The tech space is not a friendly place these days. Companies have too much power over our data, our hardware, our lives. There are alternatives that are less intrusive, transparent and free. Best of all, they are often better than the expensive options.
Free Open Source Software (FOSS)
Freedom 0
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
Freedom 1
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish
Freedom 2
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others
Freedom 3
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others
To find out why the numbers start out at zero plus a lot of other cool information about the open source movement, start with these links.
Free Software Foundation
Open Source Initiative
FOSS on Wikipedia
We use Davinci Resolve for many of our creations and recommend it since it has a full featured free version, even though it is not open source. Following is a list of free open source software that we use now or have in the past. We are not connected with or endorsed by any of these, we just think they are useful and want to let you know
Office Workspace
- LibreOffice https://www.libreoffice.org/
- Proton proton.me
Audio
- Audacity https://www.audacityteam.org/
- Ardour https://ardour.org/
- openDAW https://opendaw.org/
Video
- OBS https://obsproject.com/
- Kdenlive https://kdenlive.org/
- OpenShot https://www.openshot.org/
- Handbrake https://handbrake.fr/features.php
Images
- GIMP https://www.gimp.org/
- Shotwell https://shotwell-project.org/
- Darktable https://www.darktable.org/
- Ocular https://okular.kde.org/
- Beeref https://beeref.org/
Drawing
- Drawing
- Inkscape https://inkscape.org/
- Krita https://krita.org/en/
3D Environment
- 3D Models
- Blender https://www.blender.org/
- Dune3D https://dune3d.org/
- Godot https://godotengine.org/
Database
- Data Management
- MySQL https://www.mysql.com/
- PostgreSQL https://www.postgresql.org/
CAD and GIS
- CAD & GIS
- FreeCAD https://www.freecad.org/
- LibreCAD https://librecad.org/
- QCAD https://www.qcad.org/en/
- OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/
- QGIS https://qgis.org/
- GRASS https://www.osgeo.org/
Operating System
- Linux
- Ubuntu https://ubuntu.com/
- Mint https://linuxmint.com/
Utilities
- Utilities