How to Enhance Windows with Open Source and Free to Use Software

[HappinessNow]

For those who still choose to use Windows for what ever reason (let's hope your at least dual booting to Ubuntu or some other Linux &/or BSD distro), I decided to put together a quick guide with links to Enhance your Windows experience with Open Source and 'Free to Use' Software.

Web Browsers:

Firefox - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html

*Opera - http://www.opera.com/

*Google Chrome - http://www.google.com/chrome

Photo Work Flow Software:

Raw Therapee - http://www.rawtherapee.com/

Raw Conversion Software:

UFRaw - http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/

Photo Manipulation Sofware:

GIMP - http://www.gimp.org/

Video/Audio media players:

VLC - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

*J. River Media Jukebox - http://www.mediajukebox.com/

Streaming Music players:

*Pandora - http://www.pandora.com/

Image Burning Software:

*IMGburn - http://www.imgburn.com/

* = Not Open Source but Free to Use Software

This is a quick short list please add more to the list in post below, only add software that you use on a regular basis and can stand behind.

[Grant A.]

Replace IMGburn with this FOSS alternative:

InfraRecorder (http://infrarecorder.org/)


Chat:

Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im/)
Irssi (http://irssi.org/)
ChatZilla (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16)

Alternative to WinZip/WinRAR:

7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/)

Vector Editing:

Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/)


All of the links in this post should lead to FOSS alternatives for certain programs.

[sandy8925]

I'll just give the name of a site:

www.osalt.com

This site lists opensource alternatives for many types of software so if you don't find what you want on this list you can also try searching there.

[Kingsley]

How about an alternative for FineReader 8.0 Pro?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBYY_FineReader#ABBYY_FineReader

[Eclipse.]

Google chrome's source is open by the way, theres a eula for the executable but the code is open.

[Kinney]

Replace IMGburn with this FOSS alternative:

InfraRecorder (http://infrarecorder.org/)


Chat:

Pidgin (http://www.pidgin.im/)
Irssi (http://irssi.org/)
ChatZilla (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16)

Alternative to WinZip/WinRAR:

7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/)

Vector Editing:

Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/)


All of the links in this post should lead to FOSS alternatives for certain programs.

I'm going to second InfraRecorder. I only just found out about it a couple months ago but it is a very nice alternative to some of the more bloated non-free alternatives.

I'm also going to throw in Putty, GVim, Cygwin, and Filezilla.

[ve4cib]

SMPlayer (http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/) is a nice alternative to VLC. It's maybe a touch heavier than VLC, but I think it looks much more attractive, and is just as stable and feature-laden.

Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/) is my standard music player under Windows. It's not as nice as Amarok or Rhythmbox, but it gets the job done.

Listen (http://www.listen-project.org/), just Listen. I've not used it much (it doesn't get along well with Win7 at work, and I use Amarok and Rhythmbox at home), but it's got some good reviews.

K-Meleon (http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/) and SeaMonkey (http://www.seamonkey-project.org/) are other OSS browsers/web suites.

KDE for Windows (http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows) has some decent applications in it. It's not quite complete, but parts of it work well. It's nice if you absolutely cannot live without Konqueror or Kate.

Geany (http://www.geany.org/) is my new favourite text editor. I've been using it pretty much exclusively at home (under Ubuntu) and at work (under Win7) for the last several months. It's got syntax-highlighting (like GEdit), but it's also got a symbol tree, code-folding, and the like, which makes writing code so much easier.

OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org/). I'm surprised no one's mentioned this yet (unless I missed it). It does everything one could ask of an office suite, really. Plus that built-in export to PDF feature is nice.

[Dr. C]

SMPlayer (http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/) is a nice alternative to VLC. It's maybe a touch heavier than VLC, but I think it looks much more attractive, and is just as stable and feature-laden.

Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/) is my standard music player under Windows. It's not as nice as Amarok or Rhythmbox, but it gets the job done.

Listen (http://www.listen-project.org/), just Listen. I've not used it much (it doesn't get along well with Win7 at work, and I use Amarok and Rhythmbox at home), but it's got some good reviews.

K-Meleon (http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/) and SeaMonkey (http://www.seamonkey-project.org/) are other OSS browsers/web suites.

KDE for Windows (http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows) has some decent applications in it. It's not quite complete, but parts of it work well. It's nice if you absolutely cannot live without Konqueror or Kate.

Geany (http://www.geany.org/) is my new favourite text editor. I've been using it pretty much exclusively at home (under Ubuntu) and at work (under Win7) for the last several months. It's got syntax-highlighting (like GEdit), but it's also got a symbol tree, code-folding, and the like, which makes writing code so much easier.

OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org/). I'm surprised no one's mentioned this yet (unless I missed it). It does everything one could ask of an office suite, really. Plus that built-in export to PDF feature is nice.

OpenOffice.org is by far the simplest way to introduce many a Windows user to Free Libre Open Source Software. Replace Microsoft Works with OpenOffice.org. After they get over the shock of what OpenOffice.org can do when compared to Microsoft Works and at no cost!. They are in many cases ready to move to new and better things in software.

[BoyOfDestiny]

I've found cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) indispensable.

"Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It consists of two parts: A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a Linux API emulation layer providing substantial Linux API functionality.
A collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel."

It made it very simple to use rsync to back up data, use ssh -X to play on my Ubuntu machine over wifi, then "retire" the Windows machine for good... :)

[HappinessNow]

I'll just give the name of a site:

www.osalt.com (http://www.osalt.com)

This site lists opensource alternatives for many types of software so if you don't find what you want on this list you can also try searching there.
Those aren't referrals by ubuntuforum members, which is the point of this thread.