - File archiver
Linux - The only non free software I’ve had on my computer for quite some time is a few games like Quake/Wolfenstein/Neverwinter nights etc. Listing all the free software I use under Linux would take a lifetime so I’m not even going to try though.
Does WinAmp count? Nice amount of features for the lite version, though the registered one obviously has more. Anyone else know of other media players that are free and offer similar features?
I use OpenOffice as well, in some ways I find it’s graphing abilities via Calc are more powerful than Excel.
LaTex2e, used for creating PDF’s with nice and clean formatting and special characters, not that viable for casual use but needed for some of my classes.
More or less math oriented for its purpose.
Anything Google really, I love Calendar, and of course everyone knows of Google Earth, but I don’t find it very useful unless I want to measure a certain distance around town. Definitely a novelty app for me.
WinSCP3 is the transfer program I use since I use SSH, again more school related than anything else.
The GIMP is awesome for image editing, slightly less intuitive than Adobe imo, but definitely worth learning since its free.
I used to use Trillian as well, the skins were awesome, but I haven’t used any sort of instant messaging for well over a year now.
SmartFTP as abadd mentioned is great, i use it all the time
I can’t bring myself to use GAIM or Trillian, after becoming so used to MSN Messenger and Google Talk’s interface.
Firefox/Opera, Frostwire, uTorrent, Winamp, Adaware, Spybot everyone should know about these.
and also a little gem i love, CDex - great CD ripping software
I didn’t think WinRAR was free… unless that’s changed? But yes, it’s a handy little app, and files compressed in the .rar format are typically much smaller than zipped files. Most of the files on this site are rared too
Although saying that, I’ve found that the tar.gz format does the smallest form of compression in many cases.
I used to use Winamp, but lately I’ve found that foobar2000 is the audio player of my choice. It’s simple and light weight, yet hosts heaps of powerful features. If you don’t mind your program not looking pretty and want excellent functionality I’d highly recommend this program. Tabbed playlists, right click to convert to almost any audio format, and being able to rip your CDs straight to .flac (or any format of your choice) all while using very little memory makes it very handy.
Felix, you mentioned Google Earth - I’ll like to mention just how useful I’ve found the web based Google Maps. Being able to see where I live in photographic detail really is amazing.
Trillian is indeed a very polished application, but unfortunately the current (free) version doesn’t support Jabber/Google Talk which is something that I’m using more and more these days. Jabber uses an open instant messengering protocol, so anyone can set up a Jabber server and communicate with people connected to other Jabber servers, instead of being tied to a specific company (MS, Yahoo, AOL etc). If the free version of Trillian Astra (the next version of Trillian) supports Jabber then I’ll probably switch back.
Also, another handy utility is FireFTP. It’s an FTP extension for Firefox and works great if you don’t want a separate FTP program (for whatever reason).
And yes, uTorrent is great - nice and light weight. Make sure you press T on the About screen to play the included game of Tetris. BitComet isn’t bad either.
[quote=“Solo Wing Dragon”]I didn’t think WinRAR was free… unless that’s changed? But yes, it’s a handy little app, and files compressed in the .rar format are typically much smaller than zipped files. Most of the files on this site are rared too
Although saying that, I’ve found that the tar.gz format does the smallest form of compression in many cases.
[/quote]
Another good option for small compressed files is the 7z format. As supported by 7zip (7zip is a great free app I use at work) and many other compression programs. The good thing is unlike rar 7z is totally free. (The makers of rar released uncompression for free but according to their license you are supposed to pay them if you want a version that can make rar archives.)
Yeah, 7zip isn’t bad format… something I should maybe consider switching to, given the open nature of the format. Do you know if there are any disadvantages of using 7zip over using the RAR format? The only problem I found is with the 7-Zip File Manager is that you can’t delete individual files, although that could quite easily be solved by re-creating the entire archive file.
You could look at pirated software as “free” in a way, I suppose, but it’s not really free in terms of what the license dictates.
Also, if the license doesn’t allow modification of the source code, then the software isn’t really free, regardless of whether the binaries are given away for free or not. Free as in beer, but not free as in freedom. For that reason, I prefer to use open software, where a just as good/better alternative exists to a piece of proprietary software (such as Firefox).
In that case, Linux and FreeBSD are probably the only good open source examples I can think of. Ubuntu Linux has certainly evolved into a nice operating system; Linux is finally desktop ready.
Well since I bought my 2nd generation Macbook Pro I haven’t really used Windows or Linux as much as I used to.With the exception of Maya all software I use is free.
That beeing said some of the best software I’ve ever used is Mac-bound.
Adium : best IM software
Quicksilver : a launching tool that never seems to amaze with all the stuff you can do
etc etc
The only cross-OS piece of software I use right now is Songbird which is an iTunes alternative that still needs a lot of work but offers some great stuff.I recommend it.I’ll use the usual tagline “The Firefox of music players” since add-ons is one of it’s biggest advantages.Like I said it still lacks a lot of the polish but it’s still great.
It has a built in web browser that enables it to work closely with mp3blogs with lots of cool features.You can basically build up a huge library in a matter of clicks.
If you are wondering : songbirdnest.com/screencast/
Thanks for the link to Songbird, Gehn. I tried this program a while ago in the very early stages, but going by the latest build they’ve improved things a lot. Like you said, it still needs a lot of work, but I can definitely see this program becoming “the Firefox of media players”.
As for operating systems, as a PC gamer, I’m stuck with Windows. However, despite some compatibility issues with legacy software, Windows Vista isn’t a bad OS at all.
As it happens, my copy was in fact free, so it (sort of) fits into the theme of the topic (but not really).
Vista is AWFUL - add in the fact that you can’t view ANY of your own videos beyond 800x600, makes it even worse. Vista is loaded with DRM, and is, basically, a Big Brother OS. Avoid it like the plague.
[quote=“Solo Wing Dragon”]Just thought I’d start up a topic on something a bit different. People use computers every day, yet often we take the software that’s installed on it for granted. After all, if it comes with the computer, why install anything else, even if there a better free alternative?
Lets use this topic to discuss Free software that can be used as a replacement or to compliment existing proprietary software. It would a great opportunity to educate each other of what we use to help better our computing experiences.
Some free software which I use:
Gaim - a really useful program if you have friends who use different IM networks, as it supports MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, and a bunch of others. Gaim used to be a bit buggy, but the latest beta is rock solid. Firefox - a flexible, extendable web browser which supports tabs, live bookmarks, and lots of plugins to extend its feature set. OpenOffice.org - a decent, free alternative to Microsoft Word, Excel, and the rest of the office suite. It doesn’t feel as polished as the new Office 2007, but it does the job for creating most kinds of documents at home. Notepad++ - much like Notepad, which comes with Windows, but has lots of useful features such as line numbering and syntax highlighting. Paint.NET - not sure if this is 100% free, but if you want something for simple image editing and don’t need all the complexity of Photoshop, this is a great app.
Those were the first five that popped into my head. It would be great to hear what other people use.[/quote]
Solo, Paint.net is free, I downloaded it and it worked fine without anything popping up saying it was a trial version. Just letting everyone know.
Yeah, it’s free, I just wasn’t sure it was completely free… as in, you can modify the source code and release your own version, essentially forking the project.
