GT Video: Go Open Source or Go Home
Comments(10)
- By nixiepixel
You don’t have to be a geek to want to save your money and download programs for free. Here are 5 of my quick picks for open source software.
You may be wondering, What is Open Source?
Open source generally refers to software that is released with open code and no restrictions on downloading, modifying or advertising the work. An open source program usually starts when developers publish their code where other developers can learn about it, download it, and play with it.
Where do you come in?
You can reap all the benefits of course by using the application for no cost to you.
Pros of Open Source software I use:
Firefox –Flexible
-
secure (noscript makes it arguably the safest web browser)
- Many add ons to do whatever you need
-
free (no charge, and not tied into anyone’s operating system)
-
large community willing to help support people with problems (via mozillazine.org and others)
-
cross-platform (runs on Windows and linux for dual-booting fun! + Mac)
-
professionally developed and maintained by the Mozilla Foundation (non-profit) and the Mozilla Corporation (for profit)
(honorable mention to Thunderbird and other Mozilla projects, such as the latest version of the web browser – “Shiretoko”)
Openoffice – Supports almost every Microsoft Office format
-
free (does what the $150 version of Office does and more, including most features of the $500 version)
-
large community willing to help support people (try getting support from Microsoft)
-
much smaller and considerably faster than Microsoft Office
-
cross-platform (runs on Windows and linux for dual-booting fun! + Mac)
-
uses many of Microsoft Office’s interface conventions, making switching between them easy
-
developed and maintained professionally by Sun Microsystems
GIMP
(GNU Image Manipulation Program) – free (is not a replacement for, but can be used by amateurs to do much of what Photoshop can do)
-
much smaller and faster than Photoshop
-
community support
-
cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac)
Pidgin – provides many of the features of non open-source IM clients such as Trillian
-
free and open source
-
small and fast
-
cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac)
KDEnlive – free and open source
-
many powerful features seen with commercial video editors like Sony Vegas
-
lightweight and fast
-
clean interface
- (only available on Linux , try Avidemux for Windows)
I knew nothing about this stuff, you sold me! I was seriously about to go out and buy photoshop today! I don't think I will be doing that now. Thanks for the tip! Great video by the way!
That was incredibly well done and informative! Gimp and Pidgin are really going to come in handy. Thank you!
@NixiePixel you speak the truth – but your your video skills are getting waaaaaay too strong!!!
I live in VIM. Love perl; to me, writing perl is just like thinking (I think using words in complete sentences). Also use MinGW/MSYS and rsysnc. All on Windows. But my award for "best program" goes to Adobe CS4 because of how well it integrates several components! Just consider how poorly the various components of MS Office work with each other to see what a terrific achievement the integration in CS4 is!
Why not come out and recommend to use Linux with all these great programs? Ubuntu (both Gnome and KDE versions) I can recommend to just about any average user. It looks good and works great, most people can get up and running on it without much trouble.
So all you people out there looking to save money, go whole hog and download Ubuntu.
OpenOffice.org may be able to import mainstream MS Office 2007 documents, but once advanced features such as equations are being used, OpenOffice mangles them completely. So, if your Word 2007 document uses beyond-the-basics features, OO will not be able to import it successfully, the pages layout itself being severely altered.
I would tend to agree with you. However, Open Office has proven to do great jobs exporting to .doc form, so I usually write my formulas/equations in Open then save it as a Word document. Does that seem to work?
try video converter named Super from eright software
While I can agree with some of your alternatives to closed source programs, I can't really agree with all the options. I certainly prefer Office 2007 over OpenOffice and Photoshop over GIMP. The next major version(s) of OOo and GIMP may make me reconsider, but they are either too simple, outdated, or unintuitive for me to spend large amounts of time on. Thanks for the video.
Thanks for this very informative video ^_^