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Thursday 7 November 2013

Free and Open Source Alternatives for most of the paid softwares on Windows Machine

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I have recently been using windows more than usual for official use. Being an Ubuntu user i am not much used to either use a trial version of any paid software or pay for any software. I googled a lot for my daily use softwares to make my life comfortable and found that almost for every paid software there was an alternative in the Free and Open Source World. Here is what i found:

  • Operating System : Widows (Paid) -> ReactOS (Alternative) I have a different blog written for this.
  • Office Utility : Microsoft Office (Paid) -> Libre Office, Open Office(Alternative). For years i only knew about Open Office as an open source alternative. However after going through the threads on Ubuntu forums as to why was Libre Office considered over Open Office as a default Office utility for the OS i came to know that Libre Office development was far too faster than that of Open Office. I even saw the results myself to verify this fact. I would recommend Libre Office for the same reason.
  • Video/Music Player : Windows Media Player (Most Probably Paid - I have hardly heard of Microsoft ever releasing anything free of cost :D) -> VLC media Player, Media Player Classic(Alternative).
  • Remote File Sharing : WinSCP, FileZilla, Putty
  • IDE for C# Programming : Microsoft Visual Studio (Paid) -> Sharp Develop (Alternative) (Although i was looking for Command line utility as i am only used to VIM as such, but found this one and made a note of it.
  • File Compression : WinRAR, WinZIP(Paid) -> 7zip(Alternative)
  • PDF Reader : Adobe Acrobat Reader(Freeware+Commercial) -> Foxit(Alternative)
  • Email Client : Outlook(Paid) -> Thunderbird(Alternative)
  • VM : VMWare(Paid) -> VirtualBox(Alternative)
  • Reference Management : Zotero (Zotero is another good add-on cum software for Reference Management. You can save your websites and URL/PDF preferences online so that whenever you clean your cache on browsers and you desperately needed some link and you cleared your cache and reinstalled new browser. You can check your Zotero and get URL/PDF back as all these preferences are stored online in your separate account.)
  • Cloud Storage : GoogleDrive/Dropbox

1 comments:

Shailesh said...

File Compression: FreeARC, UHARC