Free Software List

[TechAsh]

Free Software
​

Web Browsers

FireFox
The award-winning Web browser. One of the most popular of the IE alternatives.

Opera
Another award-winning Web browser.

Flock
"The browser for people who like to be connected."

Maxthon
Easy to use and powerful web browser.

Safari
Apple's industry leading browser.

Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

SeaMonkey
An advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple - all your Internet needs in one application.

E-Mail Clients

Thunderbird
Mozilla's excellent e-mail client.

Mulberry

Pegasus Mail
The Internet's longest-serving PC e-mail system

Word Processing/Office

OpenOffice
The leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.

AbiWord
A free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word.

StarOffice
Just like OpenOffice and Microsoft Office except that it comes free with the Google Pack. (Worth around $70.00 if you buy from Java).

Lotus Symphony
Office productivity software that is intuitive, easy to use and provided at no charge. For Linux or Windows Operating Systems.

XPS Annotator
XPS Annotator is an advanced XPS Viewer that allows you to add notes or comments to flag information or to highlight items of interest for later reference. XPS Annotator also support security features, such as digital signatures.

Instant Messengering Clients

Trillian
A fully-featured, stand-alone, skinnable chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC.

Chatzilla
A clean, easy to use and highly extensible Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.

Pidgin
Another chat client. This one allows you to use multiple chat accounts at the same time.

X-Fire
The instant messenger for gamers!

X-Chat 2 for Windows
A Free X-Chat (UNIX IRC client) build for Windows.

Miranda IM
A multi protocol instant messenger client for Microsoft Windows. It's smaller, faster, and easier!

aMSN
A MSN Messenger clone that comes with features similar to MSN Messenger. Available on multiple platforms.

Photo/Image Editing

The GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program.

Blender
The free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems.

Paint.net
A free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows.

PagePlus SE
Desktop Publishing

PhotoPlus
Photo and Image Editing

DrawPlus
Graphic Design and Vector Drawing

3DPlus
3D Animation and Modelling

Picasa 2
Basic image editing and management software by Google. It allows you to show your photos through the email, prints or via the web.

Easy Thumbnails
A utility for creating accurate thumbnail images and scaled-down/up copies from a wide range of popular picture formats.

trueSpace
Powerful 3d modelling software for3dgraphics, animations, rendering, NURBS, web design, games design.

Audio Editing/Playing

Audacity
Open-source software for recording and editing sounds.

gtkPod
This program allows you to synchronise your iPod with Linux.

MediaCoder
Universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates with the most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution.

FooBar2000
An advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and support for several popular audio formats.

SongBird
A highly customizable alternative to traditional desktop media players.

Traverso
A Digital Audio Workstation.

Denemo
Denemo is a music notation program for Linux and Windows that lets you rapidly enter notation for typesetting via the LilyPond music engraver.

Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware/Firewall/Security

ZoneAlarm
Easy-to-use firewall, blocks hackers and other unknown threats.

Avast
A full-featured anti-virus package for non-commercial home use only.

AVG-Free
Basic protection against viruses and spyware.

Comodo Firewall Pro
Rated by PC Magazine Online as an Editor's Choice, constantly monitors and defends your PC from internet attacks. It's easy to use and passes the industry's most stringent firewall "leak" tests.

TrueCrypt
Free open-source disk/ partition/ storage device encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.

Archive Software

WinRAR
A powerful archive manager.

7-zip
A robust archive manager that can handle many archive formats: zip, rar, tar.gz, and of course, the 7z format.

jZip
A powerful and reliable compression utility. jZip is based on proven and reliable 7-Zip archiving technology by Igor Pavlov. jZip sports an elegant, easy to use yet powerful user interface.

TugZip
TUGZip is a powerful award-winning freeware archiving utility for Windows® that provides support for a wide range of compressed, encoded and disc-image files, as well as very powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.

FTP Clients

Filezilla
A very popular FTP client. There is also a Filezilla FTP server.

Web Server Software

Apache
One of the most popular and common open-source HTTP servers. (x10Hosting use Apache on all their servers)

PHP
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development.

ActivePerl
The complete, ready-to-install Perl distribution.

OpenSSH
A free version of the SSH connectivity tools that technical users of the Internet rely on.

XAMPP
An easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl.

 

[TechAsh]

Re: Free Software

Programming & Web Design

Eclipse
Opensource developement platform. You can do everything with this. Programming in PHP, c++, JAVA and many others. It has bunch of extending plugins.

NotePad++
A free source code editor and Notepad replacement, which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

Aptana Studio
Aptana Studio is a powerful, free and open source Ajax development environment which runs stand-alone or within Eclipse. It offers unparalleled tooling for Ajax including HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript editing and debugging, plus support via additional free plugins for PHP, Ruby on Rails, Adobe AIR, Apple iPhone development.

Komodo Edit
Komodo Edit is a free, open source editor from dynamic language experts.

Geany
Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features.

MinGW
A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows specific header files and import libraries, augmenting the GNU Compiler Collection, (GCC), and its associated tools, (GNU binutils). MinGW provides a complete Open Source programming tool set which is suitable for the development of native Windows programs that do not depend on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs.

SciTE
SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for building and running programs.

Nvu
Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing. Nvu is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

HTML-Kit
Full featured free editor for HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and other text files.

Drawing/Design

Google Sketchup
SketchUp is a 3D modelling program designed for professional architects, civil engineers, film-makers, game developers, and related professions. It also includes features to facilitate the placement of models in Google Earth. It was designed to be more intuitive, flexible, and easier to use than other 3D CAD programs.

Video Playing/Editing

VLC
A highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats

iSquint
FLV Convertor for Mac. Conversions can be used on iPods as well as computers.

