Honestly Windows Sucks but most of the users all over the world have to use Windows today because they don’t really have an alternative, Linux is still a little difficult to use and Mac’s are extremely pricey when compared to PC’s loaded with Windows. Here are some free software that are extremely good alternatives to the ones that are built into Windows. Remember free software doesn’t necessarily equate to bad software. Most of these softwares are extremely popular.
- Mozilla Firefox
- OpenOffice
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- Nvu
- Pidgin (aka GAIM)
- Ekiga
- GIMP
- VLC Media Player
- Open Workbench
- Dia
The holy grail of web browsers being cross platform, open source and free. Firefox is number 2 in terms of market share but it tops the list for having less security vulnerabilities, simple and clean interface (KISS principle) and ability to customize with plugins and extensions. In short, if you want a better surfing experience, switch to Firefox.
The best replacement for Microsoft Office. This cross platform office suite is open source, free and spots a similar collection of applications. The closely adopted look and feel, features and common file formats will make your conversion to OpenOffice smooth sailing.
Your intelligent alternative Email/Newsgroup client to the bundled Microsoft Outlook or recently Windows Mail. Like Firefox, it is another A+ product by Mozilla designed with simplicity in mind making it easy to use, secure and extendable with themes and plugins.
Nvu is an free, open source yet excellent HTML editor comparable to the likes of Microsoft Frontpage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) and tabbed editing coupled with other common web authoring features makes it a superb application tool for anyone.
Why have a hundred different IM’s when Pidgin can do the job. Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows. You can talk to your friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr.
Your video conferencing and VoIP counterpart tothe bundled Microsoft Netmeeting (Meeting Space in Vista). Ekiga is previously known as GnomeMeeting and is interoperable with many such applications (which use the SIP protocol) including Netmeeting itself. It doesn’t have all the fanciful features but it serves it original purpose well and sufficiently good enough.
Microsoft Paint is just too basic for our needs and Adobe Photoshop can burn a hole in the pockets. And that’s when GIMP, the open source graphics editor, comes into the picture. Although I honestly feel Adobe Photoshop is still better in terms of features and usability, GIMP is still a very commendable piece of work offering almost as many features and most importantly, it is free software.
Free, open source and extremely platform-independent, this has to be my favorite media player which ousts Windows Media Player in every way I can imagine (maybe I am biased). Among its list of features, one notable one is it supports and spots a large number of codecs, with support constantly added with each update.
Ahh, that damned piece of Microsoft Project giving you headaches with your project management and money issues again? Fear not as Open Workbench, a desktop project scheduling and management application, is equally good sharing many features as MS Office.
Possibly the best free diagramming software replacement for Microsoft Visio, both which are used to draw diagrams (eg. UML, flowcharts, relationship models etc). Do note that Dia is unable to open Visio (.vsd) files although it is possible to import diagrams as XML.
See Open source nearly covers up almost everything that you do on software that comes bundled with Windows. Save all your money and go the open source way.
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Jason
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Karthik Kastury
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Matt Wolfe