 One of the most common complaints I hear from Windows users that are thinking about switching over to Linux is the fact that they're worried about having to use free and open source software. They have this misconception that proprietary software is inherently better. It's just better software that free and open source software is somehow inferior. The fact that you didn't pay for it means it's bad, it's cheap in quality, and that's not the case. Also, a lot of Windows users have this misconception that for many tasks out there, all you have are proprietary software solutions, that there's no good free and open source software solutions for certain tasks. And for the most part, this is not true either. There are some things that maybe there's not great free and open source alternatives for, but for 99.9% of the tasks that you do on a computer, trust me, you're going to find great free and open source software. In most cases, the free and open source software is actually better than the proprietary software that you were used to using on Windows or Mac or whatever proprietary operating system you're coming from. So let's talk a little bit about some of the more popular proprietary software out there that there are great free and open source alternatives for. Probably the most common complaints that I hear from potential new to Linux users, especially you guys coming from Windows, is that things like Microsoft Office, the Adobe Creative Suite, Dropbox, OneDrive, things like that, you have to use those in a business environment or sometimes in a school environment and those products are required for you to do your work and you can't just switch to free and open source alternatives. That's not really a good criticism of free and open source software. There are actually free and open source alternatives to all of that stuff, Microsoft Office. We have several really good free and open source office suites available on Linux, the most common one is LibreOffice, which is typically installed on most desktop Linux distributions out of the box and LibreOffice is fantastic. Everything you could want in an office suite is in LibreOffice and again, we have many many other full office suites available on Linux that are free and open source, completely free and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office. Yes, I get that your business or your university requires you to specifically use Microsoft Office. That's not a problem with free and open source software. That's a problem with your place of employment or your school. The problem is they don't understand that they're forcing you to give up a little bit of your freedom to use proprietary software when free and open source solutions are out there. What I strongly suggest is instead of complaining to the Linux community that you can't use free and open source software because your workplace requires you to use Microsoft Office, complain to your boss about forcing you to use Microsoft Office. They've probably never heard about the free and open source software movements, maybe direct them to my YouTube channel. I have a video on this channel titled, Why I Choose Free Software and I explained the evils of proprietary software and the benefits of free software and I doubt that anybody, your professor at your university or your boss at your work could watch that video and not think, oh yeah, I get it now. I see the point why me forcing people to use these privacy invasive proprietary software suites, this is a bad idea. I shouldn't be putting this on my employees or my students. I should be allowing them freedom of choice in this case or at least choosing something for them that is actually free and open source that is not spying on them or data mining them. So I strongly recommend if you're in that situation. Again, this is not a problem with free software or open source software. This is a problem with unfortunately the powers that be at your work or university. And again, direct them to this channel. I've got several videos about why you should be using free software rather than proprietary software. Now, I mentioned several alternatives to the Microsoft Office suite, the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. We've got a ton of good creative programs on Linux. Some of the ones I use all the time, I use GIMP for raster images. GIMP is kind of like our open source alternative to Photoshop. You also have Inkscape, which is for scalable vector graphics. You have Krita, which is another image creation program that's very popular on Linux. You have Blender, which is a great animation, multimedia kind of program. That's probably when people talk about there's no professional software that's free and open source software. Show them Blender. Blender is like the gold standard as far as animation software. Let's talk about video editing. Kaden Live is my video editor of choice. We have actually several free and open source video editors. Unfortunately, most of them are not quite up to the level of a lot of the proprietary solutions, the professional proprietary solutions like DaVinci and Lightworks and things like that. But Kaden Live is really close. Kaden Live is really close. And of course, it's completely free, free of cost and free as in freedom. I also mentioned some of the other things you see in workplace settings. I've worked in offices where everybody had to use things like a Dropbox or OneDrive, you know, those proprietary syncing services, cloud services. And of course, we have a free and open source alternative. That free and open source alternative is NextCloud. Anybody can