We all love certain programs and we don’t want to give them up, or rather, we would love to continue using them unless, that is, we can find a better alternative. There are sometimes good alternatives, but maybe not better ones, given the fact that some tool is simply better suited to a certain task that you need to do at a certain time.
We all like certain programs and we tend to use them, even though they are paid programs. What if you had a decent alternative and didn’t have to pay lots of money to a company so that you could use a program on a computer?
Here are some open source alternatives to your popular software choices.
GIMP – Corel/Photoshop Alternative
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program and has been around for around 15 years. GIMP has grown a lot during that time, so much so that it is very powerful nowadays and can be considered a decent contestant to Photoshop and Corel products, namely Photo-Paint.
Unlike the two paid products, GIMP is free and open source. You can have it and it will work for any platform, for free.
It is solid enough that you could do all your photo work with this program, not to mention that there is a solid community that supports it, from developers to people who can help with tutorials.
7-Zip – WinRAR/WinZIP
To be fair, I am not sure that anyone is still using the two paid programs, given that 7-Zip became an industry standard a long time ago, actually. It is free and open source and does everything you want from an archiver. It compresses and decompresses really well, using all the available CPU resources it has.
It is simple to use and can read any archive type, making it the best choice for an archiver, better than all paid alternatives.
Blender – Premiere Pro/DaVinci Resolve
This one is a bit of a stretch, but Blender is actually a decent video editor that you can use to replace Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. It is a solid choice, though it takes a bit of getting used to. There are some things about it that aren’t as easy to understand as they are with the other two, particularly about the interface and how some things are set up by default.
With a couple of updates and quality of life features, it will become a decent video editor, and since it’s free, it already gets a major plus.
LibreOffice – Microsoft Office/Google Workspace
While one of the two is a cloud based service, and the other a set of products you typically download, LibreOffice is good enough to replace both. You can download it and it’s a complete office suite, with everything you need, from database editors to spreadsheet editors to word processors.
These are some great open source alternatives to programs you might be regularly using. Add Firefox as a browser choice and you should be well on your way to private computing.
