Open source software. What does it mean? It means that it is free to download and use, and if you are an experienced programmer or developer, you can add your own code to the software, in order to improve it. Open source means that you can download the source code and examine it if you want to take a closer look under the hood or in this case, layers of programming languages, most likely. 

While the part dealing with development is interesting to, well, developers, the altruistic part is what many people will be looking at, namely free software which they can use in their everyday lives. Here is the best, and coincidentally, most famous open source software you can download today.

LibreOffice

The Document Foundation is doing such a marvelous job with this office suite. Why, you ask? Well, for starters, it is free. Secondly, it is absolutely good in its own right. Thirdly, it is cross-platform available. That means the main systems, as well as other, minor ones. Linux, macOS and Windows are support, as well as Android.

This suite has everything you need for a working and free office suite. You won’t be plagued by constant updates or crashes, while at the same time paying the price of nothing. It is also open to modding, in other words, it supports extensions, which are made to seamlessly integrate into the suite. The extensions can do anything you want them to and there are huge databases to browse if you are missing a certain something. LibreOffice should be a part of any system today.

GIMP

Often butting heads as to which software is more popular, GIMP is right there with LibreOffice. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is available for Windows, macOS and Linux, of course. It is the free relative to Adobe Photoshop and a pretty good one, at that. It used to be quite confusing and difficult to navigate, where only the ones with the strongest of wills (and those with the least money) managed to properly learn to use it. Today, it is much simpler and offers quite a lot for anybody looking to edit photos and/or do digital art.

Audacity

Office and art, check, now here’s music. Audacity is used to record any sort of audio and is a very good tool to do so. Often a part of every musician’s PC, but not only because it’s free, but because it offers everything you could want to record, on the 3 main operating systems, macOS, Linux and Windows.

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox, the browser which is open source. Wait a minute, Chrome and Edge are also free with your systems? Yes, but free doesn’t mean you get access to the source code and that you can contribute to it. Open source means that you can look under the hood for all the dark secrets. Firefox has been THE browser for people who want their privacy protected. Their email client, Thunderbird, is also a great, open source tool.

Linux

Yes, Linux, the operating system, the core which is used to run so many distributions, is free and open source. There are plenty of distributions to choose from, Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu and Linux Mint, Fedora, or if you’re feeling a bit technical, Arch and Gentoo. 

These are the best open source programs and operating systems you can download today.