CD/DVD Burning

FinalBurner FREE
Allows users to burning CD / DVD / Blueray Discs. Includes basic DVD authoring software allowing users to make their own DVD Video. Able to burn ISO files and Audio CD. Audio CD Ripper is also included in the software.

CDBurnerXP
CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface.

MagicISO
MagicISO is a powerful CD/DVD image file creating/editing/extracting tool.

ImgBurn
ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit!

System Tools/Maintenance

Advanced WindowsCare Personal
Protect from spyware, repair, optimize, and clean your computer in one click.

CCleaner
A system optimization and privacy tool.

CleanUp!
A very useful tool for cleaning all unnecessary files on you windows machine.

PuTTy
A free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms

PuTTy Tray
An improved version of PuTTY. It features some cosmetic changes, and a number of addons to make it more useful and much more fun.

StrokeIt
An advanced mouse gesture recognition engine and command processor.

Cobian Backup
A multi-threaded program that can be used to schedule and backup your files and directories from their original location to other directories/drives in the same computer or other computer in your network.

Process Explorer
A really useful tool that shows you information about all process running on your computer.

IObit SmartDefrag
Windows disk defragmentation tool. Runs in the background and defragment the disk while using the PC. Advanced defragmentation tools available in the software to optimize disk performance.

UpdateStar
This utility scans your computer for installed software products and produces a list of available updates, along with download links and additional information.

Revo Uninstaller
Revo Uninstaller helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.

CleanMem
Memory optimizer. The CleanMem application was designed to be a very simple to operate as it will run and clean the memory out of all processes it can, without any user input.

JKDefrag
JkDefrag is a disk defragmenter and optimizer for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/X64. Completely automatic and very easy to use, fast, low overhead, with several optimization strategies, and can handle floppies, USB disks, memory sticks, and anything else that looks like a disk to Windows.

JKDefragGUI
A GUI for the JKDefrag program.

Database Software

MySQL
The world's most popular open source database.

DB2 Express-C
Free corporate quality database application.

KeePass
A light-weight and easy-to-use password manager.

Screen Savers

Really Slick
A collection of cool 3D screen savers.

Operating Systems

Ubuntu
An easy-to-install, easy-to-use GNU/Linux operating system 'for humans' based on Debian.

Kubuntu
Basically Ubuntu with the KDE desktop.

VMware
This is not an operating system itself, but it allows you to run one OS within another. Very useful for testing etc. (NOTE: You will need a license key, which is free.)

Xen.org
Like VMware, it's a virtualization system.The Xen® hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, PowerPC, and other CPU architectures. It supports a wide range of guest operating systems including Windows®, Linux®, Solaris®, and various versions of the BSD operating systems.

Arch Linux
Arch Linux is an independently developed, i686-optimised Linux distribution targeted at competent Linux users.

Damn Small Linux
Damn Small Linux is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution.

Mandriva Linux
Mandriva Linux (formerly Mandrakelinux or Mandrake Linux) is an operating system created by Mandriva (formerly Mandrakesoft). It uses the RPM Package Manager. The product lifetime of Mandriva Linux releases is 18 months for base updates and 12 months for desktop updates.

ZenWalk
Zenwalk is a GNU/Linux operating system with expressed focus on being slim and fast by using only one application per task with focus on the graphical desktop and multimedia usage. Zenwalk features the latest Linux technology along with an amazingly complete programming environment and libraries to provide the ideal platform for application programmers. Zenwalk's modular approach gives you the opportunity to convert Zenwalk into a finely tuned and modern server (LAMP, messaging, filesharing).

 

[TechAsh]

Re: Free Software

Games

linuX-gamers live DVD
An Arch Linux-based Live CD (no install needed!) distribution with a collection of popular 3D games, including BzFLag, Enemy Territory, Glest, Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, Torcs, Tremulous, True Combat: Elite, Warsow and World of Padman. Supports ATI and NVidia cards natively.

Remote Desktop

TeamViewer
This software enables you to share your desktop with your friends or vice versa. This software has a simple interface and of course it is free for non commercial uses. This software enables remote desktop support, file transfer, presentation and much more in a simple and easy to use interface.

Miscellaneous

BOINC
Uses the idle time on your computer to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.

CygWin
A Linux-like environment for Windows.

Notepad+
A replacement for the standard Windows 95/NT 4.0 Notepad.

Wireshark
A useful packet sniffer.

ObjectDock
Allows you to organise your desktop in Windows to be similar to that of Mac OS X. Available free for non-commercial use only.

AlfaClock Free
Enhances your taskbar clock (tray clock) with fully customizable clock display, alarms, time synchronization, popup calendar, time speaking and more.

Dexpot
Turn your monitor into up to 20. It creates and manages virtual desktops and enables you to work far more efficiently and comfortably with many simultaneously opened windows.

Virtua Win
Similar to Dexpot. Enables you to have multiple desktop just like those of Linux operating system and Mac OS X.

ResourcesExtract
A program that extracts resources (icons, cursors, bitmaps...) from any .exe, .dll, .cpl, or .ocx

WikidPad
wikidPad is a Wiki-like notebook for storing your thoughts, ideas, todo lists, contacts, or anything else you can think of to write down.

Download Managers

Free Download Manager
It is a powerful, easy-to-use and absolutely free download accelerator and manager.

Orbit Downloader
A freeware download manager.

Notes:

• This is work in progress, I'll be adding more programs and information soon.
• Suggestions should be posted in the 'Free Software Suggestions' Thread.
• Thanks to Chris S for creating the Original Free Software Thread.

 

[Kayos]

Free Software Poll winners:

Web Browsers: Firefox

Word Processors: Open Office

Instant Messengers: Pidgin

Image Editors: The GIMP

Email Client: Thunderbird