Going Open-Source

Below is my recommended list of open source software. I talk about some of these programs throughout the blog but I thought of having everything in one page for quick access. For further reading and documentation for some of these programs, see my resources page

Replacing Microsoft Office,

• Word → Office Libre Writer. Or write in markdown and convert it to HTML, TeX, or pdf using pandoc (requires pdflatex)
• Excel → Calc, Gnumeric is pretty good too
• Powerpoint → Impress. Revealjs
• Access → Not as easy but you can use SQLite and Postgres
• For mobile phones, there is a an Office Libre that enables you to view them
• PDF Reader → Firefox Use anything by Mozilla. Set it as the default program to open pdfs
• Notepad → Sublime, Vim
• Mail → use a web client, like Protonmail
• (Very) long Documents → LyX

Doing Computations,

• Matlab → Python (see the blog). Just download Anaconda and be a “data scientist”

Plotting,

• Excel → Javascript’s D3 Library (see the blog). Note: steep learning curve due to less available documentation. Go with Python for ease of use

OS,

• Windows, Mac → Ubuntu and its flavors like Lubuntu. If you must use Windows or Mac, use them with Windows Subsystem for Linux ad Homebrew.

Photos,

• Vector → Inkscape
• Raster → Gimp
• Conversion → Imagemagick
• Organization → DigiKam

Torrents,

• μTorrent → Transmission

Wikis,

• () → Zim
• () → Mediawiki

Blogging,

• () → Wordpress
• () → Jekyll

Teach yourself to do everything in text, and learn the Linux command line (see my resources page), and maybe some web technology (MDN and W3Schools are good sources).

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

— Doug McIlroy on Unix programming