Best Free Open Source Software For Windows 324
snydeq writes "InfoWorld surveys the FOSS-on-Windows landscape, detailing the 10 free open source solutions most likely to unseat proprietary offerings. 'Some, like TrueCrypt and VirtualBox, are real diamonds in the rough: enterprise-grade solutions that deliver many of the same bells and whistles of their commercial brethren, but for free. Others, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are already legendary, and their strong followings ensure their continued development and support at levels that rival the best proprietary solutions.'" Rather than click through 10 different pages, the slideshow presentation at least lets you hover over each page's link to preview the author's top picks.
"Hover on the slideshow"...? (Score:5, Insightful)
You could just list them in the summary - in less space than it takes to explain the "hover" trick
Re:Lisp in a Box (Score:2, Insightful)
Best open source software for WINDOWS (Score:3, Insightful)
THEN Ubuntu.
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:paint.net? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a reason, other than complexity of interface, that one might choose it over gimp.
"complexity of interface" is a pretty damn good thing to base a decision on.
I suppose gimp does not have all the shapes of a drawing program, but it does paint, with colors.
When you have to look up documentation [gimp.org] to figure out how to draw a straight line in the Gimp, and that documentation is somewhat condescending, you might start to think that the Gimp isn't actually that good for simple tasks.
Re:Lisp in a Box (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, don't be dissing Lisp. Lisp is the foundation of a lot of the niftier concepts in lots of languages today, and is considered by most computer scientists to be one of the most perfect languages ever invented. Yeah, all those parentheses are a pain, but they consistently push you to do the Right Thing, and for me one of the highest complements I can place on non-Lisp code is "that looks almost Lisp-ish".
And if you don't believe me, believe these guys:
"The greatest single programming language ever designed." - Alan Kay
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." - ESR
"LISP being the most powerful and cleanest of languages, that's the language that's the GNU project always prefers." - RMS
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." - Philip Greenspun
"These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more... civilized age." - Randal Munroe
Re:OpenOffice legendary? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know many people who have used OpenOffice and not one of them thinks it holds its own against MS Office. Including myself.
OO.o will:
* Export to PDF
* Import a plethora of formats that MS Office can't open.
* Export to Open Document Format (MS Office 2007 with SP2 will do this, but previous versions can't)
* Allow me to easily install and manage extensions
* Run natively on Mac, Linux and Windows
* Doesn't cost a penny.
We pay $400 a pop for MS Office licenses here at work. Novell's Go-oo fork implements better macro support and such which is one of the few complaints I get about vanilla OO.o. So, a free product that implements 99% of the paid product's features, including every feature I've ever needed over the past 20 years, and then does several things that MS Offiice can't do, can't hold its own?
What is your definition of hold its own?
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:1, Insightful)
Agreed.
The best part of WinSCP is that you can turn off the retard feature most FTP clients have where they show local files in one pane and remote files in another. Hello, McFly! I don't need a listing of local files, I have WINDOWS EXPLORER OPEN RIGHT NEXT TO THE FTP CLIENT! The retardation of opening your FTP client, then having to navigate to the same window you have open in Explorer just amazes me.
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is useful if you only create PDFs from OpenOffice and no other program. PDFCreator installs a PDF printer driver. Once installed, any program that can print can make a PDF. That's much more useful.
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:3, Insightful)
Your own inability to use the program does not imply that it is a horrible program. I am sure that there are many people here that would extol the virtues of vi or emacs, not because either is easy to use, but because they are powerful. Furthermore, complaining that one product sucks, but failing to provide a better alternative is not constructive. It may be true, but it is not helpful. If FileZilla is so horrible, why not provide an example of something that is better?
Then you are not really qualified to speak about whether or not this product has competition, are you? Perhaps you should have left it out of your reply.
Let us, for a moment, accept that only business users need an office suite. Why should they be ignored? They do make up a rather large number of computer users. That being said, you are ignoring a large number of people. Lots of high school and college students use office suites, as do their instructors. Many researchers also use office suites, especially in the social sciences. Authors of all stripes might use office suites. Even grandmothers writing letters to their grandchildren might use an office suite. One might argue that none of these people need to use an office suite, but that doesn't change the fact that they do use an office suite. Thus, you are just plain wrong here.
Opera isn't open, and neither it nor Chrome have the mindshare that Firefox does. As pointed out by the article, Firefox is one of the most visible and most widely adopted pieces of open software in the world, especially when considering the ecosystem of Windows software. This alone seems like a good reason to discuss it in a list of top open source programs on Windows.
Bingo. GIMP is a replacement for PhotoShop, whereas Paint.net occupies a niche somewhere between Paint and PhotoShop. It is easier to use than PhotoShop or GIMP, but is still powerful enough to fill most non-professionals' needs. Given that FileZilla was included in the list, it might have made sense to include GIMP as well, but one can also understand why Paint.net was included and GIMP was not.
As I have not used MPC (though I have used VLC), I can't really comment on this. If you have used both, why not give a reason to use VLC over MPC, rather than just throwing something else out there? The article seems to suggest that MPC was included because of the UI similarities between it and a program that might be familiar to more users who are not used to open source software. Perhaps that is the reason it was included over VLC?
Then it is good you didn't comment on it, I suppose.
You've never needed, so there must not be a need for it. H
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The list, for those who don't care about pictur (Score:3, Insightful)
Those instructions are clearly designed to mislead and confuse. How are you supposed to realise the "PDFCreater Browser add-on" is in fact a yahoo toolbar and 404 redirector? If I was installing some software called PDF creator that creates PDFs and part of it was called "PDFCreater Browser add-on" i'd assume it was some kind of necessary component to enable the creation of PDF files. Especially since just before you get the option to not install it, there is a nice piece of decoy hand-waving about opting out of some yahoo related bullshit to distract your attention away from the innocuously labelled real malware payload.