Libre Software

[lxskllr]

I ran into this list of free as in freedom software, and thought it might be of interest to some of you. It's for Windows and Apple machines, and comes without restrictions, ads, or spyware. You can also get the source to see how it works, or to change it as you like.

https://hampedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Recommendations

Here's a couple packages I used on Windows, but didn't see listed...

7Zip - Archiver that supports many formats, including rar
http://www.7-zip.org/

qBittorrent - Torrent client similar to uTorrent
http://www.qbittorrent.org/


Edit:
Infrarecorder - CD burning
http://infrarecorder.org/

PartedMagic - partioning, cloning, and system recovery
http://partedmagic.com/doku.php

 

[pyonir]

Thanks for the link. A lot of familiar programs there, that I already use, but also some I didn't know about that will be useful (like the RAW Photo editing programs).

I'm choosing Libre software more and more it seems.

 

[theevilsharpie]

When I'm looking for software recommendations, I usually hit up AlternativeTo. It's an application database that will take an application you're already familiar with and recommend alternatives.

That being said, it would be nice to find a suitable replacement for Microsoft Visio.

 

[lxskllr]

That being said, it would be nice to find a suitable replacement for Microsoft Visio.

Your linked site gave Dia as an alternative. Not sufficient? I'm not familiar with Visio outside the name.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Your linked site gave Dia as an alternative. Not sufficient? I'm not familiar with Visio outside the name.

Visio is the de facto diagramming standard in my field. I need to be able to open and save Visio diagrams, and I need to be able to use Visio Stencils. Dia can't do either, making it a non-starter.

 

[gorobei]

why no paint.net under image manipulation software?
http://www.getpaint.net/

 

[theevilsharpie]

why no paint.net under image manipulation software?
http://www.getpaint.net/

Paint.net is a great utility, but it's not entirely open source. Pinta is an alternative.

 

[lxskllr]

why no paint.net under image manipulation software?
http://www.getpaint.net/

That's a good program, but it isn't libre software. Something similar that is libre is Pinta, but it isn't as good as Paint.NET. I ended up using Gimp for everything. It isn't as easy, but it has more power, and keeps me in practice since I don't manipulate images that much.

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

It doesn't have SOFAstats: http://www.sofastatistics.com/home.php

Haven't tried Octave or SciLab, but SOFA's much easier to use than R or Sage, which I think is essential - most of the people I know (including myself) who want to use stats software aren't statisticians or programmers, and don't necessarily have the time or patience to deal with the learning curve of a program like R. Whereas I was able to get all my data imported, analysed, and outputted with SOFA in a matter of minutes. And the guy who developed it lives 20 minutes away from me

 

[Cerb]

Your linked site gave Dia as an alternative. Not sufficient? I'm not familiar with Visio outside the name.

There's nothing quite as nice as Visio, TMK, even if you don't need Visio compatibility. It's one of those programs where they got most everything right, and then just fine tuned it a bit each generation. FI, moving from Visio 2000 to 2010, all I really notice are the ribbon, slightly more flexible color control, some baked-in shapes having gradients, and that the bitmap exporter is both speedy and good quality.

You know how you were the first time you ran K3B? It just worked, most of the features you wanted were right there, and the interface was mostly intuitive? Well, Visio's like that, for generic diagramming. Dia is good, but Visio has in excess of a 15 year head start.

One thing Dia has going for it, though, is that Visio 4.0 Technical, my first experience with it, was 90% of what Visio is, today. Like basic word processing, it won't be constant catch-up treadmill, as they reach equivalent usefulness.

Now back to watching g++ terminal output go by...

 

[lowrider69]

On the topic of Paint.net there's some really good plugins that you can find on the Paint.net forums. The developer(Rick Brewster) is on there a lot so no BS gets passed off as a plugin as far as I can tell. Paint.net used to be open source years ago I believe and Rick shut that down.

 

[lxskllr]

I just ran into this cd compilation of libre software. It was originally compiled to provide Finns libre software localized to the Finnish language. It has since been extended to English. There's nothing particularly unusual about the disc, but it gives you a bunch of different packages you can try in a single download.

http://www.valo-cd.net/