Top Ten Free Applications

 Overview

I thought I’d voice my opinion on what I thought the best free applications are.  I have also tried to diversify the industries in which these software packages are to keep a nice balance of recommendations.  I’ve even included games.  There are a lot of great applications out there beyond these, but I decided to limit myself to just ten.

Criteria

In order for software to be on this list, I make some assumptions and limitations.  I have some basic requirements.  For software to be on my top ten, it must be cross platform (I’m limiting this to Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X), stable, and easy to use.  Software as a Service doesn’t count because the service may stop at some point.  It isn’t licensed to you, so you have no control over when it is and isn’t available.

1. Firefox

Firefox is actually my favorite web browser, free or not.  I think it is the best success story of the open source market.  In general I’m very impressed with the Mozilla Foundation.  The plugins are great.  I find it very useful to use plugins that manage downloads, add web development functionality, and provide integrated information inside the browser.

Given my criteria, IE and Safari don’t make the cut because they aren’t available across all three platforms.  It is true that with Wine you can use IE and Safari on Linux, but this breaks the “easy to use” criteria.  I know that Safari and Konqueror use the same engine, but they’re not the same product.

2. Fedora Core

Although Fedora Core isn’t cross platform, it runs on PC and Mac boxes, so I think it counts.  It’s a great, stable, free, and easy to use operating system developed by Red Hat.  It’s my favorite distribution of Linux because of it’s similarity to Red Hat Linux – which I use in enterprise installations.

3. OpenOffice.org

This is a great alternative to Microsoft Office.  I think that it does a great job replacing Word and Excel, but lacks a bit in the drawing, presentation, and database arena.  These sections of the program are getting better every year, and I expect that great advancements will be made on these parts of the program in the future.  Realistically most cases where I recommend OpenOffice.org, I am recommending it for the Word / Excel – like features.  This is another true success story for open source software in terms of gaining market share and project activity.  Good job!

4. Tremulous

This is a great 3D Shooter game.  I believe it’s based on the Quake 2 or 3 engine, but I’m not sure.  It’s basically aliens versus humans.  There is currently only LAN and Internet Play (no single player) due to problems developing AI.  I think the concept for the game is great, and a lot of great ideas work out really well.  The alien team can actually walk on walls and ceilings without too much effort.  The user base is quite large, so internet games are always fast paced and exciting.  There are hardly ever any lulls where there aren’t many players online.

5. Thunderbird

When paired with OpenOffice.org, one can completely replace the MS Office suite.  This would take the place of Outlook.  I like its basic functionality.  If you’re looking for a specific feature, you can look through their extensive plugin gallery for what you need.  There is even a SunBird calendar plugin.  I like its adaptive junk mail controls and filtering.  Anecdotally, I think it works better than my Outlook 2007 spam filter.  It’s another high quality product from Mozilla.

6. Notepad++

Text editors is a tough category.  It comes down to features, because all text editors are based around the same basic principal.  There are often great SDKs and text editors depending on what language you’re programming in, so I had to pick my favorite all-around text editor.

I do a lot of text editing, and Notepad++ is one of the best text editors I have used.  Yes, it fails the cross platform test, but I just love it so much.  When I’m using Linux, I use gedit or vi, and when I’m using Macs, I just use TextEdit.  It’s great because it lets me “minimize” DOM elements – which is probably my favorite feature.  It saves the state of documents when I close it too.  My only issue with Notepad++ is in Windows Vista whenever I open it, I get whacked by UAC, but it’s just an extra click.  I’m sure it will be resolved at some point.

7. FileZilla

Everyone needs an FTP Client and/or server.  I love both sides of Filezilla because it is simple.  Filezilla server could use some anti-hammering catches, but that’s just about it.

8. XAMPP

I had originally thought about listing Apache, MySQL, and PHP as applications that were great and free, but then I realized I could list XAMPP and cover them all, while satisfying the usability criteria.  Apache has the greatest market share for web servers and there is a reason why.  It’s secure, it’s lightweight, and it’s powerful.  MySQL contends with the big dogs in the database arena quite well, and it’s my favorite database.  WAMP used to be my favorite all-in-one, but XAMPP trumped that with its cross platform release and the addition of Perl.

9. VNC

Remote Desktop management is a must for people who work with clients across any sort of distance (be it miles or just a few doors down).  Being able to take over a computer while the user is watching is an extremely valuable tool.  My favorite distribution of VNC is TightVNC, but UltraVNC and the others are useful depending on what I need.

10. GnuCash

This is great accounting software.  I think that accounting courses in college should use this software as the basis for teaching students.  It makes two column accounting very easy and intuitive.  This is what I use to do my personal finances.

MP3Tag, VLC Media Player, Azureus, and various other distributions of Linux were on my list of software, but didn’t make the top ten.  What do you think should be on this list?