Free Software You MUST Download - Tom's Top 5

Free is great but amazingly useful software that works great and is also free, is the best.

They say information wants to be free. We could debate that all night, but I do know I like free software. And software is information. So I want software to be free. Sometimes.

Free software is not a dirty word either. I'm not talking about stealing, I'm talking about open source. Software that's meant to be free.

We live in a golden age, where anyone with a computer can get pretty much every piece of software they need from an open source project. Some of it however, is better than others.

I polled the Internet to find out just what software people liked the best, added in my own thoughts, and voila. A useful and helpful top 5 that costs you absolutely nothing.

[Mrskhalidsaeed]

Thanks for the video. It was quite enjoyable.

[boxofpi]

2:58 There, I skipped the ad for you. Happy? Thumbs up.

[metaspherz]

VLC and OpenOffice are the only ones I use from the top 5. But the others are great too. Download.com has lots of free and free to try software. It's my go to site for when I need to find something fast. Just make sure to pay attention when installing each program so that the bloatware doesn't get installed as well. They allow you to opt out but if you click 'accept' too quickly without reading the text you might find your homepage has suddenly been changed.

[rahul]

blender should also be on this list! best 3d app out there!

[NirajMittal]

Liked this countdown to 5. But Firefox and chrome should share 2nd spot together. Reason. Firefox uses less of your PC/Laptop memory than Chrome. Firefox uses like 100 Mb, Chrome uses 400 MB. Chrome on the other hand is Faster than Firefox. Rest don't see much of a difference. In-fact Firefox is more easy to use. and supports better add ons.

[heartdyedpurple]

ConverterLite for easy conversion of videos and audio. Just make sure it doesn't install the extra garbage.

[mawify]

@NDF211Gunner GNU /Linux distributions are a lot of fun to play with if you know what your doing. I had seen you video on paper gun the look really cool. You should try make a gun in Blender3D a free 3D program released under the GNU/GPL for Windows, Mac, and Linux . Blender3D 2.5 is really cool . Also look up LMMS.

[iExD]

Best Free Paint SOftware in My Opinion: Paint.Net and GIMP

[jrpg]

I added Daniel Smith as a friend on Facebook ;)

[Tripp]

Tom's beard is inversely proportionate to how much money he's making.

[WhiteRussianBC]

Firefox is the best web-browser and open source program!

[nintendudecubed]

@TravisLestrange We all know how to pirate software, he's obviously speaking of legal and open source softwares.

[JonathonC]

How is it not free software? You do not pay to use it and it is software that runs on my computer. Hence it is free software.

[Moker]

omg Tom Merit the last time i saw u was in cnet "free software" that was ages ago!!
i remembered ur name lol :P

[ThWisOn]

It's tricky, but indeed the Linux Kernel is in itself not an operating system. The word Linux however is by many people used to describe the whole operating system.
This confuses many people which is why I like to call the whole operating system GNU (gnu.org). Sometimes I call it GNU+Linux if I want to clarify that I use the Linux kernel with it (and not some other kernel).
Android also uses just as much of the Linux kernel as GNU does but nobody calls it Android "Linux", do they?

[Codemantic]

minus Ubuntu "which I have downloaded and used" I already had all the software downloaded in this vid

[designnow]

:[. naming two browsers was kinda cheap tom ! lol
What browser do you have to pay for ?

[ThWisOn]

Another meaning of free is not 'free of cost' but free in 'free like a bird' or 'freedom'.
Free Software is software that respects the user's freedom.

You thought he meant software that is free of cost which is a different issue. Not all free software is free of cost.

I don't know which of the two the maker of the video means.

[intelX]

Linux is not a whole operating system. It's specifically a kernel. There is no such thing as a 'Linux OS'. The majority of the 'OS' you're refering to is probably the GNU OS minus a kernel. The Linux kernel is used on Android, but the rest of the GNU/Linux OS is a completely different thing.

Also, VLC is garbage. Just use Mplayer.

[MyDigitalTeacher]

One of the basic software which everyone knows