I am a huge fan of free software. If you have old laptops, desktops, Raspberry Pi’s and other stuff lying around, we often want to use / revive them. And then you realize the OS is out of date (Windows XP anyone?), and you don’t want to dish out for another OS user license (well, you can use Windows 10 for free, unregistered if you want, with some limitations). Or you have something that works, but you need to do something with Microsoft office files, and you don’t want to spend money on another license. You can do a lot with Google Docs/Sheets and whatnot, but that can be slow and glitchy sometimes.
First of all, for old machines (and even some new ones), I much prefer Linux to Windows for various reasons. Anyway, that may come in a later post, but for now the two main reasons is that 1. it’s totally free, and 2. it doesn’t go into these long update-shutdown cycles which can be very annoying.
Anyway, here some free stuff that is really good.
Photo editing: https://www.gimp.org/
Video editing: https://kdenlive.org/en/
Microsoft Office alternative: https://www.libreoffice.org/
Drawing / SVG editing / graphic design: https://inkscape.org/
Desktop Publishing: https://www.scribus.net/
All of these are completely free with no strings attached, and are pretty awesome. While they may not be as good as some of the things they replace (GIMP vs. Photoshop), they are pretty good and keep getting better. There are plenty of free tutorials online to learn how to use them too.
Also, all of these work on both Linux, Windows and Macs.