Free software (that's actually good) for almost every occasion

Hi all,

Now, there's a lot going on in the tech industry beside A.I. Microsoft's Windows 11 is scaring off the French Government, and (quite ironically) even the Chinese Government, because of concerns regarding data harvesting and lack of privacy. Even HP and other laptop manufacturers are switching the default operating system (OS) away from Windows to other operating systems. Not necessarily for privacy concerns, but because of the low margins on cheaper laptops and a surprisingly high return rate by people not enthralled with Microsoft's ongoing subscription model. Even Adobe is coming under fire for the cost of subscriptions, it's use of people's personal photos/works to train their A.I. without permission, and several other justifiable concerns with their industry-standard software.

Also, Microsoft's forced "TPM chip requirement" for Windows 11 late last year meant potentially millions of computers that were otherwise perfectly fine for the task, either ended up as e-waste or encouraged hacks to get around the issue. I hacked my old desktop PC with more than enough performance for Windows 11.. and it worked, but monitoring the network traffic on my home router told me a lot of data was going to Microsoft. So I keep it around as a backup PC system, but I have a second OS on that machine which runs my day-to-day tasks.

So what can we do as users of computers, to keep functional computers in a usable state, and saving money at the same time?

Use free software!

I used to work as an IT guy in a local university, and the one thing I can tell you, is that universities are very budget conscious when it comes to their tech. Students on a budget using older computers, academics that are waiting for the grant money to come in, even bespoke projects in remote, limited electrical power situations...  that would never work reliably enough using commercial software were great cases for trying the free stuff.

So if you want to see how far you can go with free software, I have a page listing my favourite free apps, what they're used for (or their commercial equivalents), I've used many of these applications for decades in both my workplaces and at home, and many have come a long way in the last couple of years. Most of these apps run on Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and a few run on Apple/Android mobile devices as well. So without further ado:

https://waywardham.net/index.php/tech/i-t-and-computing/120-free-software-for-almost-every-occasion

All of my links are to the official app web sites, so you get them straight from the source. I just make free recommendations on my site because I get hounded at social events otherwise, and this way I can say "go there and see what you like, there's no subscriptions or licensing costs to worry about, so why not, right?".

I hope it helps!
Hamish

Great list thanks, I'm bookmarking for reference.

If you or anyone is interested in privacy tech solutions (mostly free as well) here is a blog post put together a few months ago.
https://disconnect.bearblog.dev/diy-tech-privacy/

You can download the PDF version here if interested:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/H2MTX334FC#joHJA2QkSPUk

This is super helpful, thanks to you both.

I'm really enjoying my Linux OS experience with Fedora and GNOME so far. Fedora seems well-supported and stable, with active development. I'm running it on an older machine with no issues.
For me it's a positive that GNOME looks and behaves differently than Windows desktop. For some people that's a turnoff, and Linux Mint or something with KDE Plasma might look more familiar.
I believe GNOME can be tweaked to include a dock (making it more Mac OS-like), but I prefer so far to run it mostly as designed.

I go into more detail in a permies thread over here, but briefly, from these lists, I use:
hardened Firefox w/uBlock Origin (general browsing)
Brave Browser set on aggressive blocking (purchases, Big Tech log-ins)
DuckDuckGo
Proton Mail
GIMP and Inkscape
LibreOffice
VLC media player


I'm still struggling to find a good (relatively easy, simple) way to run data backups on Fedora. I use Pika Backup currently for file backup (documents and photos), but I haven't figured out a good system backup yet. Can anyone point me to something? I'm on a laptop so I don't need an automated/scheduled program. Just something to run manually as needed. I back up to local external hard drives only; no cloud storage. I consider myself a "normie" as far as tech goes, with a light dusting of "not afraid to mess about in the command line if it's relatively low-risk". Any recommendations?

