Part 2 There’s a wealth of highly usable free software for the big proprietary desktop OSes. You can escape paying subscriptions and switch to free software without changing your OS.

In the first half of this short series, we looked at how to freshen up an aging Mac or Windows 10 PC, and ideally, how to wipe it and install a clean, bloat-free copy of its OS. That is all well and good, but this leaves the problem of what to put on that OS to get out of the trap of software you paid for but don’t own.

The big question, of course, is what to use and where to find it. There are lists that can help, but you need to be very cautious. If the website looks fancy and modern, then it may be trying to sell you fancy modern tools that will cost you and won’t work with older OSes. Beware of animation effects, transitions, things which fade in and out, and so on.

Compare OpenAlternative.co, which is snazzy and effects-heavy, with the decidedly low-tech Best FOSS Alternatives, which is very simple and austere. The latter has nothing to sell; it’s just a plain, simple categorized list of FOSS tools. If you scroll to the end, it even has a short list of alternatives to itself.

Always remember the KISS principle. As a general rule, try to favor things that are plain, simple, and unornamented – there’s less to go wrong.

As a general rule, we suggest treating app stores for desktop OSes with suspicion and keeping them at arm’s length. Apple has integrated its App Store deeply into macOS since 2001’s Mac OS X 10.0, but you don’t need it, and it’s full of things that you can get for free elsewhere. Most native macOS apps update themselves, so even the App Store’s handy automatic background updates aren’t essential.

So, where do you get safe free software?

On a fresh new copy of Windows, the easiest way to get up and running is Ninite. The Reg FOSS desk described this back in April, but long before that, in 2012, The Register said it could save your sanity – and endorsed it again in 2013.

A dozen years later, Ninite is still very helpful. (Sadly, the macOS equivalent, MacApps.link, is unmaintained and dated… don’t use it except for pointers.)

Ninite offers a wide range of FOSS and freeware apps, utilities, runtimes, and codecs. You tick the ones you want and it generates a custom installer for you to download. Run that, and it downloads and installs all the tools you selected, saying no to all optional extras, toolbars, adware, and everything else you don’t want. It automatically picks your language and 64-bit versions where it can.

Hang on to that Ninite installer. It’s tiny, and if you keep it and rerun it later, it will also update all the apps for you in one pass – skipping any that don’t need it.

Even if you don’t need Ninite, or don’t use Windows for that matter, there are worse places to get a shopping list of FOSS apps than just Googling the apps on Ninite’s list. It’s not comprehensive but it’s a good starting point.

Many of these suggestions apply equally to any of the big three platforms, which brings a handy extra into the deal: if you use a different type of computer at home and at work, say, it makes life easier if they run the same apps.

Aside from a couple of small tools and a copy of the oldest version of Microsoft Word that still runs on macOS Catalina or later, we treat macOS like a prettier Linux. All the apps are FOSS or freeware, installed directly from .dmg files downloaded from their creators. They all update themselves when new versions are released. Everything interoperates smoothly. We don’t really use any Apple-bundled apps except the OS itself, meaning things like the Finder, Dock, Spotlight searching, and the Preview document viewer.

For instance, we use Jeena’s TextEd instead of Apple’s text editor. For browsers, email, chat, productivity, writing, and so on, we use FOSS and freeware apps, and wherever possible, ones that also work on Linux and Windows – it makes synchronizing and switching between platforms much easier.

As for which apps…

Mozilla Firefox is a classic, of course, but it’s still getting new features. The full version of uBlock Origin works: make it the first add-on you install. Since Firefox 136, it’s had vertical tabs built in. The Reg FOSS desk has been evangelizing this for years so we’ll be brief: if you don’t use it, you need to learn. Enable the built-in browser sync and link up all your copies, and you’ll always have the same bookmarks, the same passwords, and you can open a tab from one machine on any other. As we told you in August, you can just disable all the artificial idiocy: go into about:config and enter browser.ml. Lots of settings related to the integrated LLM bot appear: set them all to false, quit and reload Firefox, and you avoid the built-in bot’s slop. In recent years, Firefox is also not just a very capable PDF viewer, it’s also a handy PDF editor: you can annotate them, fill in forms and so on, all in the browser.

Much the same applies to Thunderbird from Mozilla subsidiary MZLA. There are lots of great email clients out there. Some are free. Some are open source. Some run on multiple platforms. We’re not saying that Thunderbird is the best, but it’s free, it’s open source (so you can use it at work with no penalties), and it runs identically on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

If you don’t get on with Thunderbird, there are lots of alternatives out there, from The Bat! to the cross-platform eM Client. Pegasus Mail, the granddaddy of them all in Windows terms, is still maintained.

If Mozilla’s integration of telemetry and LLM bots annoys you, then Waterfox is an excellent alternative. For the occasional site or service that doesn’t work properly in Firefox, we tend to keep a copy of Google Chrome around, of course with uBlock Lite installed. We don’t care for it much, but it does the job, and by sticking to the upstream source, new releases come faster than in downstream rebuilds such as Microsoft Edge – for all that that does offer vertical tabs.