host their own NextCloud. And with NextCloud, you get your file sharing abilities the same as you would in something like Dropbox or OneDrive. You also have email and things like that. It's almost like a complete office suite inside a cloud, as well as your file sharing ability. So NextCloud is really fantastic. I've actually done a video or two on NextCloud on my channel before. Again, if your business or your university is forcing you to use proprietary solutions like Dropbox or OneDrive, again, let them know about NextCloud. Now, let's talk a little bit about some software that I don't think the free and open source alternatives are quite as good as the proprietary alternatives, but still, even though they're not quite as good for most people, they're good enough for me. You know, I'm always going to choose free and open source software where I can just for ideological reasons. But web conferencing has become a really big deal in the last couple of years because of the pandemic. So let's talk about video chat services, things like Discord, Zoom, Skype, Teams, platforms like that. And they're all proprietary. And you know what? There's not really great free and open source alternatives to those programs. The most popular one these days, this free and open source software is a program called Jitsie. I use Jitsie all the time. I do a monthly chat with my patrons, a live stream where patrons can join me live in a video conference and I stream it on YouTube. And we use Jitsie for that. Jitsie is kind of like your open source Zoom. It doesn't have all the features that Zoom has. And you know, it does have some, some annoying bugs in my opinion that, you know, Zoom just doesn't have. But I've switched to Jitsie because again, it's free and open source software. And even though it's not quite to the level of Zoom, it's close enough that I don't mind, you know, sacrificing a little convenience for a little freedom. Now let's talk about some genres of software that just have no free and open source software solutions at all. The most common one would be gaming all of your big triple A games. All of them, 100% of them are proprietary software free and open source games. It's just not a thing. Also, the platforms they run on are proprietary platforms like Steam. You know, there's DRM, Digital Rights Management, built into a lot of these gaming platforms. And there's nothing free software about gaming, gaming in general. The whole gaming industry is nothing but proprietary garbage. In my opinion, I know people love their games, but you got to understand ideologically. I'd rather not play proprietary games. Open source games, there's a few out there, and I've highlighted a few of these on this channel. One of my favorite free and open source games is a real time strategy game called Zero AD. I've played it many times on the channel. One of my favorite free and open source first person shooters is a game called Zodnautic. I've played it several times on the channel as well. I also love a turn based strategy game called Battle for West Knot. That's available free and open source. And all these games being free and open source software are available in your Linux repositories. You can actually just install them from your software center and whatever Linux distribution you happen to be running. Now, I've talked a little bit about situations where maybe the proprietary software is a little better than the free and open source software, but we've seen many instances in the past where one piece of proprietary software was king in that particular genre or niche, and then a piece of open source software comes along and completely destroys it and dominates that market share. One obvious example, you Windows users, long time Windows users, you remember an archiving tool, a zip unzip kind of tool that was called WinZip. Probably every long time Windows user remembers WinZip. It was the program for zipping, unzipping, you know, making compression, compressed files and a free and open source version of WinZip or alternative to WinZip came along called Seven Zip. And Seven Zip being free and open source software and the fact that it was free of charge is even more really exploded in popularity and became the standard, the de facto standard for an archiving tool on Windows. And also it's available on Mac and Linux being free and open source software. It's cross platform, so it's actually available on all the major operating systems. And many people, probably you guys right now, many of you guys that don't know much about free and open source software probably have Seven Zip installed on your Windows machine and you probably use it all the time and you never even realize that that's a piece of free and open source software. Another good example of this is on Windows. You guys have the Windows media player. That's your multimedia player, your video player typically, but it'll play audio as well. But many Windows users don't really use the Windows media player. It's lacking in a lot of features and many of them are looking for a good alternative and probably the most common alternative to the Windows media player that people install is a program called VLC. VLC is a fantastic video player, audio player as well. Multimedia player VLC has probably hundreds of millions of installs on Windows machines around the world. VLC is free and open source software. So that's just a couple of examples of where free and open source software came along and eventually surpassed the proprietary software that was leading in that genre or that niche. Let's talk about a really big proprietary