I’ve been telling often (too often?) that you should replace your Microsoft Office with the cheap (free!) and powerful OpenOffice desktop suite. But some of my readers wanted to know about other replacement solutions for PC applications running under MS-Windows.
Here are my “Open source alternatives to popular PC software“:
| Title / Download | Comments |
| Firefox (from Mozilla) | Replacement for Internet Explorer, with easy extension through free plug-ins. |
| Opera | Replacement for Internet Explorer, with faster load times, tabbed-browsing and mouse gestures to replace common menu commands (very handy evolution). |
| OpenOffice | Full-featured replacement for MS-Office. |
| Pegasus mail | Replacement for Outlook and Outlook Express, very security-oriented and very powerful (may be less user-friendly). Exists with extensions for many languages other than English. |
| Thunderbird (from Mozilla) | Replacement for Outlook and Outlook Express, with many more features (incl. SPAM filtering using statistical Bayesian algorithm). |
| N|vu | To replace Adobe DreamWeaver or GoLive! or FrontPage in most of the applications needing to manage a web site. |
| CD Burner XP Pro | In order to burn any CD or DVD without using Nero or EasyCD Pro. |
Don’t ask for an alternative to PhotoShop; For me, there is none. Adobe still has an impressively good product.
You can also check the external web site I presented here some weeks ago: The Linux Equivalent project that provides alternatives running under GNU/Linux (about the same list as for Windows, but not always).
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