Just an addition here in the 'legacy hardware' department....  Had an older Canoscan LiDE 70 flatbed scanner that would have required 3rd party software contortions to get to work with current Windows.  Finally loaded Linux Mint (Cinnamon) on 2014-built mini-PC in the house and so far pretty good.  But the awesome surprise was plugging in that old USB scanner and the scanner function built into Mint had it up and running immediately! Hats off to the Linux community and developers.....

Sara Hartwin wrote:I'm really enjoying my Linux OS experience [...] but I haven't figured out a good system backup yet.

Hey Sara, I'm a Linux newbie 1 year into Linux Mint after decades on Windows. (Loving it so far!)

For backing up files, I'm using rsync. You give it a source and destination and, with the correct settings, you can have it copy only new/changed files. Rsync is a command line tool, which always used to intimidate me, but I made it part of my Linux goals over the past year to learn some of these tools. Doesn't seem so weird once I wrapped my head around it. If you are doing the same backups over and over again, you just run the same command every time.

On the other hand, for backing up the system in case of a bug or bad update, mine has a utility called Timeshift. I think this works similar to System Restore on Windows, but I haven't had to use it yet (fingers crossed lol).

Not sure if these are the same on Fedora or not!

Ooh, I recognize rsync from previous research! And Timeshift sounds familiar, too...

Aaron Pate wrote:Doesn't seem so weird once I wrapped my head around it.

I think this is the sticking point for me. I don't understand yet what I'm telling rsync to do, so I don't trust it. Sounds like I can learn, though. Or at least learn enough to be comfortable using it. (Maybe this in-depth guide from LinuxCapable will help?)

Oh, hey, looks like TimeShift does indeed work on Fedora: FOSS Linux has an updated guide for installing and using it. That's hopeful.

Thanks, Aaron!

Sara Hartwin wrote:I'm still struggling to find a good (relatively easy, simple) way to run data backups on Fedora. I use Pika Backup currently for file backup (documents and photos), but I haven't figured out a good system backup yet. Can anyone point me to something? I'm on a laptop so I don't need an automated/scheduled program. Just something to run manually as needed. I back up to local external hard drives only; no cloud storage. I consider myself a "normie" as far as tech goes, with a light dusting of "not afraid to mess about in the command line if it's relatively low-risk". Any recommendations?

I'm super old school with my backups.  About once a week I just put things on a USB stick.  I don't back up all that much stuff so it's easy.  If I have any major problems I've always been fine reformatting and doing clean installs with everything.  It doesn't happen very often but I'm fine with it.  Anything important goes on two USB sticks and if I have large files I want to keep I put them on my external HD.

I've heard good things of the backup software already mentioned and Deja Dup.  I have no experience with any of those though.
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.gnome.DejaDup

I have been using open source for decades.

I would go as far as to suggest that open source users, and developers, share a similar mindset with permaculturalists.

No central authority. Freely accessible knowledge and ideas. Both are dedicated to frugality and reducing waste. People are put before profits.

Compare this to the ruthless computer corporations that push so hard to make systems obsolete and not repairable. When they say "upgrade" you have little choice. These companies aggressively guard their code and data formats. They fight to make it difficult for you to use other technologies.

