5 Free Software That Are Actually Great! 2021

If you want free software for your computer you have many choices to separate out the good programs from the bad. I'll show you five free software for windows macos and linux that are actually great. The criteria for this year is simple, the program must be truly free of cost and open source with the source code freely available to the public to view modify and distribute for any purpose.
Let's get started,

1- Water fox Web Browser
our first free and open source program is the waterfox web browser. While most browsers are now based on chromium including google chrome vivaldi microsoft edge and the brave browser,waterfox takes a different approach and is based on firefox.While firefox does send telemetry data to its developer mozilla, waterfox does not. The only information they collect is your operating system and browser version to check for updates.You also get full access to firefox add-ons with thousands of extensions and themes to choose from including support for some of the legacy extensions no longer supported by firefox.After their quantum update a couple years back when you launch waterfox the look is similar to firefox with many of the same features. There's a search bar and a handy speed dial to quickly access your favorite websites. The default search engine is bing, to change it open the menu in the upper right and select options in the left pane go to search and in the default search engine section give others to choose from including google duckduckgo quant start page, Wikipedia and yandex, let's go with duckduckgo. If you'd like to add or manage your extensions or change the theme open the menu again and select add-ons in the left pane here you can manage the extensions themes and plugins already installed.One of my favorite themes is dark fox,i'll enable it now,it looks a lot better than the default waterfox theme. To find additional add-ons to install go to recommendations and select find more add-ons.Waterfox also includes the firefox screenshot tool which is quite useful,to use it on any web page. Click the three dot menu icon to the right of the address bar and select take a screenshot.Your choices are save full page save, what's visible or you just click and drag to select a region after which you'll have the option to copy it to your clipboard or download it to your computer. Waterfox is available for windows mac os and linux.
Link for Water fox Web Browser:
https://code.waterfoxbrowser.com

2- SM player
SM player is for those of you looking for an alternative to vlc media player. If you've used vlc you belong to one of two camps you either love it or you think it's total garbage. Some players should be less divisive because it simply works with less bloat it supports most of the well-known file formats and codecs so it'll play just about anything you throw at it. Other features include the ability to change the playback speed subtitle support and you can change the look of the player with skin and iconthemes.If you've ever used a media player before
it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the interface.The feature I find to be the most useful is the auto bookmark especially when watching a tv show or movie here's an example of how it works, if you've not finished playing your media and you close the player you'll remember where you left off.So when you reopen, the media will continue to play from the spot that was auto bookmarked. SM player is only available for windows and the selected distros of linux.
Link for SM player:
https://code.SMplayer.com

 

3- Only Office
Only office is an office suite I mentioned a couple years ago in our free software series.And since then has improved quite a bit now it's a strong contender to libra office as the best free and open source office suite. And is an excellent alternative to microsoft office,included with their desktop editors is an alternative to microsoft word excel and powerpoint their compatibility with microsoft word and excel is nearly flawless but their powerpoint alternative still needs work. So if compatibility is important to you I'd only recommend using their word and excel alternatives at this time,When you open any of the three editors you'll notice the familiar looking ribbon at the top document is what they call their word alternative spreadsheet is their excel alternative and for powerpoint they call theirs presentation.Only office also has an online version and products geared towards businessesif you only want the free and open source desktop editors, here at the top go to products and features and select only office for desktop.Then click download now it's available for Windows and MAC OS.

Download only office
https://code.only office.com/ 

4-Blelachbit

 
bleachbit is the absolute best open source cleaner you can get to free up disk space and optimize your system while you could do most of this on your own manually do yourself a favor and just run this program to save your time and possible headaches.It's feature pack to help your computer run more smoothly and to maintain your privacy.It deletes cookies deletes logs removes temporary files and clears cache and internet history in addition it also cleans dozens of programs including google chrome firefox skype vlc media player and many others.Prior to running bleachbit or any other system cleaner it's best practice to backup your system,you'll notice when you open the program there are two panes,if you click on any category in the left pane it will show you a description in the right pane what happens if you select any item in that category don't check any option. if you don't fully understand what it does if you select an optionthat might take a long time or delete passwords that are stored.You'll get a warning it's your choice you can either select okay to carry on or select cancel to uncheck that option and I'll cancel all these out for this example i'll check a few more categories let's go with firefox.if you don't want it deleting your saved passwords click cancel,Let's go down here to google chrome check that one and of course i get that save password warning so i'll cancel that one out scroll down here a bit to microsoft edge same warning about the passwords clickcancel.When you're ready first select previewhere in the upper left when it finishes you'll now see a report showing you the number of files to be deleted,And the disk space to be recovered to delete those files,to the right of preview click on clean depending on what you selected this could take a while to complete bleachbit installation packages are available for windows and linux.
Download blelachbit https://code.Blelachbit.com/ 

 

 
5- visual studio code

Along with special editions for mac os and email servers here's one for my fellow programmers visual studio code is a code editor for microsoft that's completely free for personal and commercial use it's built on open source under an mit license with the source code freely available on github for the community to explore. And contribute to features include support for debugging code refactoring and intelligent code completion. It's also highly customizable with extensions to add languages debuggers and other tools to help with your development workflow. you can also change the theme. with thousands of lines of code you'll appreciate the preview pane onthe right that lets you quickly jump to different parts of your code. To add any extensions head over to the left pane and select the extensions tab you'll see those that you have installed and others that are recommended or you just do a search in their marketplace to see if what you're looking for is available. Let's do a search here for ruby if it's available,click install visual studio code is available for windows linux and mac. Download Visual Studio
https://code.visualstudio.com/