You’re probably looking for common Windows software alternatives for Linux. Or perhaps just open source alternatives for Windows software? Now you might be asking yourself: Why can’t I just pirate everything and use the paid programs? If you did, ask yourself this question: Why wouldn’t I help the open source developers by using their software and donating them like one dollar? Well if you’re really broke and can’t afford that, don’t pay anything, even using their software supports them. The paid and expensive software might be better than the open source alternatives. But take this: They get more excited and try to make them even better! Meaning, if you use them. There might be other alternatives you know, but these one are all open source.

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. Read more from Wikipedia…

Here we got free and open source alternatives for Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, AutoCAD, Visual Studio, CCleaner, Microsoft Office, Outlook and more! These all will work on Linux and also most of them, on Windows 10. Let’s stop the trash talk and start looking at the apps.

Software alternatives for Linux & Windows

Alternative for Adobe Photoshop

Yes, indeed, you guessed right, it’s GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. GIMP doesn’t have all the features from the Photoshop. Photoshop doesn’t have all the features from GIMP. I have personally used GIMP for a long time, and I really love it, and can rely on it. It is totally one of the best photo editing software alternatives for Linux. GIMP is also available for Windows, and I’ve used it many times on Windows 10. Works as fine as on Linux system.
Download GIMP

Alternative for Adobe Lightroom

Lightroom is not as commonly used as Photoshop, but it is meant for different kind of editing. The best alternative I found for Lightroom is darktable. darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual light table and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them. darktable is available for many Linux distributions, and also, for Windows again. So if you want a free version of Lightroom, you can test it out.
Download darktable

Alternative for Adobe Illustrator

Another great graphic designer software from the Adobe family. The best alternative for Illustrator is Inkscape of course! It’s also pre-installed in many Linux Distributions! Whether you are an illustrator, designer, web designer or just someone who needs to create some vector imagery, Inkscape is for you! You can get Inkscape for Linux, Windows and also Mac. For vectors, Inkscape is by far one of the best open source software alternatives for Linux, and also Windows.
Download Inkscape

Alternative for AutoCAD

If you’re looking for an open source alternative for AutoCAD or any else parametric 3D modeler software, you might want to give FreeCAD a try. FreeCAD is a parametric 3D modeler made primarily to design real-life objects of any size. Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters. FreeCAD is open-source and highly customizable, scriptable and extensible.
Download FreeCAD

Alternative for Visual Studio

In my opinion, there’s no better coding IDE than Visual Studio. There is also a free version of Visual Studio available which is called Visual Studio Community. Sadly, there’s no Visual Studio for Linux 🙁 I hope that Microsoft will make it some day also available for Linux systems too. If you really want to code NET programs or whatever you need, the classic choice for Linux and Mac is always MonoDevelop. MonoDevelop is also available for Windows too, but only from source. On Linux, you can just install it on most distributions.
Download MonoDevelop

Alternative for CCleaner

You’ve probably done some cleaning for your Windows system sometime, so you should know about CCleaner. If you follow the news, you also should know that some hackers planted a virus once in the CCleaner installer. Here is a Piriforms article about it. If you’re using Windows with CCleaner right now, don’t be afraid, I’m sure that they have learned from their mistakes. Maybe. Still, a great alternative for CCleaner, for Linux and also available for Windows, is BleachBit. It is a great cleaner program, free and open source. It doesn’t have all the same features that CCleaner has, but it’s simple, and there’s nothing unwanted. Check from the source if you’re afraid ;).
Download BleachBit

Alternative for Microsoft Office

While the new Microsoft office 365 is great, most of the people do not need everything in there. Also it is very expensive in my opinion. If you just need a normal set of office software, you should download OpenOffice or LibreOffice. They are both very good and both available for Windows and Linux.
Download OpenOffice
Download LibreOffice

Alternative for Outlook

Outlook is an email application for Windows. Actually I have never used it personally, it looked very scary and too complex for being just an email application. I went straight for it’s alternative which is Mozilla Thunderbird. It is awesome email application built by a great community. Mozilla Thunderbird is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. It has a great calendar nowadays too, you should try that out too. With the correct plugins you can sync it with almost any online calendar.
Download Mozilla Thunderbird

Software alternatives for Linux & Windows, and the famous final words

Thank you for reading my post till the end. I hope I have helped you in any way 🙂 Follow us on Social Media to keep in touch!
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