Friday, August 7, 2009

Open Source Application Bling, Yo!

InfoWorld has an article on the top 10 open source applications for Windows. Free.

I don't agree with all of these (ClamWin is not a good antivirus choice for most folks, for a number of reasons), but Mozilla and OpenOffice are the shizzle Flippity Floppity Floop. I'd say that they left The Gimp off the list, although they do have a Photoshop/drawing app.

So check them out. You'll love them, or double your money back!

2 comments:

tony said...

Love the blog! Can you expound on your assertion that ClamWin isn't a good choice for most folks?

Borepatch said...

Tony, thanks.

ClamWin has two things that limit it to gurus:

1. It doesn't clean malware. Today that mostly means "delete the file" instead of "clean the file", so that's not so bad. However, some malware is difficult to delete because of the tricks it does. If you know what you're doing, this is not a problem, but you have to know what you're doing.

2. It only has a file scanner - it doesn't check files as they're downloaded in real time. Unfortunately, this is how 99% of malware comes.

It has a decent database of malware signatures, and the engine seems robust. So if you're not afraid to put more effort into it, it will work well for you.