When you’ve been in business as long as we have, you run across many different kinds of software applications and utilities. We have compiled a list of quality commerical and open-source applications which you are free to download to your computer and use. Many of the programs on the list offer versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux! Just click on the logo of the product you wish to download to go to their website.
OFFICE SUITE |
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| LibreOffice is, with the exception of the “new name”, obvious. If you are looking for the single best replacement for Microsoft Office, look no further than LibreOffice. Yes, it is a fork of OpenOffice, but it forked at version 3.x so it benefited from an already solid code base. This piece of software is a must-have for open source advocates. It can also read and write Microsoft Office files! |  |
DESKTOP PUBLISHING & GRAPHIC DESIGN |
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| Scribus is a desktop publishing program for creating marketing materials, manuals, books, fliers, etc. – look no further than Scribus. Scribus can do nearly everything its proprietary counterparts can do (such as PageMaker and QuarkXPress) only it does it with a more user-friendly interface and doesn’t require nearly the resources the competition begs for. |  |
| Gimp is an extremely powerful photo and bitmap graphics editing program. It is a strong competitor to programs like Adobe Photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint, and Corel Paint Shop Photo Pro. |  |
| Inkscape is to vector graphics what Gimp is to bitmap graphics. Of course, anyone that has worked with vector graphics knows that they are not nearly as easy to work with as raster/bitmap graphics, but Inkscape goes a long way toward making that process as easy as it can be. |  |
FINANCE |
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| GNUcash is the de facto standard accounting software for Linux. GnuCash is amazing in features, usability, and reliability. Many people have been using GnuCash for years and have yet to encounter a single problem. It does reporting, double-entry accounting, small business accounting, vendors/customers/jobs, stock/bond/mutual fund accounts, and much more. |  |
MULTIMEDIA |
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| VLC Video Lan Client is the multimedia player than can play nearly everything! In fact, VLC claims, “It plays everything”. I can vouch for that claim. I have yet to find a multimedia format VLC couldn’t handle. Ditch Windows Media Player along with it’s crash-prone, resource hogging behavior, and migrate to a light-weight, reliable all-in-one multimedia player! |  |
| Audacity Anyone that needs audo editing software should take a look at this powerful, open-source selection! Audacity will enable you to create podcasts, music, convert audio to various formats, splice files together, change pitch of files, clean up audio noise, and much more! |  |
WEB BROWSERS |
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| Mozilla Firefox is another open source project that goes without saying. Firefox is quickly helping the “alternative browsers” to usurp the insecure, unreliable Internet Explorer as the king of browsers. It promises more speed and security. |  |
| Google Chrome has the smarts and speed you need to do, create, and explore online. Chrome has everything you need to make the most of the web, like quick answers in your address bar, one-click translation, and personalized articles for you on your phone. Chrome automatically protects you from security issues like phishing and dangerous sites. Chrome works on any operating system, and on all your devices. Switch between your laptop and phone, customize any way you want, and keep doing more. |  |
EMAIL CLIENT |
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| Mozilla Thunderbird is a cross-platform, open-source email client that competes with the likes of Microsoft Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or Apple Mail. Thunderbird originated as an offshoot of the Mozilla Firefox web browser project and was developed by the same team until Mozilla Corporation released development to an independent organization in order to focus efforts on Firefox. Like Firefox, Thunderbird supports add-ons, extensions that provide additional functionality to the email client. One of the key extensions available for Mozilla Thunderbird is Mozilla Lightning, an extension that adds calendar and personal information management capabilities to Thunderbird. |  |
VIRTUALIZATION |
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| VirtualBox No, not everyone is working with virtual machines, but for those of you who are, make sure you give VirtualBox a go before you dive in and purchase VMware. VirtualBox has many of the features that VMware offers but can bring you into the world of virtual machines without the overhead cost of VMware.
A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (ie. a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine. So, let’s say you have a Windows 7 computer, but you wish to try the Linux operating system. Instead of installing it over your existing operating system, you can create a virtual machine on your existing computer into which you can install Linux. You boot to it and use it just as if it were another computer. Or let’s say a company needs to replace multiple outdated servers. Instead of purchasing 4 new physical servers, they could buy one powerful physical server and virtualize the four different servers on that one machine. This is a substantial cost savings and is much easier to manage! We have experience working with proprietary systems like VMware or open source solutions such as VirtualBox. |
 
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ZIP COMPRESSION |
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| 7-Zip is an open source file archiver. If you need to compress a bunch of files into a single ZIP file for archiving or simply to send to someone else, this is the program for you! 7-Zip operates with the 7z archive format, but can read and write several other archive formats. The program can be used from a command line interface, graphical user interface, or with a window-based shell integration. The cross-platform version of the command line utility, p7zip, is also available. 7-Zip supports a number of other compression and non-compression archive formats (both for packing and unpacking). |  |
ANTIMALWARE, ANTISPYWARE |
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| Malwarebytes is the strongest antimalware protection ever. It fights threats that antivirus software isn’t advanced enough to stop. All threats are removed including worms, rogues, dialers, trojans, rootkits, spyware, exploits, bots, and other malware. Work, play, and socialize online freely with no worry. |  |
| Spybot Search & Destroy is still free for private use but now we also have more advanced products for our home users that provide more than just protection. With our new range or products users can remove annoying startup programs, securely delete files to ensure confidentiality or backup important registry settings. |  |
UTILITIES |
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| ImgBurn is a lightweight CD/DVD/HD DVD/BluRay burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! It has several “Modes”, each one for performing a different task.
ImgBurn supports a wide range of image file formats and can burn audio CD’s from any file type supported via DirectShow. You can use it to build DVD Video Discs and BluRay Video Discs with ease. ImgBurn supports all the Microsoft Windows™ OS’s from Windows 95 up to Windows 10. If you use Wine, it should also run on Linux and other x86-based Unixes. |
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