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

[Albatross]

Foxit reader may work as an alternative. I think it has a dark theme. Not sure if it can adjust text/background colour though. 

 

Thanks! I'm googlng it now. :

[rashdanml]

is there a reason why potplayer isnt on the list?

 

if somone wonder why I use it, its because win 10 does not have media player, and I didnt want to use vlc. and potplayer was the one I found on the net.

Added. Probably missed it due to there being countless media players available.

 

VMware Workstation should be added, the free alternative being Oracle's VirtualBox

Added a section for virtualization.

[65441321234]

[deleted]

[Albatross]

Foxit reader is almost perfect! Thank you @rashdanml! I'm sorry for the delay, I downloaded the file and installed, but completely forgot about it (went back to Linux for a few days straight). Anyways, I love it, but I just wish there was a way to edit the color behind the PDF/documents once opened. What I mean is the sidebars besides the documents. But, regardless, it is pretty much perfect I suppose.

 

 

 

But...! If someone has an alternative though that is truly a "dark" reader, please share it. I cannot stand looking at light colors!

[BurgerBum]

Oh wow, thanks for this post. I've been using Linux for quite a while and this post still managed to introduce me to new and cool FOSS to use.

^^^

[EposVox]

Great thread & list, thanks!

[Albatross]

Me again! This time I am looking for office software that allows organization, through such things like spoiler tags. Probably an impossible request, but hey, doesn't hurt to try. I tried looking for extensions for Libreoffice but that failed miserably, and I haven't found a single software through google myself.

 

So...anyone?

[Opask]

Oh since it seems this post is still being updated I have another media player.

 

https://mpv.io/

 

 

A fork of MPlayer with better features. It supports a lot of the same things as MPC-HC but is open source and cross platform. No gui by default but will give you the proper .desktop files on GNU/Linux and add the "open with" option in windows. Once you load the file it has a floating progress bar/play/pause etc menu.

[rashdanml]

Oh since it seems this post is still being updated I have another media player.

 

https://mpv.io/

Cheers! It sounded a bit familiar, could have sworn I had already added it to the list. It's up there now

[rashdanml]

Me again! This time I am looking for office software that allows organization, through such things like spoiler tags. Probably an impossible request, but hey, doesn't hurt to try. I tried looking for extensions for Libreoffice but that failed miserably, and I haven't found a single software through google myself.

 

So...anyone?

Well, as much as I like challenges, that is probably beyond the capabilities of word processors. The closest you can get is a web-based CMS that you can run on a local server to give you that functionality (spoiler tags are web-based). A web-based word processor may have similar functionality, but I haven't really seen one that supports it.

[alpenwasser]

- snip -

 

 

Cheers! It sounded a bit familiar, could have sworn I had already added it to the list. It's up there now

 

Ah, good to see you're around. I wasn't sure when you'd show up again, so I went ahead and added it. Sorry about that. I did make a backup of your post in case I broke something though.

 

Well, as much as I like challenges, that is probably beyond the capabilities of word processors. The closest you can get is a web-based CMS that you can run on a local server to give you that functionality (spoiler tags are web-based). A web-based word processor may have similar functionality, but I haven't really seen one that supports it.

Yeah, only other thing I can think of is text/code editors which do folding based on code tags, braces and indentation, but that's probably also not what's asked here.

[Albatross]

Well, as much as I like challenges, that is probably beyond the capabilities of word processors. The closest you can get is a web-based CMS that you can run on a local server to give you that functionality (spoiler tags are web-based). A web-based word processor may have similar functionality, but I haven't really seen one that supports it.

 

Ah, I feared as much. I just found that with all that I write it'd be helpful to click a button to quickly unfold a section I need to read/edit or keep it folded so I skip to the next.  :lol: Maybe someone will make an extension in the future that does it or something very similar. 

 

I appreciate it regardless.  

[rashdanml]

Ah, I feared as much. I just found that with all that I write it'd be helpful to click a button to quickly unfold a section I need to read/edit or keep it folded so I skip to the next.  :lol: Maybe someone will make an extension in the future that does it or something very similar. 

 

I appreciate it regardless.

Cheatier solution: Notepadd++ with <p> tags, saved as .html. Blocks of "code" (which in your case is just text) can be opened and closed quickly. Downside though: no formatting.

