Below is a list of the programs every home computer user should have. All of the programs mention below are free to use. I 100% guarantee you find at least one program on this list you will love.
- Libreoffice -“LibreOffice is a free and powerful office suite, and a successor to OpenOffice.org” LibreOffice comes with a great set of software. It comes with a word presser called Writer, a spreadsheet called Calc, a presentation called Impress, a database called Base, a Visio like drawing program called Draw, and math editor called Math. This is a great office suite.
- Thunderbird – “Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize – and it’s loaded with great features!”
- Gimp – The Gimp is a free alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop, which comes all of the bells and whistles that come with Photoshop.
- Inkscape – Inkscape is a great Vector Graphics program.
- Krita – Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program.
- Blender – Blender is an amazing 3D creation tool that supports modeling, rendering, motion tracking, compositing, and all possible tasks that can be tagged under the 3D pipeline. If you’ve heard of Autodesk Maya, then Blender Graphics tool can compete as a strong contender alternative for 3D animation. On Blender, you can easily create full-length animation films to VFX effects, all for free.
- VLC Media Player – A great free media player that plays various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
- 7zip – A great program to compress and decompress files 7zip supports a wide range of compressed file formats.
- Openshot – OpenShot is an award-winning free and open-source powerful video editor for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
- Audacity Audacity is a great powerful easy to use audio file editor.
- DBAN – DBAN aka Darkies Boot and Nuke is a great program to securely erase your personal computer hard drives before you get rid of them.
- System Internals – System Internal is great set of Microsoft utilities that should have been included in Windows.
- CrystalDiskInfo -CrystalDiskInfo is a great program to find out the health of you hard drive.
- Rufus – Rufus is a great easy to use program to help you make bootable USB drives.
- Linux Mint – Linux Mint is an alternative to Windows and MAC OS. It is designed to work ‘out of the box’ and comes fully equipped with the apps most people need.
- Filezilla – Filezilla is an great free FTP program. FileZilla Client not only supports FTP, but also FTP over TLS (FTPS) and SFTP.
- Macrium Refect Free – Macrium Reflect Free is a great program to make a disk image of your PC. They offer a paid version, but in my opinion the free version is good for most home users.
- Bitwarden Bitwarden is a great easy password manager. It supports all Operating Systems and supports a wide variety of web browsers. There is also clients for IOS and Android devices.
- Brave – Brave is a free privacy based web browser.
- OBS – OBS aka OBS Studio is a free and open-source app for screen casting and live streaming. OBS Studio provides real-time capture, scene composition, recording, encoding, and broadcasting via the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). It can stream videos to any RAMP-supporting destination, including YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and Facebook