Having been an early adopter of the personal computer (I built a CPM Z80 machine in the early 80's before the first IBM PC came out), I have always sourced my own applications to run on them. On the very rare occasion that I have bought or used commercial software I have often been mightily frustrated with limitations, updates, licence keys, dongles and unasked-for upgrades that have crippled my hardware. It's one of the reasons I stay well away from Apple products; you don't seem to quite own what you buy. Add to this the trend towards subscription-and cloud-based software and it becomes more and more difficult to keep control over
Because I work in an office in the real world I necessarily use the current MS Windows operating system - I could use Linux, but I have colleagues who, like myself, buy their hardware with the operating system installed and we are all familiar with this native environment, and I'm all about peaceful coexistence. Besides, as maligned as Windows is by "people who know", I have found it to be reliable enough. Currently on Windows 10, which I have to say is really annoying with its "Let's finish setting up your computer" interference every other update.
I don't use any other MS product though. I want to own my software and have it installed and run from own computer. So the office production suite I use is Libre Office (big brother to Open Office which is just as good). It has word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing programmes and they work prettymuch like any other office suite. It will read and write as any version of MS Word or Excel if you want it to, and it works seamlessly with Google Docs or Sheets.
Back in the day, when the jpeg was just invented to speed up transmission of images, image rendering software was slow and clunky. (If you're as old as me, you'll remember the slow painting of an image, line by line, as it was downlaoded and rendered to your screen, probably in Netscape.) I was alerted to an independant bit of freeware called Irfanview, an image viewing and processing programme that was (by comparison) really fast. Although those days are well gone, I still use this programme in its latest versions as it remains a very powerful and quick image viewer and adjuster. It's not Photoshop, it won't do layers and lassoes, but for colour adjustment, sharpening, cropping, resizing and changing formats, it's second to none; everything I need for processing images for websites or for print media. It has a number of associated plugins for a wider range of functionality.
Probably the jewel in the crown of free software for a musician is MuseScore. Having once paid a lot of money for a music writing programme called Encore (pre-Wimdows, run from a DOS prompt...), and having used the industry standard Sibelius in education settings, MuseScore is not only free, but is so much easier to use, way more intuitive than other programmes I've used. Like any powerful programme, it takes a bit of time to master but there are many official and third-party instructional YouTube videos on each small aspect or function. And the accompanying sounds for playback are the best I've ever heard for this kind of software. (I see that Encore still exists and it says it's free to try: proceed with caution .)
For basic recording and audio editing, you can't beat Audacity, especially since its latest upgrades. Quick to install and easy to use, its simplicity belies a lot of advanced capability. You can multi track, make podcasts, add effects, de-noise and convert audio to different formats.
These are just a few of the day-to-day programmes I use, all free, running from your own hard drive and don't require you to be connected to the internet to use them. Most importantly, they've all been around for a long time and all have strong community support, many instructional videos and texts and are stable and not buggy. I hope there is something here that you find useful.
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