That weird Kjorteo-like thing (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} kjorteo) wrote,@ 2008-04-09 11:28:00 |
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Some random freeware plugs
The problem with the open-source community is that it is often alarmingly pompous and loud. Hell, the fact that there even is a community is usually troubling enough. I want programs that can do the things I want them to with no hassle, preferably for free. I don't want to be part of a community.
That being said, though, there are some surprisingly neat freeware programs out there if you just try to ignore the people who get all uppity about them. The thing I like, though, is that they can replace the programs you'd otherwise have to pirate, if you're the kind of person who feels bad about that sort of thing. Which probably none of you are. Given the choice between 1) Paying lots of money for a legitimate license for a popular commercial program, 2) pirating said popular commercial program, or 3) finding a no-strings-attached guiltless freeware alternative, most of you will probably happily go for 2. Well, I like option 3 when the replacement does everything I would have needed the commercial program to do, so let me at least make some recommendations!
(Disclaimer: Some of these are open-source, some aren't but they're still freeware. I really don't care enough about the distinction between the two--that's the open-source community's job. I just like programs that replace commercial programs without requiring money.)
Operating System: ... :(
Unfortunately, I've got nothing here, because free operating systems suck. I mean, there's Linux, but...eeurgh. I'm happy to say that I have legit copies of Windows for both my machines (purchased XP Pro for the tower, the laptop came with Vista Ultimate.) I'm not really comfortable with software piracy when it can be avoided, so I do feel better having actually paid for Windows, but money or piracy are pretty much your choices here, since Linux is horrible. They claim that Ubuntu is supposed to be designed around "Hey, what if we made Linux such that actual human beings could use it?" but I'm still skeptical.
Web browsing: Mozilla Firefox
One of the many areas in which the community is noisy enough that it's hard to just use a decent browser without making it sound like I'm trying to make some sort of statement. Maybe it will help if I at least concede the bad points: Firefox is a total unrepentant memory hog, and not all websites designed with IE in mind work properly. (Although this seems to be in the process of being fixed, as I'm finding less and less sites I have to give up and use IE for these days.) Plus, it's not exactly the free alternative to commercial/pirated software, since anyone who has Windows has a free copy of IE, which as of IE7 has tabbed browsing and most of the other cool features Firefox mostly got attention for having first. It does still have its advantages, though! It's slightly (the degree of this is highly exaggerated, but it's still at least a little) more secure with things like ActiveX and such. And the good news about having such a rabid community is that the extensions are amazing. Yes, IE7 supports plugins, too, but the sheer number of really good add-ons for Firefox that people have actually bothered to make is staggering.
E-mail and newsgroups: Mozilla Thunderbird
Well, it's pretty much Outlook Express only it seems to work slightly better. Plus, it has one of those trainable adaptive junk mail filters, which is awesome.
Image editing: GIMP
This one might not be to everyone's tastes, since image editors seem to be a highly personal thing, and it's hard to switch from one to another after finally getting a handle of where everything is. Heck, I know someone who still uses Paint Shop Pro 5 (they're up to 13 now, I think) because they pretty much broke it in the new versions and all the other editors are confusing after getting too used to PSP. So, this might not be for everyone. Still, if you're willing to give it a try, GIMP does everything that you or I would need it to do, and it's free. If you're a professional graphics designer, then no, but at that point you can probably just view the $900 PhotoShop license as a legitimate business expense anyway. For mortals, GIMP is just fine. Its help file is an abomination unto God, but its community is excited enough that there are tutorials everywhere. If you get it, just remember that your help file is called Google, and that one is excellent. "How do I (whatever) in GIMP" is guaranteed to bring up at least 20 different results. Just, whatever you do, don't get the GIMPshop plugin. Its whole "We rearranged GIMP to make it look more like PhotoShop so people can more easily get used to the change" basically boils down to just making one big window it forces all the individual GIMP windows into, and it doesn't even work very well. (It doesn't de-clutter the taskbar at all, and it's incredibly buggy and prone to making GIMP itself behave erratically and/or crash.)
