When comes to personal computing most of us will prefer Microsoft Windows. Microsoft Windows is ruling the world of personal computing as it holds more than 90% of the market share. Although we don’t know why we are using Windows, we rather think of it using for personal computing. Since most of the Laptops are shipped with windows or our colleagues and friends will be using it. We need to revisit our personal computing habits.

Well, Windows is equipped with lots of functionalities and an amazing user experience and frequent updates. I must admit it. But every Operating System has its own pros and cons. Also, we have an alternative operating system to watch out.

Linux Operating System

Linux is an open-source operating system which available at free of cost. It is lightweight when compared to Windows. You don't need to spend an additional penny on some anti-virus program to safeguard your PC, you just need to depend on some security updates to stay safe. But working with Linux OS needs some learning curve. If you are getting familiar with it, you can sense your productivity increase.

Which Linux?

Next, the one big question, which Linux distros should I choose? Well, it depends. Based on your needs it will vary. Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distro for personal computing as of now. But there are other distros also you could use Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE. If you’re serious windows users, you can prefer ChaletOS or Linux Mint. I have also found this interesting site that can suggest you a Linux distro based on your preferences — Distro Chooser

Linux Alternatives to Windows Apps

Let’s think about productivity, we rely on some applications on a daily basis. Does that achievable with Linux? Why not, even you can improve your productivity. Let me walk through it.

Office Suite

Any sort of computer-based work is incomplete without an Office Suite. LibreOffice is an alternative to Microsoft Office. It is compatible with almost all MS Office files formats. Available for free of cost.

Other Software like WPS Office, Apache Open Office, AbiWord is some of its alternatives.

Email Client

Mozilla Thunderbird is an email client alternative to Microsoft Outlook or Windows Mail. It has stunning features to manage your emails.

Graphics and Image Processing

We have some alternatives to Adobe products for graphics.

GIMP is a fully-featured image processing software alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor alternative to Adobe Illustrator.

Tux Paint and Kolor Paint are alternatives to MS Paint.

Media Players and editors

The VLC media player is the popular option for a media player.

If you are looking for a video editing tool, then OpenShot is a video editing tool will be an alternative to Windows Movie Maker. For editing audio, you can pick Audacity.

Text Editors and IDE

If you are a developer you will definitely rely on Text Editors and IDE.

Notepadqq is an alternative to Notepad++. All Other popular text editors like Sublime, VSCode, Atom, Brackets are also available in Linux Platform. You can also try some of the best Linux based editor like VIM, Nano, Gedit.

As far as IDE is concerned, all major IDE is available for Linux. You have Linux support for IntelliJ, Pycharm, Netbeans, Eclipse, Android Studio, RStudio.

Browsers

Almost all modern web browsers will be available in Linux. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera.

Readers

Okular, Evience are some of the popular picks. Adobe Reader is also available for Linux platform.

I have suggested some of the famous alternatives. If you are looking for a specific alternative, I recommend you to have a look into this site. It has crowdsourced alternative software recommendations.

Opensource technologies are evolving at a rapid rate in today's world. Also, Linux is gaining more and more community support to keep you updated and safe. Keep an eye over it, It will save lots of money and improves your productivity.