I have already written about office suites and operating systems. Now I will talk about various other applications which are significant in their own way but are not mainstream enough to have their own reviews. All the applications that I will discuss here are open source(hence free). I am not giving the details of each software I am mentioning, because it will take a lot of time and space. This review is just to inform that all of us have a choice. The motto of people who develop free/Open source software is to give the users a choice.
Browsers -Firefox -I know all the browsers are free. But this one is open source and a hell lot more secure. No need to expand any more. Many reviews already on MS recently.
E mail ClientsThunderbird From the same people as Firefox. Very easy to use and feature rich. Has all the features of Outlook express and many more. Try it and you will know.
Image Editing-GIMP from the Linux camp(although a version comes for windows too.) this software does not seem like a free software and has features only biggies like Photoshop have. A must try, I know many professionals using it on their Linux box. Just for information, a version for making movies in available, which is seriously used in Hollywood.
P2P-emule we have grown up on a Napster, Kaazaa diet. But both the pro grammes were notoriously unstable and some times installed spyware on the computer. E mule is open source and contains no spyware. It searches the network of Kazaa and Gnutella. Very nice interface too.
Database-Mysql This one is as good as it can get. For small and medium use, there is no better database than this one. Fast, easy to use, and powerful. Only with a better frontend, it can give Microsoft Access a serious run for its money. Other notable databases? PostgreSQL, SAP db.
Apart from this, open source software are available for almost all the needs. In fact I use an open source music player, cd ripper, cd writer OS, office application and many more. I don’t have any problems whatsoever.
Open source is very big in the server arena. Almost all types of servers are available and they perform at least as good if not better than the commercial ones.
Many programming tools are also available, but this is not a place to discuss that. There are websites that facilitate open source development and hence are a great place to find the appropriate software for ones needs. My favorite such site is https://sourceforge.net, here one can find software for almost any need. All of the stuff here is open source and free. A must try site for all.
If there are any queries, then please feel free to M2M me.
Nikunj