DON’T CHEAP OUT
Hear us out as we use this box in an article about free apps to tell you not to use them: Sometimes it pays to pay. Sometimes a free package can’t do the exact thing you want – if you’re interacting with a business with very precise standards, a document that, say, LibreOffice produces might have subtle differences that make it look terrible on that company’s Microsoft Officepacking machines. An opensource package comes with no guarantees, no support, no comeback if everything goes wrong. It might have a forum full of enthusiastic amateurs and some officiallooking documentation, but it doesn’t have any guarantee of professionalism.
If it’s mission critical, don’t rely on free software.
Often, free apps either lack critical features (many exist simply to tease a paid upgrade) or can’t keep up with the quality of their paid-for alternatives. For instance, while we’ve recommended ShotCut as a free video editor, it is nowhere near as complex or well built as something like Adobe Premiere.
Even Cakewalk, our pick for free audio recording and editing and a formerly paid-for app, isn’t the best choice in its sector because it’s a little behind the curve.
Then there’s the niche apps for which there is no free alternative, and you should also consider Windows itself – while we put our weight behind experimenting with Linux, it is not, for most, a production OS. Windows is rock solid, compatible with just about everything, has a huge software library, and despite the fact that you can run it in a choppeddown unactivated mode, you really should pay for the license, or at least attempt to transfer an old Win 7 license up the chain.