So, without further ado, and in no particular order, here are the six free and open source apps that I use for a creative life. But what they can do is offer an experience that is certainly close to what we’d find in many retail products, with the added benefit of also being free.Īnd while this is not a comprehensive review of the functionality of each app it is intended to give you a quick overview of what is available especially if you’re a creative person looking to move away from Adobe subscription models and Microsoft data tracking. Now remember, most open source apps are developed by small teams with limited budgets, and may not have all the bells and whistles of the big corporate players. And it’s these apps that I want to share with you today. And for those apps that weren’t cross-platform I was able to find some very capable alternatives which did the job equally, or almost as equally, well. I was already using a number of free open source apps, which where cross-platform between Windows and Linux, before I made the switch. Well, that wasn’t as painful as you might think. And I’ve been using Linux ever since.īut what about the apps? As a creative person how did I cope with no long being able to use those Windows exclusive apps like Photoshop or InDesign on an operating system which didn’t support them? Nowadays Linux has matured into a much more reliable and usable family of operating systems called ‘ distributions’, or ‘ distros’ like: Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro where hardware compatibility issues are (mostly) a thing of the past.Īnd that’s why when my laptop’s hard drive failed a few years ago, and I replaced it with a shiny new SSD, instead of the usual dual-booting I decided to kick Windows to the curb and go full-on Linux. In those early days a relationship with Linux could often be frustrating, especially where hardware compatibility was concerned (just ask anyone trying to get their printer to work), but even then I could see the possibilities it offered as a legitimate, and future, replacement for Windows. But the concept of a free and open source operating system that didn’t come with all the Microsoft baggage was certainly appealing. I’d been dabbling with Linux off-and-on since the 2000’s, when I dual-booted with one of the first releases of Ubuntu along side my copy of Windows XP.īack then Linux was still very much in the realms of tech geeks and system admins-in other words, people a lot smarter than I was. About five years ago I ditched Microsoft Windows for open source Linux.
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