[Albatross]

Cheatier solution: Notepadd++ with <p> tags, saved as .html. Blocks of "code" (which in your case is just text) can be opened and closed quickly. Downside though: no formatting.

 

Yikes. Well in my line of paid hobbies (I help commission conworlds, conlangs etc) formatting is very important. I don't think the addition of what I need would be worth it at the cost of something as vital as formatting.

 

 

If you ever do come across something like this, I'd surely be interested in knowing about it.

[alpenwasser]

Cheatier solution: Notepadd++ with <p> tags, saved as .html. Blocks of "code" (which in your case is just text) can be opened and closed quickly. Downside though: no formatting.

 

 

Yikes. Well in my line of paid hobbies (I help commission conworlds, conlangs etc) formatting is very important. I don't think the addition of what I need would be worth it at the cost of something as vital as formatting.

 

If you ever do come across something like this, I'd surely be interested in knowing about it.

Alternatively, you could use LaTeX.

The source code could be folded as you wish, while the end document would be beautifully formatted. On the downside, there's a slight moderate non-trivial learning curve to it. Once you get over that though, it's pretty bloody awesome actually.

[Albatross]

 

 

Alternatively, you could use LaTeX.

The source code could be folded as you wish, while the end document would be beautifully formatted. On the downside, there's a slight moderate non-trivial learning curve to it. Once you get over that though, it's pretty bloody awesome actually.

 

I'll try it if it will do what I want while maintaining the formatting that I need (like Libreoffice).

 

Is this the website?

 

https://latex-project.org/ftp.html

[alpenwasser]

I'll try it if it will do what I want while maintaining the formatting that I need (like Libreoffice).

 

Is this the website?

 

https://latex-project.org/ftp.html

Haha, dat moment when something you say half-jokingly gets taken somewhat seriously.

Not that I want to discourage you. I've written a few semester projects in it and use it quite a lot these days. It is awesome, but before you get started, maybe let me elaborate a bit about what you might be getting yourself into. It will probably require a bit of time until you can work with it fluently, but once you can, it's pretty sweet (IMHO, at least. Some people find it hard to get to grips with it).

As an idea of what you can do: https://github.com/alpenwasser/laborjournal/blob/master/versuche/skineffect/skineffect.pdf

Now, to give you a bit of an idea of how the whole thing works (simplified, of course):

The basic idea is that you have a source file (which is essentially just a text file with a .tex file extension), and you compile that into a pdf (or something else, if you want, but usually you go for pdf). One of those files for the pdf I linked above is this one: https://github.com/alpenwasser/laborjournal/blob/master/versuche/skineffect/sections/arbeitsgrundlagen.tex

The basic underlying technology/language for that is TeX. Working with TeX directly is... not for the faint of heart, to say the least. But: You can write macros in TeX (what essentially amounts to functions in regular languages). One set of these macros is called LaTeX (there are others, but that's probably the most popular one these days). If you use a compiler which converts LaTeX to pdf instead of using pure TeX as the source, you can then write your stuff in LaTeX (which is what I did in the document I linked above), which is much more convenient than going with pure TeX.

For added functionality, lots of additional packages have been written over the years by many different people. Basically, they're roughly what amounts to libraries in conventional programming languages. You include them into your document with the appropriate command and then use their functionality. You can browse through them here (letter 'A', at least): http://www.ctan.org/pkg/:A

Because installing and downloading individual packages is a bit bothersome and annoying, some nice people have created what's called "TeX" distributions. Basically that's a bundle of the most commonly used (and some not-so-commonly used) packages, so it's all installed in one go. The downside of that is that it will usually eat quite a lot of disk space, but such is life. These are the "TeX Live", "MacTeX" and "proTeXt" links on the page you linked (there might be others, but so far I've only used TeX Live since I'm on Linux).

Basically, installing a distribution of choice for your platform should get you set with most of the packages you'll ever need (I've never needed to install an additional package by hand I think).

Now, as for actually working with the stuff, you can use any text editor you like, in the simplest of cases. But there are various editors specifically made for this purpose (some also give you a preview of the pdf which your source would compile to). One of the more popular ones I'm aware of is TeXMaker: http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/

Obviously, this is where you'd want to maybe google around a bit to see if you can find an editor with folding functionality (I use Vim, but that too is not for the faint of heart, and I don't really use folding to be honest). However, in this case you might actually not need to use folding, because you can split your source code across different files, and could then only work on specific files, without touching the ones you don't care about (then recompile the entire document at the end of course). Up to you.

