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Seven OpenSource Apps You've Just Got to Try
BESTS 
Tags: technology, free software, free, speech, open source, opensource, geek, american culture, electronics, computers
As well-made, well-distributed open source programs like Firefox are stealing market share, open source software is becoming more and more popular. Here are some of my favorite apps available online.
| | Number one is, of course, Mozilla Suite. Secure, fast, and free, Firefox and its sisters Thunderbird (for email) and Sunbird (a calender app) are converting users as fast as you can say "Mozilla Rules" - and no wonder. | | | Another great browser - and my personal choice - is Opera. Even though it's not technically open source, it is distributed freely from their site, and at least deserves an honorable mention. It's just as fast and secure as Firefox, and its super-easy Speed Dial makes access to your favorite bookmarks as quick as you can tap two keys. All this beats out the regrettable fact that it's just not open source. | | | As for text editing, no computer would be complete without OpenOffice. It comes with Writer, Calc, Impress and a few other programs designed to push Microsoft Office off the map, and in quality, if not popularity, it's done its job. | | | For those older computers - the kind that can't run Microsoft Office whether you want it to or not - AbiWord is an elegant, lightwieght solution. It's got almost all the same features as Word and takes up a fraction of the CPU space. | | | VLC Media Player is a no-brainer for anyone, period. It can play almost any type of media file (even those obscure ones that WMP can't hope to make sense of) and will come in handy more often than you'd think possible. It's also fast and streamlined, although quite powerful under the surface. | | | TrueCrypt is another open source app that I use almost every day. It's the most user-friendly encryption program I've ever come across and offers several different types of encryption. This program is not messing around - you can even create a secret, hidden volume within a volume in case, and I quote, "an adversary forces you to reveal the password." Whether it's financial info or embarrassing love poems, TrueCrypt can hide it for you. | | | Pidgin is an instant messaging client for Windows and Linux. It can handle almost ten different protocols, such as AIM, MSN, Jabber, and Yahoo Messenger. I highly recommend it - lightweight, pretty to look at, and powerful under the surface. | | | Last, but not least, is the biggest leap of all - Ubuntu. I won't go into an overview of all its benefits here, but any search will turn up plenty of pros with only a couple of cons in the mix. For the user sick to death of Windows, this is the ultimate headache-remover. Easy, fast, and fully community-supported, any one of the apps above will work smoothly in Ubuntu - more smoothly than any of Windows' native offerings. So enjoy! | | | One more note - while I have provided examples of the most-used applications here, sometimes only a specialty program will do the trick. (For instance, Index Dat Spy can help clean up your old temp files and TightVNC performs just like LogMeIn.) So if you're ever at a loss, just Google it - chances are some kind developer will have had exactly the same problem, and made it available for anyone else in the same boat. Cheers! |
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