Image viewing: XnView
Another one that sort of strays a little from my stated goal of recommending freeware alternatives to commercial programs, this is basically Windows Picture & Fax only with more features and less bugs. (Plus it can view more formats, too, like PSD.) I'm only recommending it here because it fits so nicely next to the image editor, and because XnView is really that awesome.
Archive management: IzArc
WinRAR is probably the most pirated program out of all the ones I'm discussing today, since the thought process is so automatic. I need to read .rar files, so it's time to get WinRAR. I don't want to pay because being able to read .rar files is a God-given right, so it's time to get a crack. However, the other side to that is that it's such a basic thing that it's surprisingly easy to replace. IzArc is a freeware program that reads .rars and whatever else WinRAR can do. IzArc = WinRAR but free. What more do you need to hear?
Text editing, spreadsheets, etc.: OpenOffice.org
This one actually surprised me. First off, it has to be one of the more alarmingly pretentious freeware programs this side of Linux and the Firefox community. Heck, they love themselves so much that they put their website name entirely, including the .org, into the actual program name. It really is called OpenOffice.org. When you download and install it, it tries to install it in C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org before you change it. Really. (You'll never guess where you can download it from, by the way.) Still, pretending for a moment that this isn't about some sort of counterculture community affiliation and I just want to do what Microsoft Office can do without having to pay $400 for it, OpenOffice(.org!!) is amazingly, almost miraculously good. It... it is Office. Granted, I haven't had it for very long, so there's a chance I could run into some obscure feature it doesn't have eventually, but for now, it's just about identical. The biggest change I've had to put up with so far is getting used to the new names for the individual programs. (Microsoft Word = OpenOffice.org Writer; Microsoft PowerPoint = OpenOffice.org Impress; Microsoft Excel = OpenOffice.org...Calc?) Once I was in the right program, the layout was spot-on. Even the menu layout and all associated options are practically identical! I will note that Writer, while still having the auto-spellcheck and associated squiggly red underline of doom, does not appear to have the auto-grammar check and associated squiggly green underline of doom. Of course, if the ability to fight with a program that can't figure out your perfectly legitimate sentence and blames you for it is worth $400 to you, then, well....
The problem with the open-source community is that it is often alarmingly pompous and loud. Hell, the fact that there even is a community is usually troubling enough. I want programs that can do the things I want them to with no hassle, preferably for free. I don't want to be part of a community.
That being said, though, there are some surprisingly neat freeware programs out there if you just try to ignore the people who get all uppity about them. The thing I like, though, is that they can replace the programs you'd otherwise have to pirate, if you're the kind of person who feels bad about that sort of thing. Which probably none of you are. Given the choice between 1) Paying lots of money for a legitimate license for a popular commercial program, 2) pirating said popular commercial program, or 3) finding a no-strings-attached guiltless freeware alternative, most of you will probably happily go for 2. Well, I like option 3 when the replacement does everything I would have needed the commercial program to do, so let me at least make some recommendations!
(Disclaimer: Some of these are open-source, some aren't but they're still freeware. I really don't care enough about the distinction between the two--that's the open-source community's job. I just like programs that replace commercial programs without requiring money.)
Operating System: ... :(
Unfortunately, I've got nothing here, because free operating systems suck. I mean, there's Linux, but...eeurgh. I'm happy to say that I have legit copies of Windows for both my machines (purchased XP Pro for the tower, the laptop came with Vista Ultimate.) I'm not really comfortable with software piracy when it can be avoided, so I do feel better having actually paid for Windows, but money or piracy are pretty much your choices here, since Linux is horrible. They claim that Ubuntu is supposed to be designed around "Hey, what if we made Linux such that actual human beings could use it?" but I'm still skeptical.
