Free and/or Open-source Alternatives to many Common Programs

[neyoneit]

Why is https://www.photopea.com/ not in here? its the best browser photoshop-like, Also bitwarden opensource

[Man]

Avast?

But... Why?!

 

EDIT: Oops, just realized this thread was started a decade ago. All is forgiven! But in any case, most people don't need anything 'fancier' than Windows Security that comes bundled with Windows 10 and 11. It's 100% free and works well enough, as long as you don't wander too far into the beaten path, if you catch my drift. 

[malaki]

Someone recently set up a GitHub Repo of a bunch of Open Source alternatives for many Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) utilities. Whilst most are for more organization/business needs, I'm sure there are many projects in the repo that people will find interesting or useful

[mtbboy1993]

Video Editing

Davinci Resolve https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

Already mentioned, but some things to add: I did not know about the 60fps limit, but I don't use more than that for gopro footage currently anyway.

it has all features most need and more. But Studio version offers advanced features, but it's not pricy at $295 so great alternative to other paid software. The free version offers colour wheels, HDR colour wheels, sharpening, blur, so can track and plug faces, licence plates anything you want really. No watermark

 

Music:

Free music library software

Foobar2000:

Easy software to use, supports flac files, you can add album covers, and other info, have great control over your music library.

https://www.foobar2000.org/

 

Free Photo enhancement:

Rawtherapee, it's free, easy to learn.

https://www.rawtherapee.com/

 

https://www.darktable.org/

 

Vector:

Illustration software which uses vector format.

https://inkscape.org/

 

Task managing:

Process explorer

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer

 

Uninstaller:

HiBit Uninstall: it's free, and works well, easy to use, no paid extra features.

https://www.hibitsoft.ir/Uninstaller.html

 

Chat/communication:

Discord: you can chat with friends, and join chat servers.

https://discord.com/

[mtbboy1993]

On 1/24/2016 at 8:43 AM, Wolf_Lbh said:

Libre office should really be higher up on that list, above open office. Afaik open office is barely maintained, if it is at all anymore. In any case Libre Office is a far superior program.

Also Vlc player may have been king of the hill a few years ago but now smplayer and mplayer run a lot better.

Other free programs I use:
Firefox
Chromium (not google chrome, chromium is the exact same thing but without the spyware/google eula) (btw perhaps a browser section could be a thing?)

Pdf viewer/printer - Foxit reader

TTFA Split & Extract Pages - Splits/combines pdf files.

Epic text editor/crappy compiler - Notepad++

Torrent program - utorrent. Simple, customizable, minimalistic.

Calibre - Ebook viewing/organizing program. You can also rename ebooks which makes them easy to sort as the kindle at least just piles everything in alphabetically and has no native rename options which sucks horribly for series of books if you want to read them in order.

MediaPreview - enhances thumbnails for media files.

CCleaner & CCEnhancer - basic maintenance/cleanup of system files.

Eraser - Military grade file erasing program so your data can not be recovered.

Irfanview - Image viewer.

Audacity - Great free audio editor. Competes with Adobe Audtion.

MediaCoder - Media File Converter.

MediaMonkey -  great free audio player. Can work with apple devices.

This may be a bit controversial but I share Linus' belief that once I pay for content I own that content in any form I choose to enjoy it via, also for many older games the copyrights have expired so anyways here are some emulators I enjoy:
DeSmuME - Nintendo Ds emulator.
VisualBoyAdvance-M - Emulates Gameboy/Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance games.
Dolphin - Emulates Gamecube/Wii games.
Project64 - Emulates the Nintendo64.
Jnes - Emulates the original Nintendo Entertainment System.
Zsnes - Emulates Super Nintendo.

Irfanview supports colour profiles

[mtbboy1993]

GIMPshop  development stopped in 2007 and the website has been acquired by Skillademia, which is a paid service, with free courses too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop

[Wolf_Lbh]

Years ago I suggested some emulators and things have come a long way:
Libretro/RetroArch - Bundles multiple emulators together so you can launch your games from a single program by simply installing the emulator cores + bioses. The cores I suggest are:
Atari800 - Atari 5200 emulator
Virtual Jaguar - Atari Jaguar emulator
Beetle PC-FX - PC Engine emulator
MelonDS - Nintendo DS emulator
Gambatte - Game Boy Color emulator
Messen - NES emulator
Mupen64Plus-Next - Nintendo 64 emulator
Pokemini - Pokemon Mini emulator
bsnes - SNES emulator
BeetleVB - Virtual Boy emulator
Flycast - Sega Dreamcast emulator
PicoDrive - Sega CD and 32X emulator
Beetle Saturn - Sega Saturn emulator
Beetle NeoPop - Neo Geo Pocket/Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator
Beetle PSX - PS1 emulator
PPSSPP  - PSP emulator

