Bossie Awards 2012: The best open source desktop applications

With so many free and amazingly capable open source desktop apps available, it’s a wonder anyone still pays for software. And with OpenOffice and LibreOffice now competing to outdo each other’s office productivity suite, the future looks even brighter than the present. Whatever your need (content creation, content editing, helpful utility) or your platform (Windows, Mac, or Linux), you’ll find the right tool for the job among these winners.

Whether you love or hate Ubuntu’s new Unity interface, it’s the first genuinely innovative, modern, and original UI to come to an open source operating system. Ubuntu has driven Linux desktop adoption above 1 percent at long last, and Unity is the first step to going well beyond. Ubuntu 12.04 was the second release to include Unity and the first truly mature release of it, and now Ubuntu is hitting the tablet market, where it will be a viable option for users wanting a more powerful tablet than an Android or iPad. Thanks to the less desirable Windows 8 interface, we can expect an even more ascendant Ubuntu in the years to come. — Andrew Oliver

OpenOffice — the well-known, low-cost (as in $0) productivity suite that has provided so many with a viable alternative to Microsoft Office — was recently placed under the stewardship of the Apache Software Foundation, where it has been updated to version 3.4. Word processor, spreadsheet, graphic design, presentations, math formulas, and database connectivity are all included, along with a broad array of add-ons, such as spelling and grammar tools for several languages. Among the recent changes: much faster startup, AES-256 encryption for ODF documents, many improvements to the spreadsheet app, better PDF output options, and a relicensing of the whole suite under Apache License 2 instead of LGPLv3. — Serdar Yegulalp

The open source equivalent to Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape is a vector drawing program with features to rival commercial applications in the same space. Text objects, polygons, gradients, tablet/pen support, and exporting to many common formats (PostScript, PNG, and SVG, among others) are all included. Advanced features include the ability to edit Inkscape documents as raw XML — a great way to fix drawings that are broken or incorrectly imported — and the ability to place text along paths or shapes, along with other detailed typographic controls. As with Scribus, the biggest missing piece is support for commercial spot-color systems like Pantone, but this can be worked around. — Serdar Yegulalp

This multiplatform audio recording, editing, and conversion application can import, export, and manipulate sound files in just about every format in common use. Audacity includes whole battery of common effects (noise reduction, limiting, “auto duck“), and common audio plug-in types (VST, Nyquist, Audio Unit, LADSPA) are also supported. The program’s biggest drawback is the interface. It’s rather clunky when working with multitrack audio, for instance, and some of the tool behaviors take getting used to. But the gamut of useful features far outstrips the limitations. — Serdar Yegulalp

Forgotten, insecure, or dangerously redundant passwords are all in the past with KeePass. This multiplatform app stores passwords in a heavily secured database with top-grade, independently vetted encryption. Once you’ve placed your passwords into the “vault,” you need remember only the database password and nothing else. Third-party plug-ins add integration with everything from smart-card readers to online file-sync services like Dropbox. A handy password generator lets you devise passwords and see at a glance how many bits of security they provide. — Serdar Yegulalp

A Swiss Army knife of an archive tool, 7-Zip is mainly for Windows, but ports exist for just about every other platform of consequence. Aside from reliably opening most archive formats in use, 7-Zip also compresses to a few common formats, including its own highly optimized, open-architecture 7Z format. Even file system archives like ISO, UDF, and SquashFS can be cracked open with 7-Zip, making it a handy way to pop open the contents of a disk image for adding to a bootable flash drive, for instance. CRC-32, SHA-1, and SHA-256 checksumming is also included. It’s hard to imagine a rescue disk or system utility folder without it. — Serdar Yegulalp

“Where did all my disk space go?” WinDirStat shows you with easy-to-read graphics that depict where disk space is being allocated on one or more volumes, turning maintenance and disk cleanups into a game instead of a chore. (Small wonder the progress-bar icon for the program is Pac-Man!) File types can be color-coded for easy distinction, and the resulting map can be shown with or without free space as part of the picture. Right-click a region in the map to zoom in on folders or files, start a command-line prompt in a given subfolder, or perform mass cleanups via user-defined automated actions. — Serdar Yegulalp