Try free/open source software

As I have said, I am very passionate about free software. But to completely make the change towards a completely free operating systems is like starting to swim at deep water, if you have not swum before. Not always a good idea. So there are some software, that is both “free as in freedom” and “free as in free beer” that you can try out if your operating system is Windows or Mac.

Here are different categories of free/open source software that you can use in your Windows or Mac operating system:

Office software

LibreOffice is a great replacement for office software, such as Microsoft’s proprietary Office software. This includes the programs you need to write documents, spreadsheets and databases (and more). It is stable, and was initially forked from OpenOffice since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

Web browsing

Mozilla Firefox is my default browser and I am quite at home with it. You have a lot of add-ons that you can choose from and use in your browser.

Chromium is a web browser on which Google Chrome is based. It is quite fast, and includes an “app-store” of its own. Here you can view a comparison of different browsers, and as you can see, the Chromium-based browser is, accordingly to that survey, the best.

File (de)compression

7-zip is mostly free/open source software with the unRAR restriction. This is only available under Windows and includes a graphical interface.

gzip is a completely free/open source software and also free as in free beer. However, the Windows version is a bit old (last modification was in 2007) and (de)compressing is done in the CLI.

Image editing

Gimp stands for “the Gnu Image Manipulating Program” and is quite a competent program to compete with Adobe Photoshop (though there are some minor shortcomings that could be better).

Music software

I was quite blown-away when I heard that there was free music software, about two-three years ago. But I think of this as a blessing to us musicians who have wanted some good software to write music with.

Score software

MuseScore is WYSIWYG-software. And in my opinion quite impressive, too. MuseScore makes it possible to collaborate with other score-writers through the net, where you can publish your scores if you want to.

Studio software

LMMS is a neat tool for making studio software. You could have a synthesizer which is connected to your computer and save your songs with it. If you would like to have some track where you sing or have otherwise recorded a track, you can use Audacity to record your track(s).

Try these programs out, and you probably will find out that you like some of them.

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