Okay, sorry for the wall of text, but just to give you an idea of what it's about and what you'd be getting yourself into. As a side note: While you can do awesomely fancy stuff with it, and those often are a bit tricky to accomplish, doing something similar to a good-ol' LibreOffice document can be as simple as:

 

\documentclass{article}% this is a comment\usepackage{graphicx} % this is how you include a package\begin{document} % this is where the actual stuff starts which you then see on the page\section{This is my Fancy Shizzle!}% Let's include a picture\begin{figure}    \includegraphics[width=.7\textwidth]{mypic.png}    \caption{This is a fancy picture}\end{figure}And this is some fancy text!\begin{itemize}    \item        With a fancy list    \item        with fancy bullet points\end{itemize}And so on and so forth...\textbf{some bold text}\texttt{typewriter font for code}\emph{emphasised text} (usually italizied)And regular text you just type in like this.\end{document}

That document you can then compile to a pdf. Edited December 22, 2015 by alpenwasser

[Albatross]

Haha, dat moment when something you say half-jokingly gets taken somewhat seriously.

 

I took you entirely seriously. lol I was ready to learn what I needed to do what I need, but blimey...was that even English?! haha  Honestly I was expecting a learning curve, uncomfortable at most, but yikes that seems like torture since I have no idea what it is to begin with.    But if I can learn more of it, that'd be great, because the examples you gave look really fancy! I've the time to set aside over the weekend to look into it on Linux, at the very least. 

[SIGSEGV]

LibreOffice should be higher than OpenOffice, it's much better maintained.

I suggest ENIGMA Game Maker as a alternative to Game Maker. It's libre and Game Maker compatible.

Nano should be higher up than vi/vim since it's easier, and add Links2 to the Linux terminal stuff (it's a text-based web browser that's really good).

Qemu should be on the list of virtualization tools.

Transmission should be first in the list of torrent programs, it's simple, easy to use and has a no-nonsense interface.

Tox should be on the list of chat programs.

DosBox should be added under gaming.

The Darling Project should be there somewhere too.

The Atom editor should be under development tools, and '(IDEs)' should be removed, because there are far more development tools than just IDEs.

[alpenwasser]

I took you entirely seriously. lol I was ready to learn what I needed to do what I need, but blimey...was that even English?! haha  Honestly I was expecting a learning curve, uncomfortable at most, but yikes that seems like torture since I have no idea what it is to begin with.    But if I can learn more of it, that'd be great, because the examples you gave look really fancy! I've the time to set aside over the weekend to look into it on Linux, at the very least.

Well, the basic premise is pretty much "write source code" -> "compile into pdf", in its simplest form.

It looks a bit overwhelming at first, but once you have the basics down, anything more than that is primarily using google and stackexchange.

If you really want to get into it, feel free to make a thread about it in the coding section and tag me with questions.

[MG2R]

I took you entirely seriously. lol I was ready to learn what I needed to do what I need, but blimey...was that even English?! haha  Honestly I was expecting a learning curve, uncomfortable at most, but yikes that seems like torture since I have no idea what it is to begin with.    But if I can learn more of it, that'd be great, because the examples you gave look really fancy! I've the time to set aside over the weekend to look into it on Linux, at the very least. 

The biggest advantage of LaTeX is that it does all the heavy lifting on layout. You just tell what needs to be a title, a reference, a paragraph, whatever, and LaTeX will produce a document that's laid out according to certain stylistic rules.

[alpenwasser]

The biggest advantage of LaTeX is that it does all the heavy lifting on layout. You just tell what needs to be a title, a reference, a paragraph, whatever, and LaTeX will produce a document that's laid out according to certain stylistic rules.

May the gods have mercy on your soul if you ever try to deviate from that though (see: floats)

[MG2R]

May the gods have mercy on your soul if you ever try to deviate from that though (see: floats)

Oh, I'm not touching layout creation in LaTeX with a ten foot pole.

 

[EChondo]

Hey, I found an alternative to this thread!: https://alternativeto.net/

 

[alpenwasser]

Hey, I found an alternative to this thread!: https://alternativeto.net/

 

Now the real question is, do we enter this thread as an alternative to alternativeto.net on their site?