MacLibre: One Download Wins You Many Free Mac Apps

September 26th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 8 CommentsTweet This (1)

A few months back I wrote about PortableApps.com, a site where you can get a whole slew of useful software applications–most of them open source–in one free download. This site has become especially popular with people who like to tote a lot of applications on a USB thumb drive. For now, though, PortableApps.com delivers Windows applications only. For the many Mac-based readers here, MacLibre is an equivalent site.

At MacLibre, one free download gives you a bushel of free open source applications for Mac OS X. You can view the various download options here, and you’ll see from the footprints of the downloads that you can easily put your applications on a portable drive.

The list of applications you get with MacLibre is impressive–some of the best open source applications around. You get GIMP (graphics), Adium (IM), Firefox, Thunderbird (e-mail), Cyberduck (FTP), AbiWord (word processor), ClamXav (anti-virus), and many more. The MacLibre distributions are under the GPL public license.

Since I use a lot of open source software applications as part of writing for the OStatic blog, I’m particularly fond of a few of the applications. AbiWord is a great, lightweight word processor with an interface very much like Microsoft Word’s. Adium is also the instant messenger of choice for many Mac users.

In the case of both PortableApps.com and MacLibre, you may or may not favor the applications you get as your primary ones, but there are lots of other ways you may find these applications useful. If you have a notebook with limited storage, these applications take up very little space, and it’s nice to have a bushel of productivity applications on a USB thumb drive if you happen to carry one.

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Comments (2)

Great stuff:-)

Thanks Stephen.

Cheers,

Ralf

Ralf Lippold — 11:47 PM on September 26, 2008 Reply
Wicked, thanks a lot for the heads up!

Cheers.

Wii — 10:06 AM on September 27, 2008 Reply

Linkbacks (6)

[...] Are you carrying a USB thumb drive with useful applications with you at all times? I’ve written before about how it makes a lot of sense, and how to stock your drive with many good free, open source [...]

WebWorkerDaily » Archive Stay on Top… — 4:00 PM on October 13, 2008
[...] you do adopt a USB thumb drive, also see this post I did on PortableApps and MacLibre–two easy ways to get tons of open source applications on your drive in one quick [...]

WebWorkerDaily » Archive Better Opportunities… — 4:00 PM on December 2, 2008
[...] has quite a lot of enhancements over previous versions. In particular, if you’ve followed my previous posts on good open source applications to put on a USB thumb drive for use anytime, you may want to [...]

WebWorkerDaily » Archive QTWeb Is an… — 4:00 PM on January 22, 2009
[...] is a Windows-only download, but there are similar offerings for both the Mac and Linux. I wrote about MacLibre here. This site offers a download that delivers free open source applications such as GIMP (graphics), [...]

WebWorkerDaily » Archive PortableApps… — 4:01 PM on March 12, 2009
[...] is a Windows-only download, but there are similar offerings for both the Mac and Linux. I wrote about MacLibre here. This site offers a download that delivers free open source applications such as GIMP (graphics), [...]

PortableApps Delivers Better Look, Security… — 6:11 AM on March 17, 2009
[...] is my favorite site for downloading a suite of Windows apps optimized for a flash drive, while MacLibre is a good equivalent for people on [...]

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