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

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

 

:D

Goof :P 

 

(I used it as a source for some items on the list, but I picked the ones that look good. AlternativeTo has many options, but not all of them are actually practical). 

Interested in Linux, SteamOS and Open-source applications? Go here

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  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

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.

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.

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Posted

Awesome thread. I hope it gets further updated. 

 

Here's my suggestion:

Code Editor: Brackets. (opensource/MIT license)

http://brackets.io/

 

It's a really great editor, can be extended with plugins/extensions.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

This is a very nice list of alt. tools you have compiled here! Although TrueCrypt should be changed with VeraCrypt or another Encryption program.

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Posted

Any free VPNs (or, a one time purchase VPN) that could allow me to easily play my foreign games? I've run out of my trial for WTFast, so now I'm out of luck. :(

 

 

(Also, if anyone is looking for gif making software that's free, look at: Giffing Tool and Instagiffer.)

|  The United Empire of Earth Wants You | The Stormborn (ongoing build; 90% done)  |  Skyrim Mods Recommendations  |  LTT Blue Forum Theme! | Learning Russian! Blog |
|"They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.” ― Tupac Shakur  | "Half of writing history is hiding the truth" — Captain Malcolm Reynolds | "Museums are racist." — Michelle Obama | "Slap a word like "racist" or "nazi" on it and you'll have an army at your back." — MSM Logic | "A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another" — Jesus Christ | "I love the Union and the Constitution, but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it." — Jefferson Davis |

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Posted
6 hours ago, Albatross said:

Any free VPNs (or, a one time purchase VPN) that could allow me to easily play my foreign games? I've run out of my trial for WTFast, so now I'm out of luck. :(

 

 

(Also, if anyone is looking for gif making software that's free, look at: Giffing Tool and Instagiffer.)

"Free" (and most paid vpns, ever wonder why most are Chinese and Chinese people use them to protest their government and get caught all the time?) tend to pay for themselves by harvesting all your information. Your vpn knows where you connect from, and where it routes all your data to, and even if it didn't it could still monitor all your exit node activity like login info, broswer fingerprint, and ect to find out your identity or anything they wanted to know about you. And also various governments across the world set themselves up as relay nodes in anonymity networks like tor and monitor all activity that goes through their node. If you are not also setup as a relay node they can see exactly where that information ends up at and if you are then you could get in trouble for the crap someone else was doing that passed some manner of illegal content through your own relay node.

Even "legit" vpns get raided all the time and have their data seized.

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12 hours ago, Wolf_Lbh said:

"Free" (and most paid vpns, ever wonder why most are Chinese and Chinese people use them to protest their government and get caught all the time?) tend to pay for themselves by harvesting all your information. Your vpn knows where you connect from, and where it routes all your data to, and even if it didn't it could still monitor all your exit node activity like login info, broswer fingerprint, and ect to find out your identity or anything they wanted to know about you. And also various governments across the world set themselves up as relay nodes in anonymity networks like tor and monitor all activity that goes through their node. If you are not also setup as a relay node they can see exactly where that information ends up at and if you are then you could get in trouble for the crap someone else was doing that passed some manner of illegal content through your own relay node.

Even "legit" vpns get raided all the time and have their data seized.

 

But I just need one to play foreign games. I'm not going to be doing anything illegal. Are their none to be had that is decent? :(

|  The United Empire of Earth Wants You | The Stormborn (ongoing build; 90% done)  |  Skyrim Mods Recommendations  |  LTT Blue Forum Theme! | Learning Russian! Blog |
|"They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.” ― Tupac Shakur  | "Half of writing history is hiding the truth" — Captain Malcolm Reynolds | "Museums are racist." — Michelle Obama | "Slap a word like "racist" or "nazi" on it and you'll have an army at your back." — MSM Logic | "A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another" — Jesus Christ | "I love the Union and the Constitution, but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it." — Jefferson Davis |

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2 hours ago, Albatross said:

 

But I just need one to play foreign games. I'm not going to be doing anything illegal. Are their none to be had that is decent? :(

That depends, do you care if someone can easily get your game info and potentially hawk or your stuff on a gold selling site? It is possible the game you are playing isn't popular enough to be targeted by these kinds of people but if it is like wow or something then it does happen a good deal. Also the game's cheating detection engine is a lot more likely to mass ban your account falsely if you connect via a vpn because chinese gold farmers/bots usually do the same. A lot of false bans get handed out for connecting via a vpn.

