It seems like the freeware software world has in recent years made some good strides of progress, to the point that some freeware alternatives to commercial programs are usable on professional level. In this article I’ll list some freeware programs that I personally found to be good replacements for their commercial counterparts on my laptop that runs Windows.
1. E-mail: Thunderbird + OpenPGP
I had been using Microsoft Outlook with the PGP plugin for many years. A couple of years ago, when OpenPGP got to the point of stress-less usability, I switched over to Thunderbird. And I’ve been happy with it ever since.
2. Encryption: TrueCrypt
This has replaced PGPDisk. It offers secure encryption and some interesting encryption functionality that isn’t available on PGPDisk.
3. Firewall: COMODO Firewall
Comodo has replaced ZoneAlarm and Kerio. It does everything I expect a firewall to do without any annoying popups (something the freeware version of Kerio has a lot of).
4. Antivirus: avast!
Avast! is a good and fairly light antivirus that has replaced Kaspersky. The only thing I needed to do is disable those voice messages…
5. Virual machine: SUN VirtualBox
I was happy to give up the use of VMWare in favor of something lighter.
6. Virtual drive: DEAMON Tools Light
A replacement for Nero ImageDrive. At the time of writing of this article it’s apparently not compatible with Windows 7, although I use it on Windows 7 without any problems.
7. Code editor: Notepad++
Notepad++ has replaced NuSphere PHPEd. It’s pretty nice, light and does the job. I use it for PHP and Javascript programming.
Where the freeware community is lacking
Well, not everything can be replaced just yet.
Photoshop – Gimp is the closest contender, but for the more complex work I found Gimp inadequate.
Visual Studio – Nmake is a C++ compiler that is still way ahead of the competition. And so are the VS C++ debugging options. Nokia is working on Qt Designer which is a nice piece of software, but it’s based on a third party compiler and debugger, which make it nearly unusable at this point in time. But they’ve done a terrific job with Qt itself, so I’m hoping they’ll get Qt Designer to a usable stage soon.
Microsoft Office – OpenOffice is getting better and better, but in my opinion it’s still “not there.” It lacks some basic things that I’m so used to in MS Office. Maybe I’m just stuck in my ways, or maybe I just don’t like the tacky feel of OO…
Of course there are some freeware programs that I didn’t list because I don’t consider them a replacement for commercial software, they were simply always there: VLC, Firefox, Skype, 7-zip, Winamp, WAMP, Filezilla, CCleaner, etc.
Again, as the world progresses, the freeware alternatives become more realistic to use. Let’s wait and see.
