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