LMDE 7 user here. That's Linux Mint Debian Edition. Almost two months ago I had to recycle a 15 year old Lenovo laptop because butter fingers dropped it. Dinged one corner and the keys on that corner didn't work. Try to repair a 15 year old laptop? Nah. I shopped around at several stores and shops. At Walmart, the floor man heard what I wanted and headed for a cabinet in the back. It was the HP I'm using right now, marked way down because they were moving it to out-stock. Microscrap didn't get a chance to start. I got into the UEFI and did the needed resets and plugged in a USB with LMDE-7. Installed and updated in much less than an hour. Spent another hour making some preference settings and adding some preferred software and applets, then about 5 minutes restoring my files and away we went.
My wife and I have used one flavor or another of Linux for 19 years. Around that time I did a bit of website hard-coding; html, css, php with a touch of javascript.
Our Linux journey started in 2007 when one critical update from Microsoft repeatedly crashed my 18 month old XP desktop requiring a Restore, if it would let me, or else a full reinstall. I went round after round with MS 'Support' trying to get it to take. No good, so MS 'Support' told me my 18+ month old PC was obsolete. Hmph! My wife had just bought a brand new Vista desktop. She's blind in one eye and has slightly distorted vision in the other. Her desktop settings are critical for her comfort, preventing eye strain and headaches. Well, nearly every MS update reset her settings to Microsux's favorite default settings and I'd have to get back into her settings and fix them. PITA! Pain In The Astericks! Who owns this PC, us or Microsh!t? Obviously not us. I started looking around for a Mac, but I won't buy a pig in a poke and no one would let me take one for a test drive. Desperation time. Take a look at this Linux stuff I'd heard a wee bit about. I went with Ubuntu. Tried it from a DVD without installing it for two hours. I put it through it's paces and learned that the only real differences were program names and menu layouts. I installed it cold-turkey, erasing Microslop, and restored my files and got back into a web project. I tried several coding editors and found one that felt good. My wife noticed the huge improvement in my vocabulary almost immediately. She started looking over my shoulder.
What's that?
Linux.
What's that?
It ain't Winblows.
Can I have it too?
I dual-booted MS and Ubuntu so she could pick which one she wanted when she started her PC. I showed her some of the programs. We had already been using Thunderbird for emails and LibreOffice which are included with most Linux installations. I showed her how to browse the files on the Windows partition. The only obstacle was the desktop settings. A few hours on a couple Linux forums and I had them worked out and she took off. About two months in and I noticed she hadn't asked me to reset her desktop settings in quite a while.
How's it going?
Great!
How's Linux?
Great!
What about Vista?
Haven't used it in weeks.
Want me to remove it?
Sure.
I moved her files over to the Linux partition and erased Vista with glee!
At that time we were both officers in the local chapter of a blind association. We had no trouble making/sharing documents or joining video calls. Goodbye Microsoft! And now we own our PCs, not MS or Linux!
The only major problem we've had was when Robin went looking for more word games. She found one on a well known major news website and installed it as a browser extension. It turned out to be a home page hijacker AND it was persistent. That was before those became illegal. Remove it and it would come right back. The cure? There are two methods to uninstall software in Linux: one removes the software, leaving configuration files or purging, which removes the software and all of its configuration files. I purged her browser, restarted her PC in case the problem would reload from memory and reinstalled the browser. Hijacker gone! So much easier than using an antivirus! I've never installed an antivirus on her PCs. With care, they're not needed!
Will we ever go back to Windoze? Nope!

I missed one other of your questions, backups. I've tried TimeShift, rsync, even cp (copy) in the command line and in BASH scripts. What I've settled on is cheating. I simply hook up my external drive, open the file manager, highlight and copy my /home folder, move focus to the external drive, make a new dated folder and paste my home folder into that. I wait for the file manager to quit and job done.
On occasion I'll do the same with the /etc folder. The /etc directory contains host-specific system configuration files for the operating system and installed applications. It serves as the central repository for settings that control system behavior, network configuration, user accounts, and service daemons. Backing it up can save you some time re-configuring your programs and network settings. If you want to. Purely optional.
If you find you need your file manager to be root, open the terminal and enter:
pkexec <file_manager_name>
If pkexec isn't installed on your Fedora, use:
run0 <file_manager_name>
BTW!! Don't EVER enter a command you haven't checked out first. There are plenty of A-holes out there that gleefully try to get you to trash your system. And be careful while you've got your file manager open in root. Close it as soon as it's done.

My wife had just bought a brand new Vista desktop. She's blind in one eye and has slightly distorted vision in the other. Her desktop settings are critical for her comfort, preventing eye strain and headaches.

I do not have the best vision either. One thing I especially like about the MATE desktop, I can make it look just like I want it to look. I can make the icons, the sidebars, and the fonts, as big as I like. I can make the background and the fonts in the terminal whatever color and size I want. I have found this to be difficult to impossible with Windows or MacOS.