Good free software

[joeactor]

My new laptop didn't have MS Office and I was going to have to pay.  I have never paid for software and never intend to, so I'm using Libre Office  This fits all my simple needs and seems excellent to me.

I used Open Office and Thunderbird (email) for a while. Both are pretty solid as well.

I like Open Office, but now I tend to use google docs a lot since I like easy access to all my things on different devices (phone, work laptop, personal laptop, drawing tablet, regular tablet, home desktop, home farming computers... etc.). Plus gdocs makes it easy to share with others for collaboration.

Same here.

Using Google Drive to do a project now...

[Davin]

Oohh, speaking of project collaboration, I've been using https://slack.com/ and am finding it incredibly useful. Mostly it's useful to keep a team in communication on multiple projects, while keeping the discussion to one project, so it's like a chat program per project with a bunch of extra features and plugins. We also share files over it.

[solidsquid]

For the sciency folks out there, some of these may come in handy:

R - A stats program that has exploded in popularity and usage over the last five years.  It's based upon the program S+ and is a command line style analysis software.  The base program as well as many add on packages and IDEs - I personally find R Studio to be one of the best and most widely used.  I'm still very much a beginner at using R as the language itself has a bit of a learning curve.  However, just with my limited use I've already experience how powerful this program is and the wide range of things it can do.  I feel that another few years and R will definitely give SAS a run for it's money and probably leave SPSS in the dust.

Python - This is technically a programming language although some folks disagree and call it a scripting language but I think it's just a to-MAY-toe/to-MAH-toe kind of issue.  The language is actually fairly intuitive - as programming languages go - and it offers an immense amount of different applications you can use it for.  A lot of people in the analytics world are finding a lot of use with it especially in machine learning uses and also as an accessory to already established statistical programs like R and SPSS.  Python also has a ton of IDEs available, the one I use and I see often is PyCharm by JetBrains.

Sublime Text Editor - This text editor has programmers, script writers and command line program users in mind.  It is set up with a bunch of preset language syntax environments such as SQL, R, C++, Java and lots more.  So you can write your code in the editor, debug it and change it around and write multiple languages separated by tabs just like on the internet browsers.

Oracle SQL Developer - If you have any interaction with databases you'll most often run into Oracle's products - they are one of the big dogs on the block in that area.  I found their SQL Developer extremely useful and helpful while learning SQL and making use of databases constructed in Access.

SAS University - If you have an email linked to an institution of higher learning - aimed at mainly college students and instructors, SAS offers a free version of their software based upon their SAS Studio version of SAS.  SAS has been around a really long time and is the top of the food chain as far as statistics software is concerned.

Mendeley - If you do a lot of research, you collect documents and end up with a massive amount of them.  It can be hard to organize them and that's where this software comes in.  It helps organize your references and PDF documents to make it easier to find the info you need in your own literature library.

And an extra for the musicians:

Pro Tools First - Pro Tools is THE name is digital music recording and engineering.  Now they offer a free version of their famous software. Gone are the days of trying to get a great engineered sound from Audacity - now you can have something that was specifically designed for recording music, for free.

[Firebird]

If you're into programming, I recently discovered Komodo Edit. So far I've used it for SQL, Django and Python, but it supports syntax checking for tons of languages and is available on both Windows and Linux (not sure about others). Very easy to use and chock full of features.

[Asmodean]

And an extra for the musicians:

Pro Tools First - Pro Tools is THE name is digital music recording and engineering.  Now they offer a free version of their famous software. Gone are the days of trying to get a great engineered sound from Audacity - now you can have something that was specifically designed for recording music, for free.

Ah, yes! Very not bad. Though me, I prefers my trusted FL Studio.

[solidsquid]

If you're into programming, I recently discovered Komodo Edit. So far I've used it for SQL, Django and Python, but it supports syntax checking for tons of languages and is available on both Windows and Linux (not sure about others). Very easy to use and chock full of features.

Thanks for the tip! Programming is new to me but in my line of work that's where things are headed, more toward the "big data", complex visualization, and mixture of research and programming hybrid model.  I want to make sure I don't get left behind in the old researcher's home with my calculator and critical values tables.

I did find that SQL is not too bad, it's pretty straight forward as languages go.  R is a bit more involved and there is definitely a steeper learning curve.

And an extra for the musicians:

Pro Tools First - Pro Tools is THE name is digital music recording and engineering.  Now they offer a free version of their famous software. Gone are the days of trying to get a great engineered sound from Audacity - now you can have something that was specifically designed for recording music, for free.

Ah, yes! Very not bad. Though me, I prefers my trusted FL Studio.

Most of my older recordings were done on a cassette tape with a Tascam four track, then later I started using Adobe Audition pretty heavy around 2009 and Audacity a bit mostly for just recording some ideas when they came to me.  Just like with the stats programs, in my music recording I don't want to be left behind and hope to make use of the new tech as I can learn it.  It's all come a long way since the plain old MIDI stuff which is like showing my 10 year old step-daughter a ring tone on my old flip phone from 2005 - it's like her trying to conceive of a time before the internet.

[Davin]

Sublime Text Editor - This text editor has programmers, script writers and command line program users in mind.  It is set up with a bunch of preset language syntax environments such as SQL, R, C++, Java and lots more.  So you can write your code in the editor, debug it and change it around and write multiple languages separated by tabs just like on the internet browsers.

At work, I use Visual Studio for most things, but often I will switch out to Sublime just to use the multi-edit stuff. When I'm programming PHP or JS, I almost always use Sublime.

[Asmodean]

it's like her trying to conceive of a time before the internet.

I hear kids used to play outside back then, with barely a thought for traffic and them predators in every single bush and alley! The horror!

[joeactor]

Reborn!!!

Here's a free music/audio editing suite:
https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk

[joeactor]

After constant frustration attempting to stop Windows 10 updates, I finally found this:
https://greatis.com/blog/stopupdates10

Seems to work ok so far. Stops services and processes from updating.

(why do I need this? Because the last upgrade Win10 did screwed up my system - had to roll it back to a prior version!)

[No one]

It's all free, so long as you don't get caught.

[Tom62]

I like eM Client (https://de.emclient.com/) as Outlook replacement. It find it much easier to use and it syncs pretty well with iCloud, GMail, etc.

[Recusant]

Lately I've been using Stellarium, the planetarium program that I learned about in this thread ten years ago. Updated it after using an old version for some time, and saw that they have an online version. It's not bad on a laptop, though I prefer the offline program. It does work on mobile devices, but I'm not impressed with it on that platform. There's an app as well, which may be better, but I haven't tried it.

[hermes2015]

I don't like the default Gmail browser interface. As an alternative, I find Thunderbird much more to my liking.

https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

[Randy]

I like Universe Sandbox. You have to get it on Steam though but it is free and quite fun to play "what if" with the planets and stars.