For media players, the classic VLC remains a good candidate. For just audio, The Reg FOSS desk is quite fond of Foobar2000 – it’s not FOSS, but it’s free, wonderfully simple and uncluttered, and it runs on Windows, macOS, and even Android.

For chat apps and other SaaS-type tools, there are several excellent all-in-one tools that will let you manage all your conversations in tabs in a single app. Our daily go-to tool for this is Ferdium, but as we wrote in the previous link, there are several alternatives. It’s worth noting that Thunderbird can talk to XMPP and Matrix by default, and has extensions to handle things like Slack, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, Teams, and others. The difficult odd man out is Signal, which won’t work with anything else, doesn’t sync message history, and is generally a bit of a pain in its quest for the maximum possible security – but a few regular contacts are on it, so we keep it around anyway.

If you want something lighter-weight, for techies willing to roll their sleeves up and manually configure plugins, the venerable Pidgin can talk to a lot of services, it’s very lightweight and fast, and a major new release is under construction. The venerable Trillian is still around too, and it runs on macOS as well, but sadly can’t talk to most modern messaging systems.

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For a general office suite, it’s well worth keeping LibreOffice installed even if just for emergency file recovery. If you still use OpenOffice, it’s long past time to switch: that version is all but dead, and we recommend uninstalling it and replacing it with its actively maintained successor. If you find the appearance of LibreOffice a bit old and staid, then try OnlyOffice or WPS Office, which are more up-to-date with Microsoft’s modern UI.

For image viewing, on Windows, for us nothing beats IrfanView, and we still miss it on both macOS and Linux. There are others, though, such as FastStone and the cross-platform XnView.

For editing, the GIMP is back in active development – and if you can’t get on with the UI and still miss Photoshop, try PhotoGIMP. Worthy alternatives include Paint.net and the cross-platform Krita. We lack sufficient artistic skills, but we hear Inkscape is pretty good. For photographers, Darktable is worth a look, and for managing photo libraries, try the cross-platform digiKam.

For file compression and decompression, dump that ancient, unregistered copy of WinRar and get 7-Zip, or if you’d prefer to avoid Russian apps, PeaZip. On our Macs, we keep The Unarchiver and Stuffit Expander around just in case there’s anything the OS can’t handle itself.

For file downloading, we mostly just use the Multithreaded Download Manager extension for Firefox, but for anything more complicated, FileZilla may help.

Despite what we said earlier about old text editors being safe, there are better alternatives to the built-in ones in most OSes. A few years ago, we wrote about Notepad++ and Geany, which both use the same editing component, Scintilla. There are versions of Notepad++ for even very old versions of Windows, and while Geany is mostly found on Linux, it’s also a good, fast macOS text editor.

We very rarely need a full-function office suite, but find a plain-text editor a bit too minimal, so for writing, we usually use the distraction-free Panwriter Markdown editor. It’s an Electron app so it’s not light; if you want Markdown in something lightweight, then Ghostwriter does the job and it’s cross-platform. It even runs on Haiku and on the Raspberry Pi, and even on Windows 7. For note taking, we like LogSeq, although we suspect we only use about 1 percent of its facilities. It’s a hierarchical markdown note taker with basic outlining, and that ticks a bunch of Reg FOSS desk boxes. We’ve tried syncing it between machines with Syncthing but that proved rather flaky.

As a hypervisor, we like Oracle’s VirtualBox. As we have explained before, the only licensed part is the Extension Pack, and the hypervisor works fine without it. Avoid that, and you’re safe. If some demanding guest OS doesn’t work, then on Macs, the all-FOSS UTM is a good alternative, but for most things, the now-gratis VMware is a bit easier. It works a bit differently on Windows, Linux, and macOS, which is annoying, but it does the job and does it well. If you often need a Windows VM, we find VMware noticeably faster than VirtualBox with that guest.

But I don’t know this stuff!

Well, it may have been long ago, but once upon a time, you didn’t know how to use Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Excel to their best advantage either.

Breaking free of proprietary tools takes some effort, yes. You will have to relearn how to do some things. You absolutely will find things that the free and open source tools simply can’t do.

The question then is: do you need those functions, or were they just handy? Only you can decide if certain functions are convenient, but not actually essential, or if they are things you cannot get your job done without.

This particular vulture was an early adopter of Windows and has been using PCs for worryingly close to 40 years now, and there were absolutely things we missed when we moved to mostly running Linux and the new Mac OS X about halfway through that time span. However, a lot of them have proved with time to be things we can just do without. The returns in terms of never worrying about subscriptions, and so on, are completely worth it.

In general, our advice is that investing the time in learning alternative tools, ones from suppliers whose business models don’t rely on subscriptions or lock-in, will repay you manifold. ®