TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Some people prefer to use Microsoft Windows, and other people have to. Just because you use Windows doesn’t mean you can’t use some good high quality free open source software. This topic has been done before, but it never hurts to add another person’s opinion. Without further ado, here are my choices for the 25 best open source applications that you should use on your Microsoft Windows PC.

1. Mozilla Firefox

While this list is in no particular order, without question the number one application on this list is the open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox. If you’re still using Internet Explorer do yourself and the web a favor and get Firefox now. From much better standards compliance than IE and better overall security to the number of extensions and themes available for Firefox, there is simply no reason to use Internet Explorer any more. Finally after many years a new version of Internet Explorer has been released. It includes a number of improved features, but in my opinion it still hasn’t caught up to Firefox.

2. Azureus

This open source Java BitTorrent client is my favorite overall BitTorrent client. (Check my review of BitTorrent clients for Mac OS X for my reasons why.) It has a ton of features and works just as good in Windows as any other OS with Java.

3. Cygwin

Cygwin brings a lot of the power of your average GNU/Linux system to Windows. A lot of command line (and even X11) applications are available with Cygwin. If you want to do open source development or compile open source programs under Windows, get Cygwin.

4. VLC media player

VLC will play many different video formats including those not supported by Windows Media Player. It’s also far less bloated than Windows Media Player.

5. HandBrake

I love this program. I use it on my MacBook Pro as well. It is probably one of the best and easiest DVD ripping and converting programs available.

6. Nvu

This is a really solid WYSIWYG web authoring and management program. It is pretty full featured and makes it easy for people without HTML skills to create a site from scratch.

7. Abiword

This is a lightweight and quick word processor that’s available for many different operating systems, including Windows. I like it a lot because it is quick and far less bloated than OpenOffice.org.

With that being said…

8. OpenOffice.org

This is the complete and premiere open source office suite. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program among other features. It also has somewhat better compatibility (in my experience) with Microsoft Office documents than Abiword.

9. Audacity

This is a really nice audio recording and editing application. It has a wide variety of features found in many non-free and non-open source audio recorders and editors.

10. Thunderbird

This is my email client of choice on all the platforms I use. It’s from the Mozilla team and is much better than Windows’ included email client (Lookout Express, or now Windows Mail in Vista). Like Firefox it has many extensions and themes available for it.

11. The GIMP

Certainly the most comprehensive and capable open source image manipulation program out there. While it doesn’t have everything Photoshop does, it is more than enough for most people’s needs. Since it’s also quite popular, there are tons of tutorials on the web on how to do nifty things with The GIMP.

12. X-Chat 2

This is a pretty good IRC chat client. The link goes to an unofficial (free) build of X-Chat for Windows. The official site requires you to pay for Windows binaries for X-Chat.

But if IRC isn’t your thing…

13. Gaim

Gaim is a nice open source instant messaging client that supports a number of different IM protocols including AIM, Yahoo!, Jabber and MSN. It also has a variety of plugins that can be used with it. On Mac OS X I use Adium which uses libgaim, part of Gaim.

14. PDFCreator

Why spend all that money on Adobe Acrobat (Pro, not the free Acrobat Reader) when all you need is to simply be able to distribute your documents as PDF files? This free open source application allows you to print directly to a PDF file from any application you can print from. You can even merge PDF files to a single PDF. It is one handy little application.

15. 7-Zip

Still using that unregistered shareware version of WinZip? Give 7-Zip a try. It has almost the same interface (including a command line interface!) and supports all the archive formats you could want. It even compresses better than WinZip.

16. Democracy

This is one of the cooler applications here and one that I am looking forward to getting a lot more familiar with. It’s a video player, an Internet TV player, High Definition content player, a BitTorrent client so you can download videos right from the player, and can download and play video clips from YouTube and Google Video. And it has a slick interface as well.

17. FileZilla

A great FTP / SFTP transfer client. It has all the features a modern FTP client needs.

18. Eclipse

This is the IDE I like and have used for all of my Java development tasks. It is very extensible and has a great community following. Open source and written in Java so it is available for all fully Java capable operating systems.

19. NetBeans

Originally I was just going to include this with number 18, but I decided to just make it its own item. NetBeans is similar to Eclipse in that it is a Java-based IDE. Some people prefer it to Eclipse so I might as well include it here.

20. Scribus

A professional desktop publishing application that is also free open source software. It also has a great community around it. If you have desktop publishing needs, definitely check this application out before shelling out the money for Pagemaker.

21. Putty

SSH / Telnet client for Windows.

22. ClamWin

You’re running Windows? You need anti-virus software. Here’s a free and open source one. Grisoft makes AVG, also has a free anti-virus client, but it isn’t open source. ClamWin doesn’t include an on-access scanner, however.

For that feature…

23. Winpooch

This open source application helps protect your system from spyware and other malware. Associate it with ClamWin for on-access virus scanning.

24. Eraser

Securely delete files from your hard drive.

25. Ditto

This utility extends the capabilities of Windows’ clipboard. It allows your clipboard to have a history so you can save old items copied to the clipboard and paste them later. You can even take your saved clipboard entries to another PC.

And there are many more…

So these are my top 25 picks for open source applications for your Windows PC. I know there are a lot more than this list, but I hope this selection will be helpful to many Windows users who may not be familiar with these programs.

If you have any comments on this list, or suggestions for other open source Windows applications that you have found useful, let me know!