software that eventually became free and open source because that's becoming a rather common occurrence these days is proprietary software switching to a free and open source license because the writing is on the wall. These days, I think everybody in the software community realizes that it's all about open source these days, that the old way of developing software that proprietary model that is dying and that the future is actually free and open source software. So you're seeing a lot of really important proprietary software starting to change over to being free and open source. A few examples of this, well, we can talk about Blender again. Blender probably the leader as far as animated software, animation software Blender began development in the mid 1990s as proprietary software. I mean, that was the standard back then proprietary software, right? But, you know, after a few years of development, I want to say around 2003 Blender switched over to a free and open source license. And that was great. And it didn't hurt Blender at all because Blender, I mean, we're in 2021 now. So it's been licensed under free and open source license for 18 years. And Blender just dominates that particular market share. Some other good examples of proprietary software switching to free and open source software Qt, QT, the Qt toolkit began development in the early 1990s as proprietary software. And for a long time in the early days of Linux, a lot of Linux distributions wouldn't actually ship a Qt based desktops because of the licensing issues. It was proprietary. But Qt saw the light and in 1999, around 2000, 1999 2000, they switched over to a free license, which allowed Linux distributions, Linux desktop distributions, for example, to really start pushing things like the Qt desktop and, you know, later LX, Qt and other Qt based desktop environments. Another great example, especially for us Linux users is idtech, some of the old id game engines. So we're talking about game engines from the Doom and Quake franchises. I mentioned earlier, we don't have a lot of free and open source games on Linux. But what we do have, we have a ton of free and open source first person shooters because most of them are based on these old Doom and Quake engines that id actually open source. They were originally proprietary, but after id, you know, made their money on them for a few years, you know, selling them as proprietary games, they open sourced it and gave those engines to the community for us to work on and develop our own games based on that technology. And it's just not Linux software that has switched from proprietary to free licenses. Many things on Windows were proprietary and are now free and open source. For example, the PowerShell that so many people love PowerShell and Windows PowerShell was originally proprietary software when it began development, you know, about 15 years ago. But three or four years ago, of course, Microsoft open sourced the PowerShell. Now, it's now licensed under a free license. Other things that Microsoft has licensed under free and open license include things like the Microsoft calculator. They open sourced the calculator. Now, that's not a big deal because on Linux we have literally hundreds of free and open source calculators. Most of them much better than the Microsoft calculator. But that's still nice that they open sourced a piece of software that was previously proprietary. I believe they also open sourced a file manager at 1.2 that was proprietary on Windows. Now, I've been rambling a little bit about this proprietary software versus free software debate. But ultimately what it boils down to is with the exception of you guys that are forced to use proprietary software at your business or at your school. And that's not that many of you. I mean, that's a small percentage of you watching this video right now. They're actually forced to use proprietary software. Most of the people that complain about not being able to switch from proprietary software to free software, it is all willpower. It is all mental. Honestly, it's one of those things. Change is hard. It's one of those things. I have to use all this proprietary software because it's what I'm used to. I've used it for years. I've only used this suite of applications. It's what I know. It's what I love. And I can't live without it. Yeah, you can. You know how you live without it? You make yourself live without it. You have to switch. And that's what is the problem is people are scared to switch. Once you switch and you start using the free and open source alternatives and you start getting used to them, you start loving them. And then you can't switch from them. You could never go back to the proprietary software you used to use because you realize how inferior in many cases that software is to the free and open source software that now you've grown to love. So my advice is that if you really want to switch away from proprietary software to free and open source software because you've come to realize it's something you need to do, how do you do it? Well, my advice, just do it. Just do it. And I promise you, you will not regret it. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe James, Mitchell Paul, Scott West, Akami Allen, Chuck Commander Angry Diyoka, David Dillon, Gregory Hiko Lee, Maxim, Michael, Mike Nitrix, Alexander, Peace, Archon Fedora, Polytech, Raver, Rick Prophet, Stephen and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon because without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to support me, please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace.