Somebody asked me if there are any alternatives are to the more common commercial software packages, and I realised I had not covered this previously to any great extent. Obviously there's millions of pieces of software in existence, so I'm not going to cover them all, or even 0.001% of them. But here's a brief and truncated stab at it.
Office 365: Microsoft has transitioned to a subscription model, but I'm not convinced anybody's getting any value from it aside from the 1TB of online storage it comes with. My preference is software which doesn't alter it's appearance and functionality based on recent fashions every 3 years. Therefore Libreoffice, which is free (as in the french name, Libre), is my choice. It does all or most of what Microsoft Office does, can read and write Microsoft office documents, and just kinda works?
Outlook: Thunderbird is a more straightforward product, doesn't have the problems associated with Outlook (particularly once you have a large number of emails) and it's free. No open-source email software that I'm aware of matches Outlook for group calendar stuff, but that can be replaced with shared Google calendars.
Spotify: I've gone over the ethical problems with these guys in a previous article. There aren't any free alternatives, but for paid alternatives Tidal exceeds Spotifys features, has much better quality and gives more back to musicians. Likewise Bandcamp is great if you prefer to support and download individual (largely independent) artists, rather than streaming loads of different ones.
Windows 11: no-one's terribly happy with this, and neither it seems is Microsoft because they keep on changing it. But the things which haven't changed are as follows: it's buggy, slower than Windows 10, and doesn't run on older computers. Luckily Microsoft's own long-term service channel (LTSC) licenses for Windows 10 continue to receive updates till 2029. These aren't publicly available but computer professionals like myself can purchase them.
Adobe Premiere, Reader, Photoshop and Lightroom: the world's video editor of choice has many contenders, but one I have been frequently recommended is Sony Vegas - apparently a better user interface. Adobe's PDF reader is free, but awful slow & cumbersome - instead I recommend Sumatra reader (also free) or Foxit Editor (if you need document editing/signing). Photoshop can be matched by the free "Gimp" software package, amongst others, while Lightroom can be replaced with the free and open-source Darkroom.
- written entirely by Matt Bentley