Once again it is completely your choice and it is possible you won't ever have any problems but personally I would not touch one with a 10 foot pole.

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2 minutes ago, Wolf_Lbh said:

That depends, do you care if someone can easily get your game info and potentially hawk or your stuff on a gold selling site? It is possible the game you are playing isn't popular enough to be targeted by these kinds of people but if it is like wow or something then it does happen a good deal. Also the game's cheating detection engine is a lot more likely to mass ban your account falsely if you connect via a vpn because chinese gold farmers/bots usually do the same. A lot of false bans get handed out for connecting via a vpn.

Once again it is completely your choice and it is possible you won't ever have any problems but personally I would not touch one with a 10 foot pole.

Well I made my account for Black Desert using random information just in case someone tried to hack me, so I don't think they'd get much other than my game account and some false information. Beyond that, would could they get? IP address, right, or is there more?

 

And I wouldn't mind if I got banned. I can't play as it is now, anyways. :)

|  The United Empire of Earth Wants You | The Stormborn (ongoing build; 90% done)  |  Skyrim Mods Recommendations  |  LTT Blue Forum Theme! | Learning Russian! Blog |
|"They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.” ― Tupac Shakur  | "Half of writing history is hiding the truth" — Captain Malcolm Reynolds | "Museums are racist." — Michelle Obama | "Slap a word like "racist" or "nazi" on it and you'll have an army at your back." — MSM Logic | "A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another" — Jesus Christ | "I love the Union and the Constitution, but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it." — Jefferson Davis |

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Just now, Albatross said:

Well I made my account for Black Desert using random information just in case someone tried to hack me, so I don't think they'd get much other than my game account and some false information. Beyond that, would could they get? IP address, right, or is there more?

 

And I wouldn't mind if I got banned. I can't play as it is now, anyways. :)

When an account is harvested by gold sellers typically they sell everything that isn't nailed down and change all the login info so it will be as annoying as possible to reclaim it and in the mean time set it to bot and harvest even more gold for them or if the account doesn't have any skills worth botting for cash they set it up to spam every account in a common public area or on a big list of names they have about offers to buy/sell gold or common scams like getting promoted to a game moderator or something if they just provide them with their password.

I'm not familiar with black desert so I don't know if that kind of thing is possible though. If you absolutely had to use a vpn to connect I would probably just use tunnelbear because it has a lot of free data they will let you use and then pay for it after that. As something with the Linus seal of approval it is probably fairly trustworthy, at least more so than your average vpn.

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For you Cisco fans. I've found an alternative to Cisco Anyconnect VPN client. Anyconnect is an semi-proprietary Cisco HTTP SSL VPN solution. The big issue at hand is that many institutions don't update their client license with Cisco, and thus VPN users are stuck on older versions of the VPN client. 

 

The alternative: OpenConnect 

Openconnect is a VPN client, that utilizes TLS and DTLS for secure session establishment, and is compatible with the CISCO AnyConnect SSL VPN protocol. 

 

Windows: https://github.com/openconnect/openconnect-gui/wiki

*nix (yes BSD too): http://www.infradead.org/openconnect/index.html

 

You can add this next one under CAD.

For y'all that use GIS, in specific ArcGIS (ESRI), there's an alternative: QGIS

 

QGIS: QGIS is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS) licensed under the GNU General Public License. QGIS is an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). It runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, Windows and Android and supports numerous vector, raster, and database formats and functionalities.

http://www.qgis.org/en/site/about/index.html

 

Note: The QGIS installer also includes GRASS.

▶ Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Einstein◀

Please remember to mark a thread as solved if your issue has been fixed, it helps other who may stumble across the thread at a later point in time.

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Posted

Great to see this thread is at least a bit active still :) 

And to make this a worthwhile post: another good text editor is NotePad++, I personally like it a lot.

And a really good chat client (voice and text) is Discord. Have been using it for a couple months now and love it. There are even many unofficial API's out there so you can code your own bot (API's are in many different languages ranging from Javascript, to Java, to Python and more).

"We're all in this together, might as well be friends" Tom, Toonami.