Other Emulators:
Citra - 3DS emulator (A version of this exists in RetroArch but the core is not as good as the standalone)
Dolphin - Gamecube/Wii emulator (A version of this exists in RetroArch but the core is not as good as the standalone)
Cemu - Wii U emulator (Didn't have much of a library and almost all of it was ported to the Switch except for: Xenoblade Chronicles X, Wind Waker, Skyward Sword, Paper Mario Color Splash, Sonic Lost World, Star Fox Zero, and Yoshi's Woolly World. Any other Wii U game that is popular is better played on the Switch imo)
PCSX2 - PS2 emulator
RPCS3 - PS3 emulator (note most popular games work well and 70% of the ps3 library is listed as "playable" meaning you can finish the game with hopefully only minor crashes or glitches but some tinkering and googling may be required. It will also require a decent computer to run it. A better solution might be picking up a used ps3 off ebay and just jailbreaking it so you have 100% compatibility and everything just works. Personally I suggest the launch model ps3 as even though it costs more it is also fully backwards compatible with PS2, PS1, and PSP games)
Yuzu - Nintendo Switch emulator (This is still a wip and currently ~800 games are bad/broken and 1800 games are good-perfect with almost all of the popular games being near perfect and updates happening incredibly frequently.)
Vita3k - PS Vita emulator (50% of the library is listed as playable or better. Personally a PS Vita or PSTV is not that expensive to pick up off ebay and very easy to jailbreak. The PSTV would require jailbreaking to play a lot of games as it doesn't have the motion and touchscreen controls the PS Vita has but there are homebrew tools to allow you to easily play those games and I prefer to play on a tv.)
Xemu - Xbox emulator with 80% of the library listed as playable. Requires a good computer. (Imo you are better off jailbreaking an xbox for 100% compatibility)
Mame - a massive preservation effort that plays many consoles and arcade games as best as any program is currently able to emulate. Systems include: Atari 2600, Atari 7800, CD-i, ColecoVison, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, Sega SG-1000, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, Intellivision, Atari Lynx, Neo Geo, SuperGrafx/TurboGrafx 16/TurboGrafx CD, and Wonderswan (Note Mame isn't very user friendly even if it is the best so for any of these systems if you struggle dealing with Mame you can just use RetroArch cores instead)

[Wolf_Lbh]

On 6/30/2023 at 8:58 PM, Wolf_Lbh said:

RPCS3 - PS3 emulator (note most popular games work well and 70% of the ps3 library is listed as "playable" meaning you can finish the game with hopefully only minor crashes or glitches but some tinkering and googling may be required. It will also require a decent computer to run it. A better solution might be picking up a used ps3 off ebay and just jailbreaking it so you have 100% compatibility and everything just works. Personally I suggest the launch model ps3 as even though it costs more it is also fully backwards compatible with PS2, PS1, and PSP games)

RPCS3 actually just got an update today that gives it a lot more performance on lower end computers. I'd still suggest using a jailbroken ps3 for the compatibility but if you don't have money/space for one and have a mid tier computer you can emulate most of the library pretty well.

[TheLANguy]

Greenshot- An open source screenshot tool. Greenshot has a lot of features compared to snipping tool, such as a blur and save directly using preferred file output settings. It comes in a portable version.

https://getgreenshot.org/

https://github.com/greenshot/greenshot/

[Wolf_Lbh]

For anyone looking for a photoshop alternative and finds gimp to be really difficult to use I found out the website https://www.photopea.com/ is actually really great and has some in development ai based image editing tools that might be really handy (making inserted objects match the texture you are placing them in type things if you want to add a tattoo to someone for example)

[Killjoy_NS]

Is there a "EZ CD Audio Converter" alternative in Linux based distro?

I didn't find any type of converter on/for MINT OS.

[abg134]

Hi! There is a very useful and open source alternative to web apps like ITGlue, it's called "ITFlow"

give it a check out!

I think if you're in IT and/or a sysadmin you'll love it!

you host it on your own on a VM or in the cloud, it's super easy to set up and is constantly improving

check out their main site, click on "Try the demo" and experience it instantly! (UN: demo@demo PW: demo)

https://www.itflow.org