I use Windows... how can I move to free software?
by
Matt Lee
Contributions
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Published on
Jun 24, 2010 12:19 PM
You can install free software applications on your Windows machine and use them instead of proprietary software from Microsoft and others.
Audio and video
- Audacity is a free software audio editor featuring a wide variety of filters, plugins, and codecs.
- OBS is a widely used and fully free software tool for video recording and live streaming.
- VLC and mpv both replace iTunes and Windows Media Player, and support an enormous variety of different file formats and encodings.
Chat clients
- Thunderbird is a free software mail reader that replaces Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail.
File-sharing
- Transmission and qBitTorrent are two clients for the popular BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, and replace spyware like uTorrent.
Games
- 0 A.D. is a real-time strategy game blending historical accuracy with advanced 3D graphics, and is fully free software.
- Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a popular "roguelike" role-playing game, sending players into an always different, randomly generated dungeon for treasure-hunting and exploration.
- OpenTTD is a free software transportation simulation game, based on other popular railway and transportation simulators.
Graphics
- Blender is a fully free 3D graphics editor, supplanting nonfree programs like Maya.
- GIMP is a full-featured and ethical replacement for Adobe Photoshop.
- Inkscape is a vector graphics editor that offers an ethical replacement for Adobe Illustrator.
- Krita replaces Microsoft Paint and other raster graphics editors.
In the office
- Calibre is a free software tool for managing your ebook library, and is additionally able to convert to and from many different ebook formats.
- LibreOffice replaces all of the tools comprising the Microsoft Office suite, allowing you to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
Programming
- GNU Emacs is the real-time, self-documenting text editor, providing an advanced and ethical replacement for nonfree programming editors like Sublime Text.
System utilities
- 7-Zip is an easy-to-use tool for handling compressing and extracting file archives in formats like 7z, ZIP, and GZIP.
- ClamWin is a free software antivirus for use on Microsoft Windows, replacing nonfree and costly alternatives like Norton Antivirus.
- TestDisk is a free software tool for data recovery, and is able to restore lost drive partitions and accidentally overwritten files.