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 of 25 great programs 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!”
- 7zip – “A great program to compress and decompress files 7zip supports a wide range of compressed file formats.”
- GIMP – “The Gimp is a free alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop, which comes all of the bells and whistles that come with Photoshop.”
- Inkscape – is a great Vector Graphics program.
- Kirta – “Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.”
- 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”
- ActivePresenter Free Edition – “The best free screen recorder & video editor for teachers, students, and hobbyists”
- Bitwarden – a great password manager that is a must to consider
- CrystalDiskkInfo – “CrystalDiskInfo is a great program to find out the health of you hard drive.”
- System Internals – “The Sysinternals web site was created in 1996 by Mark Russinovich to host his advanced system utilities and technical information. Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications.”
- Powertoys – “Microsoft PowerToys is a set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity.”
- 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.
- Audacity -”Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Audacity is free, open source software
- VLC – 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
- 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”
- Filezilla – “Filezilla is an great free FTP program. FileZilla Client not only supports FTP, but also FTP over TLS (FTPS) and SFTP”
- Openshot – OpenShot Video Editor is an easy to use, quick to learn, and surprisingly powerful video editor. Take a quick look at some of our most popular features and capabilities.
- Virtualbox – “VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. See “About VirtualBox” for an introduction.”
- Open Shell – “A collection of utilities bringing back classic features to Windows.”
- Aomi Backupper Standard – “Free Backup Software for Windows PCs to Protect Your Operating System and Data”
- Notepad ++ – A great free alternative to Windows’ Notepad.
- Patch My PC Home Updater – “Our Home Updater is a free, easy-to-use program that keeps over 300 applications up-to-date on your computer. It is an easy way to update or install a large list of programs on to your computer.” This is also a great way to learn about new software.
- Teamviewer – “Control, manage, monitor, and repair computers, mobile devices, network machines and more – from anywhere, anytime.”
In conclusion I hope this article informs you of one or more programs you will love