Thursday, April 3, 2008

The 70 coolest Free applications

The purpose is to collate some of the best free applications (and sometimes online services) that can be found on the Internet. It’s always worth pooling a decent list of resources to those who are more fortunate to have time away from computers.

Operating Systems

Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com
The most popular Linux distro at the moment - offering astonishing performance, usability and support (from a massive online community) all for free.

PCLinuxOS - http://www.pclinuxos.com/
One of my favourite Linux releases; PCLinuxOS is very different to Ubuntu but powerful and usable in equal measures. I find it a lot more intuitive but purely though personal preference. It too is supported by a healthy community.

Fedora - http://fedoraproject.org/
I’m not a Fedora user but there are an awful lot of them. Fedora was the daddy long before Ubuntu appeared on the scene and therefore it inherits a lot of excellent features from how long these guys have been doing it. Excellent software, strong communities and worth a look. This is Linux too incase you didn’t know.

openSUSE - http://www.opensuse.org/
Quoted as being one of the more fully featured, usable editions of Linux - openSUSE has a lot of users and is one of the major players in the scene today.

Video Playback

Media Player Classic - [long url]
Amazingly lightweight and incredibly durable - MPC succeeds where most others fail. It really will play anything and doesn’t even need installing.

VLC Media Player - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
A very popular application; a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats. It will play just about anything too.

Audio

Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Winamphttp://www.winamp.com
While not open source, it is free and very good indeed. Far better than iTunes in my personal opinion.

Anti-Virus and Security

AVG - http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1
A popular and comprehensive, free anti-virus application. I use it. Simple.

Avast! Home edition - http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
Also quite popular and available for free.

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