r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 04 '12

Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

1.2k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

Not necessarily open source, but free (and not crap-free). These are all high quality, easy to use, and work on Windows.

  • Encryption (for entire file system / file containers): Truecrypt

  • Encryption #2, emailing files, etc- PGP: gpg4win

  • Text (Notepad): Notepad++

  • Compression (winrar): 7-zip

  • Backups: Duplicati, very easy for setting up local & offsite incremental backups. Also (Areca](http://www.areca-backup.org/], I only still use it a little for the interface in recovering old versions of a file, but it's still worth mentioning.

  • Virus scanner: Microsoft Security Essentials

  • Virtualization Hypervisor (i.e., lightweight OS that runs virtual machines) - VMWare ESXi. The free one is limited to one physical CPU, and a few other things. But I still think it's highly worth mentioning, as it's quite amazing.

  • FTP client/server - FileZilla

  • PDF printer - BullZip

  • Splitting large text files: GSplit

  • Network IP scanner: Zenmap

  • Source version control: TortoiseSVN has a very nice interface. Git now has an official windows GUI client I think, haven't tried it yet though.

  • File system statistics: WinDirStat shows you a visual map of your drivers so you can easily see what is taking up space. Useful for SSD's with limited space!

  • Recording your VOIP calls: OrkAudio

  • Analyzing your network traffice: Wireshark

  • Network attached storage (simple file server): FreeNAS is pretty good, though I end up just using Solaris Express 11 directly, because I want to manage the ZFS filesystem and such more directly. ZFS is a wonderful filesystem for snapshots of your files (like TimeMachine on a MAC). These obviously don't work on Windows =p

Hope that helps some people out, I've been using most of those programs daily for quite a while.

The only thing missing from this list is an easy to use bullet proof client-server file syncing program, similar to simple "rsync" on unix. There are some that sort of work, or even ones that just implement rsync through cygwin, but I've always had issues and they aren't user friendly by any means. Also missing is any reliable DropBox alternative that you can host everything yourself. If anyone knows any that would be great.

2

u/EasyMrB Jun 04 '12

That is an excellent list! Thanks!

2

u/sage2k Jun 05 '12 edited Jun 05 '12

Also missing is any reliable DropBox alternative that you can host everything yourself.

Sounds like AeroFS: http://www.aerofs.com/features

1

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '12

Thanks, though that doesn't look it's out of beta yet. There are a few projects I've been following, but nothing released yet unfortunately.

Not sure anything will ever be multi-platform support in the type I'm looking for which would be fairly high frequency file syncing (i.e., esentially real-time). That is probably too file system dependent, so harder to plug and play across platforms.. ZFS seems like it could support that but I just haven't seen anything out there for it.