10 great open source applications for Windows

I can add two others which are absolutely awesome and are on my new computers by default:

1) 7-zip. I am not exactly sure why some people still bother with winzip. 7-zip is WAY more powerful and it is free, and doesn't have nag screens or anything like that.
2) KeePass - pretty good password safe.
 
Johand said:
I am not exactly sure why some people still bother with winzip.
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because they've never gone right click > send to > compressed folder.
honestly, why anybody with windows xp + needs to use a zip utility is beyond me.
perhaps if you use gzip and linux systems. but that's really not the average user.
 
murraybiscuit said:
because they've never gone right click > send to > compressed folder.
honestly, why anybody with windows xp + needs to use a zip utility is beyond me.
perhaps if you use gzip and linux systems. but that's really not the average user.
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because maybe we work a lot with other formats like rar ?

where's paint.net ?

and Keypass like Johand mentioned... can't do without that one :)
 
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MickZA said:
Auditor Calculator is a handy freebie
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Dan C said:
where's paint.net ?
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Neither is open source - they are free as in beer (not as in free speech) with proprietary licenses. But if this was a list of "free" applications paint.net / Microsoft Security Essentials / IrfanView / NitroPDF Reader etc. would probably have made the cut :)
 
MickZA said:
Auditor Calculator is a handy freebie, I use it all the time - check it out here http://www.auditor2000.co.il/aucalcdl.htm

It also runs on linux under wine :)
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What does that do that Win7's calculator doesn't?

murraybiscuit said:
because they've never gone right click > send to > compressed folder.
honestly, why anybody with windows xp + needs to use a zip utility is beyond me.
perhaps if you use gzip and linux systems. but that's really not the average user.
Click to expand...

The default zip operations from windows is quite limited, and as mentioned it just supports the plain old zip format.

7-Zip is MUCH better.
 
Johand said:
Neither is open source - they are free as in beer (not as in free speech) with proprietary licenses. But if this was a list of "free" applications paint.net / Microsoft Security Essentials / IrfanView / NitroPDF Reader etc. would probably have made the cut :)
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Oops my bad, but paint.net was open source when it started out AFAIK..
 
Pyro said:
What does that do that Win7's calculator doesn't?
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Auditor Calculator emulates a desktop printing calculator complete with printable/scrollable tally strip. Very handy for tallying & checking long lists of numbers - if you have a printing calculator taking up space on your desk give it a try.
 
murraybiscuit said:
because they've never gone right click > send to > compressed folder.
honestly, why anybody with windows xp + needs to use a zip utility is beyond me.
perhaps if you use gzip and linux systems. but that's really not the average user.
Click to expand...

As Pyro said:
7 Zip is much better on both Windows and Linux (Right click context menu included)

edit:
Its even awesome from the command line !
 
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Don't forget about Blender, for those who don't wanna fork out thousands for Maya
 
Talking about windowz and open source in same sentence is waist of oxygen.
 
g-d-zilla said:
There are a lot more than 10. Look at www.freenew.net
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Nice, thanks for that. Not Open-Source though.

Regarding the 7-Zip argument, WinRar is simply easier to use.
And, WinXP's built-in zip handling is a nightmare, because it searches inside zip files when looking for file using windows search facilities, I always uninstall the Dll.
 
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DblD said:
Talking about windowz and open source in same sentence is waist of oxygen.
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It is a lot easier to get people hooked on the small stuff first: today 7-zip, tomorrow OpenOffice (or whatever the free version's name will be), Friday Linux and Saturday the world!


davemc said:
Regarding the 7-Zip argument, WinRar is simply easier to use.
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WinRAR is not free - so while people can risk it at home, no way it can be installed on work/client PC's.
 
I'm a long-time Freemind user and fan, but there is now a fork of Freemind called Freeplane which seems to have several improvements. It was started by one of the Freemind developers who got impatient with the slow pace of development on Freemind.

Fritz
 
A great site I've come across is www.alternativeto.net type in an app you are looking for an open source alternative and it will display similar based results based on likes, then you can filter by license type.
 
Nice links in this thread.

Some of the free software I use:

Greenshot is a very nice open source screen capture tool.

FastStone is a super freeware (not open source) image viewer.

I often use Gom Player as an alternative to VLC. Much easier and intuitive UI.
 
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