My Top 5 Favorite Free Software Programs

by Gabriel Saldaña

Thursday, September 23, 2010 at 07:03 AM EDT

Happy Software Freedom day!

In celebration of it, I'll list the top 5 free software programs I use.

• GNU Emacs Very powerful text editor. I do most of my tasks in it, specially using and developing Identica-mode. I recommend it a lot for other tasks other than programming in any language, like organizing your todos and schedule in org-mode.
• KDE SC My desktop environment. A very customizable and very nice looking desktop manger. If you like customization and good looks, you'll like it.
• VLC A very good multimedia player that plays almost any media file you throw at it. It has a very minimalistic interface, its fast and you can use it for live streaming as well.
• Git A distributed version control system. All projects must be version controlled, or else you're a bad developer. The version control software of my choice is Git because its very fast, repositories are very small, and its a very reliable tool to trust your code's history to.
• DigiKam I'm always taking lots of pictures and the best program I've found to organize them all is Digikam. It has several ways to view your pictures like tagging, by date, by album, etc. You can even find pictures by a certain color or shape in them!

And I'd like to add also some extra Free Software as a Service or Free Network Services:

• Status.net (Identi.ca) A microbloggin alternative to Twitter. Not only that but it also has several very useful features that leave twitter biting the dust.
• Scuttle A bookmarking archive program, alternative to Del.icio.us. You can store your bookmarks and tag them in the same way as in del.icio.us. but this time you get to run it on your machine of your choice.
• Libre.fm An alternative to Last.fm to keep record of your music listening habits. Its in early development but its already good. Plus it has free radio stations on the site, a feature that is no longer available for free outside the US from Last.fm
• Gitorious Instead of Github to host a copy of my Git repositories, I use Gitorious. You can run it on your private network for those non-public projects. It has a very nice and easy to use interface.
• TinyOgg Its a service I sometimes use, to free myself from watching Flash videos. It transforms the videos from flash videos from places like Youtube, and transforms them into freedom-loving Ogg Videos.

I hope you try them out. If you do, let me know what you think in the comments.

What are the top 5 free software programs you use?