6 more must-have open source apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux

As I wrote back in October, 2015, I, like many of you, run a heterogeneous environment, picking the appropriate operating system or platform for the job. To have some level of consistency in my cross-platform workflow I choose applications that I can run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. And it’s icing on the cake if these applications are open source.

In this follow up article, here are some more of the best open source and free apps I’ve found for my heterogeneous environment.

Handbrake is a video transcoder that lets you convert multiple types of video files into standard formats and also reduce the file size so that you can cram more movies on your devices. Handbrake can also batch process so you can transcode multiple files at once.

Download Handbrake for your operating system.

Calibre is an open source ebook manager that can convert simple documents and PDFs into ebooks. It can also convert ebooks from one format to another so you can create the supported format for your device.

Download Calibre for your operating system.

Clementine is an open source music player that is also capable of playing music stored on remote file servers. Clementine has many rich features such as pulling lyrics, artist info and song info from online sources.

Download Clementine for your operating system.

Inkscape is a powerful graphics editor, seen as a free of cost alternative to Adobe Illustrator. The greatest advantage of Inkscape is support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.

Download Inkscape for your operating system.

Blender is an extremely powerful app for creating 3D works –  3D animated films, visual effects, 3D applications and even video games. It’s very easy to use even for a new user, so if you even want to make a small 3D film, give Blender a try.

Download Blender for your operating system.

Audacity is a nonlinear sound editing application that lets users edit audio through a very simple interface. Audacity supports external plugins to expand its features and functionality, and as a result you get a very powerful sound editor. It can also record sound from multiple sources.

Download Audacity for your operating system.