Top 10 Free Programs

Firefox is perhaps the best all-round web browser there is. It has a huge library of plugins (including lots of virtually indispensable stuff for web developers), is both standards-compliant and widely supported, and it looks good and works well. But there are lots of alternatives, including Webkit and Chrome (both free and open source) as well as Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (which are free but not open source).

OpenOffice.org provides you with a free Office suite that’s highly compatible with Microsoft’s products, and actually has a few extra tricks up its sleeve (such as a dedicated drawing program).

Cyberduck (if you’re a Mac user) or WinSCP (if you’re a Windows user) are both excellent and easy-to-use FTP/SFTP clients. You may also want to try out Filezilla which runs on both platforms.

For those cases when you need a real text editor (e.g. for programming or editing web pages) you’ll want Notepad++ (on Windows) or Textwrangler (on the Mac) or Komodo Edit on either.

Picasa is as easy-to-use as iPhoto, offers superb integration with Google’s cloud services (of course), and indexes all the images on your hard disk. If you’re not using a Mac and you use a digital camera it’s virtually a must-have, and even if you are using a Mac (and thus have iPhoto) you may actually prefer it.

VLC is great for playing that weird video file that won’t work in QuickTime Player or Windows Media Player. And it’s just fine for playing the files that will. You may also want to try out MPlayer.

Handbrake is great for ripping DVDs so you can play them from your hard disk (e.g. on a media center computer) or mobile device (iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP, etc.). It won’t work on some DVDs (but neither will commercial packages).

For 3d modeling, animation, and rendering Blender’s features are hard to beat, and its price is impossible to beat. And if you want an unbiased renderer to go with it, look no further than Luxrender.

If you need a free alternative to Photoshop you should look at The GIMP, although Mac users may find the X11 user interface a bit hard to take. If you need an alternative to Illustrator there’s also Inkscape (with the same caveat for Mac users).

And finally, Audacity is a must-have application for anyone who needs to edit or sequence audio files.

Other Software

The programs discussed thus far only scratch the surface of what’s available. All software discussed on this site is organized into categories (what does it do? what does it run on?) and the commercial packages they can replace (OK I need something like Excel…). I hope you find the information on this site useful, informative, and easy-to-find.