Top 8 must have free open source softwares for Windows/Linux users

As a Windows and Ubuntu user I love free software’s. On Ubuntu almost every software is available for free but when it comes Windows there are not many good ones. Here is a list of some free open source software for windows that are helpful in browsing internet, editing documents, file-management, email client, movie player etc.

1. FireFox: This is a well known Internet browser for Windows. The new Firefox is available for Android and Meemo as well. This is a very competitive browser with other free available browsers like Chrome, Safari, Opera etc. I love Firefox because of its speed, download manager, AntiVirus Integration. I also love the add ons library that has many features rich add ons for Firefox that helps a lot.
2. VLC: You definitely play music and videos on your computer and you need a free app that can help you with everything, VLC is the best I know. I use VLC to play music, creating playlists, playing movies and video songs. It plays almost every format without codecs packs. It is completely Free and available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, UNIX.
3. PDFcreator: Windows users who use Adobe’s expensive product, PDFcreator will provide you almost all features for free. You will be able to create and print pdf documents. PDFCreator installs on your computer as a printer. You can edit document with any editor like Word, Excel etc and print it as PDF.
4. OpenOffice: OpenOffice is a free Office suits that packs all features of MS Office. It has a Word, spreadsheet, Presentation creator and editor plus it has other features like Drawing Tool for artists and painters, PDF creator, etc. You can open and save documents as MS office file formats like .doc, .ppt, .xls etc.
5. ThunderBird: Are you using Outlook? ThunderBird is a free email client which is most competitive to Outlook. The new Thunderbird is easier to configure and manage. You can manage and import multiple mail account in a Single folder. Backup all emails on files, import and export address book and meeting appointments etc. The new Tabbed interface integrated with fast search is a great to work on.
6. ClamWin: Windows and Linux users work on internet and portable storage which are the entry gates of virus and malicious codes. ClamWin is a free open source Anti-Virus for Windows that keeps your safe from malware, Virus, Worms and other malicious codes and apps. It has packed almost same security features as Norton. ClamWin is available for Windows 8, Windows 7/Vista/XP/ server etc.
7. 7Zip: When you are internet and download big ebooks or music files they are mostly zipped and compressed to save bandwidth and data uses. Some time zipping is a great idea to protect and ecrypt a file. 7Zip is a free and effective alternative for WinRAR. You can zip and unzip files, password protects zip files and much other functionality is built in new 7Zip.
8. TrueCrypt: You must be having important confidential data on your computer like personal photo and video gallery, Business documents, Finance related information and other secrets. TrueCrypt is a great way to ensure security and controlled access on those files and data. You can encrypt entire partition or create virtual encrypted disk.

I hope you will find these software’s useful in your daily computing tasks. If we missed any good software, please drop a comment.