Free software for web development (First Part)

For those of us dedicated to web design and/or development, making use of open source tools or free software is our daily bread. 

From the operating system itself, through text editors, code editors, image creation software or photo retouching, the offer of open source applications is vast. 

Operating System

You may be a Mac fanboy or your thing is Windows, but in addition to these two well-known operating systems, today you have dozens of free alternatives to get the most out of your computer.

One of the most widespread operating systems as an open source alternative is GNU/Linux or commonly known as simply Linux. 

One of the first Linux distributions I installed and used on my old Pentium II was Red Hat 6.0 if I remember correctly. It came in the form of a free CD in a publication, on paper, about the world of Linux. 

That was a pain. Getting everything working properly, getting the hardware working as it should, getting and starting to use the minimal applications, required many hours of reading (in English) of the few manuals that were available. There was someone in Spanish, I remember, from the University of Navarra that was very useful to me. 

But nowadays we have distributions that are easy to install and loaded with very good software ready to be used, such as Ubuntu who today is already in its version 18. 

If you have not tried Ubuntu yet, I encourage you to do so, since in addition to being simple, it has a large amount of documentation in our language and a large Community of users behind it.  

Oh, and don't worry, it's available in Spanish and many other languages.

Code editors

As in everything related to free software, there is a lot to choose from and I encourage you to comment on your favorite code editor, but in my case I will recommend Atom for its rapid growth and flexibility. Today I consider it an alternative to Sublime Text. 

Atom, developed by GitHub, includes, among many of its features, support for plugins written in Node.js and version control Go integrated.

You have at your disposal thousands of packages that will help you a lot in your day to day.

It has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Image edition

As an image editor I prefer GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) quintessential free image editing software and a worthy rival to proprietary Photoshop (PS).

On many occasions, when I see photo retouching, web design or any other courses that require editing software and I see that they only focus on PS, I think of the new pirates that are being created, since many of the young students who attend or are unemployed, do not have the means to pay for the license to use PS. 

This is where the use of GIMP as an alternative is most important.

And some will say: "It's because with PS you can do many things that are not possible with GIMP", are you sure? take a look on google 

Download now GIMP for your operating system