Web browsing: Mozilla Firefox
One of the many areas in which the community is noisy enough that it's hard to just use a decent browser without making it sound like I'm trying to make some sort of statement. Maybe it will help if I at least concede the bad points: Firefox is a total unrepentant memory hog, and not all websites designed with IE in mind work properly. (Although this seems to be in the process of being fixed, as I'm finding less and less sites I have to give up and use IE for these days.) Plus, it's not exactly the free alternative to commercial/pirated software, since anyone who has Windows has a free copy of IE, which as of IE7 has tabbed browsing and most of the other cool features Firefox mostly got attention for having first. It does still have its advantages, though! It's slightly (the degree of this is highly exaggerated, but it's still at least a little) more secure with things like ActiveX and such. And the good news about having such a rabid community is that the extensions are amazing. Yes, IE7 supports plugins, too, but the sheer number of really good add-ons for Firefox that people have actually bothered to make is staggering.
E-mail and newsgroups: Mozilla Thunderbird
Well, it's pretty much Outlook Express only it seems to work slightly better. Plus, it has one of those trainable adaptive junk mail filters, which is awesome.
Image editing: GIMP
This one might not be to everyone's tastes, since image editors seem to be a highly personal thing, and it's hard to switch from one to another after finally getting a handle of where everything is. Heck, I know someone who still uses Paint Shop Pro 5 (they're up to 13 now, I think) because they pretty much broke it in the new versions and all the other editors are confusing after getting too used to PSP. So, this might not be for everyone. Still, if you're willing to give it a try, GIMP does everything that you or I would need it to do, and it's free. If you're a professional graphics designer, then no, but at that point you can probably just view the $900 PhotoShop license as a legitimate business expense anyway. For mortals, GIMP is just fine. Its help file is an abomination unto God, but its community is excited enough that there are tutorials everywhere. If you get it, just remember that your help file is called Google, and that one is excellent. "How do I (whatever) in GIMP" is guaranteed to bring up at least 20 different results. Just, whatever you do, don't get the GIMPshop plugin. Its whole "We rearranged GIMP to make it look more like PhotoShop so people can more easily get used to the change" basically boils down to just making one big window it forces all the individual GIMP windows into, and it doesn't even work very well. (It doesn't de-clutter the taskbar at all, and it's incredibly buggy and prone to making GIMP itself behave erratically and/or crash.)
Image viewing: XnView
Another one that sort of strays a little from my stated goal of recommending freeware alternatives to commercial programs, this is basically Windows Picture & Fax only with more features and less bugs. (Plus it can view more formats, too, like PSD.) I'm only recommending it here because it fits so nicely next to the image editor, and because XnView is really that awesome.
Archive management: IzArc
WinRAR is probably the most pirated program out of all the ones I'm discussing today, since the thought process is so automatic. I need to read .rar files, so it's time to get WinRAR. I don't want to pay because being able to read .rar files is a God-given right, so it's time to get a crack. However, the other side to that is that it's such a basic thing that it's surprisingly easy to replace. IzArc is a freeware program that reads .rars and whatever else WinRAR can do. IzArc = WinRAR but free. What more do you need to hear?
Text editing, spreadsheets, etc.: OpenOffice.org
This one actually surprised me. First off, it has to be one of the more alarmingly pretentious freeware programs this side of Linux and the Firefox community. Heck, they love themselves so much that they put their website name entirely, including the .org, into the actual program name. It really is called OpenOffice.org. When you download and install it, it tries to install it in C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org before you change it. Really. (You'll never guess where you can download it from, by the way.) Still, pretending for a moment that this isn't about some sort of counterculture community affiliation and I just want to do what Microsoft Office can do without having to pay $400 for it, OpenOffice(.org!!) is amazingly, almost miraculously good. It... it is Office. Granted, I haven't had it for very long, so there's a chance I could run into some obscure feature it doesn't have eventually, but for now, it's just about identical. The biggest change I've had to put up with so far is getting used to the new names for the individual programs. (Microsoft Word = OpenOffice.org Writer; Microsoft PowerPoint = OpenOffice.org Impress; Microsoft Excel = OpenOffice.org...Calc?) Once I was in the right program, the layout was spot-on. Even the menu layout and all associated options are practically identical! I will note that Writer, while still having the auto-spellcheck and associated squiggly red underline of doom, does not appear to have the auto-grammar check and associated squiggly green underline of doom. Of course, if the ability to fight with a program that can't figure out your perfectly legitimate sentence and blames you for it is worth $400 to you, then, well....
