So, while furiously penning a response to a comment on TDW, I realized part of my comment might be useful for the many pedes looking to kick the Silicon Commies out of their lives. Not a novel idea for a post and many people have posted similar lists here, but I figured you can never have too much information when it comes to freeing yourself from the Billy G's vaccine-happy kid-fondlers...

This IS NOT an exhaustive list and I may be adding to it from time to time. If you know of other good options, even in categories not listed, please let me know. I'll do my best to keep it up to date.

A NOTE ABOUT OPEN SOURCE: While probably better than the proprietary alternative in many ways, do not just automatically trust anything that says it's open source. Just because people can look at the source and warn people if there's something shady about it doesn't mean they have looked at the source and given such warnings. Generally, the big open source names are very trustworthy. However, open source claims should not be treated as the end-all be-all. Just be careful.

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>>> Desktop // Laptop Operating System:

Linux - Linux is a UNIX-based operating system kernel which is utilized by MANY distributions (named versions). Debian-, Slackware-, and Red Hat-based distros make up the lion's share of the available versions. I personally use Linux Mint KDE as I find them to be the most user-friendly. Policy-wise, they're mostly all free and open source. Linux does not make heavy hardware demands and is generally pretty resilient when it comes to malicious software. The best way to experiment and find the best version for you is to find a refurbished computer at your local computer store (you can often find very cheap boxes available), wipe its HDD, and then load up a Linux distro, many of which have a boot preview so you can have a look at the system before installing it. If you don't know where to start, Ubuntu, SuSE, and Fedora are all very popular. If you don't like them, however, there's hundreds more where they came from so don't get discouraged. Once you settle on one, get used to the concept and use of virtual boxes for those times where you MUST have access to Windows or some such. It's a good work-around.

Note: MAKE NO MISTAKE!!! Linux IS NOT Windows or MacOS. Linux distros are not polished consumer products. They do not hold your hand. Basic things like surfing the internet or using an office suite are simple enough, but don't count on this to replace your gaming computer. If you want to get a lot of use out of Linux, you need to come to the party willing to drive down the ENTIRE learning curve. Warning given. Moving on.

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>>> Office Suite:

LibreOffice, OpenOffice, and NeoOffice - Take your pick. They all descend from Sun Microsystems' internal StarOffice system and they have similar development philosophies. Of the three, I must say the one I trust the least is OpenOffice simply because its current incarnation has IBM heritage and changes hands often enough that it's not outside the realm of possibility that a ChiCom company could get their hands on it. I prefer LibreOffice, but I've never used NeoOffice so maybe it's a better option. They're all free and open source as far as I know.

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>>> Internet Browser:

Brave - Seems to be getting a lot of attention lately and I've been using it in lieu of Firefox for the past few months. So far, it's pretty good. Brave is free and open source, but it is also based on the Chromium browser which was developed by Google and Microsoft, among others. Brave is based in the United States.

Opera - Another Chromium-based browser with competitive performance. Based out of Oslo, Norway.

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>>> Search Engine:

DuckDuckGo - As far as I'm concerned, it's the best option out there. In addition to being a search engine in its own right, DDG lets you make searches of many sites using tags they call !Bangs. For example, you can search Google using "!g [whatever you're searching for]". It's a good engine and it does make an effort to maintain your privacy.

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>>> Web Hosting:

Linode - I'm not going to give you a sales pitch for this one. You can go find their website and read more about it. If you need to host your website and you don't wanna use things like BlueHost or whatever, then this is a really good alternative. Their servers are all completely Linux-driven and I've never seen them go down. The same "know what you're doing" rules that applied to Linux apply here, however. Be warned.

Also, as a side note, unless you've got some serious money to burn and really, REALLY know exactly what you're doing, don't try to put your own at home server together. It was a bad idea when Hillary did it and it's usually a bad idea for anyone short of a fair-sized business with solid tech people in house.

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>>> E-mail Service:

ProtonMail - Tons of encryption options for both incoming and outgoing mail. Integrated contacts management (allows you to import your contacts from .csv files). There is a free account option which offers 500mb storage (the email data itself) and supports 150 messages per day. This covers the needs of most users. Paid accounts scale upward from there and allow you some piecemeal control over what exactly you're paying for. Based out of Switzerland, the company claims that even they cannot read the contents of their users' accounts, but their system is closed source and proprietary so there's no way to know how much truth there is to it. If it helps you decide, James O'Keefe of Project Veritas fame uses ProtonMail to receive and manage tips from whistleblowers.

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>>> Audio Editing:

Audacity - A very good audio editing software for anyone who needs to doctor some recordings. Free and open source. Have a look.

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>>> Image Editing:

GIMP - I've used this a long time. I actually find it more useful than Photoshop is, generally. Photoshop's Free Transform tool is pretty irreplaceable, though. GIMP is free.

Krita - I occasionally use this one. It's a darling of the Linux community and pretty useful, all things considered. It's more of a painting software than a photo-manipulation software, but they're adding to it all the time. Krita is free.

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>>> 3D Modelling (Maya, 3DS Max, etc.):

Blender - This stands head and shoulders above most of the other alternative stuff I've used. I almost always keep a copy of the software on all of my computers. It's got a learning curve like anything else, but if you're used to other such software the switch should be pretty easy.

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>>> Text Editor:

Notepad++ - It's not something we generally think about, but Notepad is a Microsoft product. Notepad++ is a far superior version with lots of great tools built in. If you save a file with a .cs, .cpp, .lua, or other code-related file extension, Notepad++ will even provide some basic programming tools from there on in the file. It has a built-in predictive text system which will speed up your programming workflow. As a programmer, this thing is near and dear to my heart. But it's useful for everyone sooner or later. It also won't forget what you were working on if your computer crashes, which is nice (it stores the data locally, so don't worry about being spied on by some weird cloud service). Free and open source.