 

mini eLiXiVy: my open source 65% mechanical PCB, a build log, PCB anatomy and discussing open source licenses: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1366493-elixivy-a-65-mechanical-keyboard-build-log-pcb-anatomy-and-how-i-open-sourced-this-project/

 

mini_cardboard: a 4% keyboard build log and how keyboards work: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1328547-mini_cardboard-a-4-keyboard-build-log-and-how-keyboards-work/

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  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

I disagree to there not being any free alternatives to Microsoft office as Google drive dose just as good of a job with most parts of it

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Tried FreeCAD and wanted to post a mention here.

This product is a good replacement for other paid software, but... still too 'fresh' to do something serious. There are still noticeable problems with adjustments like grid size and measurement units, which are crucial for fast and solid sketches.

Anyways, I see that many work's being done on this program, so I think it will be way better in near future.

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It is not an alternative to something on this list, but I just wanted to mention OpenToonz (previously known as Toonz) as an open source animation program (like anime or cartoon like animation).

This program was previously known as Toonz, but when they went open source (some time ago now) they changed their name to OpenToonz.

 

OpenToonz/Toonz is made by Digital Video S.p.A. in Italy and is customized by Studio Ghibli (famous for their animes like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro).

The program is also used by some other famous shows such as Steven Universe and Futuruma.

 

If you want to do something with animation (cartoon or anime) you should definitely check it out. It's is available for Windows and OSX.

https://opentoonz.github.io/e/

 

As I am not that into animation, I have not tried it myself so can't comment that much on it.

"We're all in this together, might as well be friends" Tom, Toonami.

 

mini eLiXiVy: my open source 65% mechanical PCB, a build log, PCB anatomy and discussing open source licenses: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1366493-elixivy-a-65-mechanical-keyboard-build-log-pcb-anatomy-and-how-i-open-sourced-this-project/

 

mini_cardboard: a 4% keyboard build log and how keyboards work: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1328547-mini_cardboard-a-4-keyboard-build-log-and-how-keyboards-work/

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On 3/30/2016 at 9:52 AM, Redstoner6 said:

I disagree to there not being any free alternatives to Microsoft office as Google drive dose just as good of a job with most parts of it

If I can't run it standalone without subjecting my data to some organization to monetize, it ain't an alternative. Then again, the latest versions of Office could actually be uploading everything to M$ for all I know. Doesn't bother me anyways, screw office suites.

PRODIGY -- SMALL TORRENT -- K'NEX SERVER -- NOCTUA PSU

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...
Posted
47 minutes ago, Evyatar said:

Hi guys,
any suggestions for a free vpn?

Tor? You can download the Expert bundle and set your proxy settings.

▶ Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Einstein◀

Please remember to mark a thread as solved if your issue has been fixed, it helps other who may stumble across the thread at a later point in time.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

Tor is not a VPN - it's even incredibly slow compared to a real VPN.

Write in C.

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4 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

Tor is not a VPN - it's even incredibly slow compared to a real VPN.

Do you have any other suggestion then? That's free? I'm guessing you wouldn't consider an SSH tunnel a VPN either, for all intents and purposes they serve the same function but work differently on a technical level. They encapsulate your packets and send them elsewhere to exit/enter while not relying on your actual external IP.

▶ Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. - Einstein◀

Please remember to mark a thread as solved if your issue has been fixed, it helps other who may stumble across the thread at a later point in time.

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Server infrastructure costs money. Your only chance is to rent a server, I'm afraid. 

Write in C.

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  • 1 month later...
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Another free antivirus you could add is the free version of Panda: http://www.pandasecurity.com/usa/homeusers/solutions/free-antivirus/.

There isn't a bloatware-feel to it and does a great job at monitoring my system. I believe the downside is the lack of a firewall; it requires a pro license to do so.

Albert Lua

 

There's no Ctrl+Z in life, it ain't Microsoft Word! -me

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  • 4 weeks later...
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Hi all, me and my team recently launched a personal cloud storage software and we need some real feedback. Go to https://lollyo.com and try it, it's free. Send us your feedback. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not, everything you have to say about it it’s just good feedback. We would really appreciate it.

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  • 1 month later...
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As far a text based IDEs go, Atom is the king. Open source and beautiful as well as a boatload of community plugins and languages, you can't go wrong with Atom.

Don't talk about stale memes.

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