Free software to organize your life

I recently purchased a new computer (a shiny, new Dell M1330) on EBay (after my last computer, an HP dv2000, imploded within 6 months of purchasing it), and with the aquisition of new hardware, I decided that I wanted to save money and only use free and open source software.  I believe that the time of Microsoft hegemony over the domain of software is virtually over, and there now exist reasonable free alternatives to all of the expensive commercial software that is more commonly used.  In fact, some of the alternatives work much better than their bloated commerical counterparts, in my opinion.  Here is a list of all the software that I have installed on my computer that I use on a daily and not so daily basis:

Internet Browser: Firefox
Office Suite: Google Docs, OpenOffice
Email Client: GMail
Calendar: Google Calendar
Music Management: iTunes (yes it is proprietary, but it is also free, and works with my iPhone)
Notetaking: Evernote
Image Management: Picasa
Image Editor: Paint.NET
Vector Editor: Inkscape
Antivirus: AVG
Game: Freeciv (although it quite doesn’t emulate Civilization enough)

All other software, at least for my purposes, are virtually unnecessary.  What other products would you not be able to live without?

Take a look at OS Living and this link on MintyWhite for more free and open source software.

~ by dpe on January 18, 2009.