Top Open Source Picks of 2008

Although open-source software is a complex philosophy of software marketing, distribution and modification, to most end users, open-source simply means "free". The open-source movement is growing as more users find viable free alternatives to expensive proprietary software. Below are four of the most popular pieces of open-source software available.

Ubuntu Linux: billed as "Linux for humans", Ubuntu Linux is a very user-friendly operating system. Ubuntu Linux comes with a full suite of open-source software installed, including office, graphics and multimedia programs. Thousands more programs are available free of charge to replace anything you may have used on your Microsoft Windows PC. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop several weeks ago. The entire installation was very easy and took less than 30 minutes. My 12 year old daughter, who has never used anything but Microsoft Windows, was able to easily find her way around and acclimate herself to Ubuntu. She has now proclaimed that she likes using the laptop more than our Microsoft Windows desktop because of her preference for the operating system. Since Linux is much more secure than a Microsoft Windows PC, I feel very good about her using it. She is much less likely to accidentally download viruses, spyware or adware on the laptop running Ubuntu. Ubuntu, or any other Linux distribution, is a perfectly acceptable operating system for most PC users. The only exception to this rule is the serious gaming community-very few popular games include Linux distributions, although for the casual gamer, open-source Linux games abound.

Firefox: If you want to view web pages they way they were meant to be seen in a secure environment, then Firefox web browser is for you. Firefox is fully web compliant, which means you'll see things on websites that just dont show up in Microsoft's internet explorer. There are also thousands of add-ons available for Firefox to make your browsing, shopping, researching, or whatever you choose to do more fun, efficient and effective.

GIMP is a free-source image editor similar to Adobe Photoshop, although experienced GIMP users will tell you that it offers many more options and flexibility. Although there is a bit of a learning curve, mainly because the layout is quite a bit different than standard Windows graphics software, GIMP is intuitive and enjoyable to use. GIMP is available for several Linux distributions as well as Microsoft Windows.

VLC Media Player: Simply the best, easiest to use media player around, VLC will play nearly any audio and video format without having to worry about finding and installing the proper codec for whatever format you are trying to watch. Videos that won't play in Windows Media Player or other commercial software will nearly always play in VLC as long as the files aren't corrupted. VLC Media Player can also be used to stream audio and video content to the internet. Although the user interface isn't as sleek and pretty as its commercial cousins, you simply can't go wrong with VLC.

These are only four samples of the thousands of open-source programs available. Sites like osalt.com and sourceforge.org can help you find open-source alternatives to whatever proprietary sofware you may need.