3 more free, open-source (FOSS) apps to replace your defaults

Published Aug 27, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day. He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice. When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles. If you've been using a computer for a decade or more, you've probably settled into a set of default apps. At some point, you weighed your options, picked what seemed best, and never looked back. In the meantime, the software landscape has evolved quite a bit while you weren't looking. There's a decent chance you're paying for software—or putting up with limited free versions—while completely overlooking equally capable, if not more capable, open-source tools. Here are three such FOSS apps worth switching to. Motrix A modern download manager Most people download files using the download manager built into whatever browser they use—Chrome or Firefox. While these work fine for grabbing the occasional file or app installer, if you're constantly downloading files from the internet, you should be using a dedicated download manager—and Motrix is one of the best FOSS options out there. A regular browser is fine for downloading files over HTTP/HTTPS, but if you want to download files using BitTorrent or FTP, you'll need a different tool. Motrix combines these capabilities into a single app, letting you download files over HTTP/HTTPS and FTP, as well as through BitTorrent and magnet links. You'll need to install the Motrix browser extension to hand off downloads you initiate in your browser, but it's a simple setup. It's worth noting that Motrix is essentially a graphical interface for aria2, the download engine that does the actual work. Aria2 is an excellent download utility, but it's primarily a command-line tool, which can make it less approachable for people who aren't comfortable working in a terminal. Motrix makes aria2 much more accessible by wrapping it in a clean, modern user interface. Download Motrix. At the time of writing, Motrix is in a transitional state. You can still use the current version, but the project is being rebuilt as Motrix Turbo, which is currently in beta. So if you're reading this in the future and Motrix Turbo is available, use that instead. Stirling PDF The PDF app for most people If you’re someone who works with PDFs regularly, you’re probably using Adobe Acrobat. That means you’re either limited to the features available in the free version, or you’re paying a subscription for more advanced tools like merging multiple PDFs, rearranging pages, or converting files to different formats. However, if you ask me, it feels like extortion to pay a subscription just to combine two PDFs. And sure, online PDF editors do exist, but sometimes you’re dealing with sensitive files and don’t want to upload them to someone else’s servers. This is where Stirling PDF comes in. It’s one of the most powerful PDF toolkits, packing pretty much every PDF operation you’d need into a single app. You can run it as a self-hosted web app or use it as a desktop application, and either way, it costs nothing. It’s got a clean, intuitive interface with an impressive feature set covering everything from merging and compressing PDFs to converting them to different formats, redacting sensitive information, and even comparing two PDFs side by side to spot differences. You can also use it to sign PDFs, add passwords and watermarks, rearrange pages, edit metadata, and a lot more. Download Stirling PDF. AppFlowy A local, AI-ready Notion alternative AppFlowy is an open-source alternative to Notion—or, in other words, a full-fledged project management system. You can use it to take notes, create and track tasks, and organize everything into databases. The interface is also simple and intuitive, much like Notion, with pages serving as the core canvas and blocks—which you can access using the “/” (slash) command—to build on top of them. That said, while AppFlowy nails the core Notion experience, it does leave out some of Notion’s more powerful capabilities, particularly page version history and web publishing. Notion also supports more advanced database formulas. However, if you’ve never really used these features, I’d argue you’ll find AppFlowy to be the better product. First, AppFlowy is local-first. This means your data is stored locally by default, which not only gives you a more private home for your notes but can also translate to a faster, snappier user experience. It’s also AI-ready, and you can pair it with a local AI model running through Ollama. This gives you AI access without API usage limits for document processing—although the quality will depend on the model your hardware can run. I should mention that you can create an AppFlowy account and subscribe to one of its paid plans to get access to more capable models from OpenAI and Anthropic—but that somewhat undermines the whole local-first, privacy-focused angle. Still, I wouldn’t count it as a point against it, since it’s optional, and who doesn’t like having options? Download AppFlowy. The open source space has matured a lot The reason most of us stick with our defaults is that when we originally picked them, the alternatives weren't good enough—or didn't exist at all. That's no longer true. The open-source space is in better shape than it's ever been. The catch is that being free often means having little or no marketing budget, so nobody knows these apps are out there. So, it's up to us—the end users who use and love these apps—to spread the word.