Geek Software Freeware

Posted on by
Geek Software Freeware Rating: 8,0/10 8682 votes
  1. Due to the popularity of my previous article on Help Desk Geek entitled 99 ways to make your computer blazingly fast, I’ve decided to write another list post with 99 items, but this time on Windows freeware programs that you may have not heard of. If you search for “best freeware programs” or “top freeware apps”, you’ll get lots of lists, but mostly with programs everyone has.
  2. Here is a list with 4 best free ocr software. Cognitive OpenOCR (Cuneiform) This application is working great and is recognizing a lot of input languages, includes a wizard that will guide user through all options and features that is offers, is easy to use and generates excellent results.

MajorGeeks was founded in 2001 and features top downloads and top news. It is a prime site for tech tools and utilities, and aims to provide the top 1% of safe, editor tested downloads. With that in mind, the site lists less than 10,000 downloads only while guidance is limited to brief reviews and user ratings. Geek Uninstaller is a completely portable program uninstaller that's packed with features, all in a file less than 10 MB in size! Sort programs by their size or installation date, delete entries from the list of software, search through the programs, export a list of installed software to an HTML file, and look up information on any program in.

Geek Uninstaller Download

It’s been more than a year since we drew attention to the crapware regularly foisted upon unsuspecting users by pretty much every big freeware site, including the venerable SourceForge. Since then, a few sites–including SourceForge themselves–have started cleaning up their act.

Geek Software Freeware Online

Geek Software Freeware

Most freeware download sites still use shady tactics, unfortunately, cramming their own installers full of unwanted software and misleading advertisements down your throat in order to make a buck. But now that a few are getting better, we wanted to give credit where credit is due–so consider this an ongoing list of sites that have made things right.

SourceForge’s New Owners Cleaned It Up

At the end of January 2016, SourceForge was sold to a company named BIZX, LLC. The new owners immediately began cleaning up SourceForge, terminating the controversial “DevShare” program that wrapped open-source installers in junkware, sometimes against the wishes of their developers. “We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that. We’re more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit,” they wrote in their announcement.

SourceForge appears to be a trustworthy place to download open-source software from once again.

The second most important problem–misleading “Download” buttons that push you to third-party websites offering open-source project installers wrapped in junkware–also appears to have improved. We haven’t seen any of those ads on the new SourceForge.

Tucows Saw the Light

Tucows is another old freeware download site that succumbed to the temptation of packing its installers with junkware. Back when we examined a variety of download sites, we called the Tucows software download site “an abomination [that] should be removed from the Internet” and found that it was probably worse than even Download.com.

On May 3, 2016, Tucows announced that it, too, was done with that practice. Tucows isn’t just a software download site–the company also makes money from selling domain names, cell phone service, and fiber Internet.

“For a while, we were struggling to walk away from the revenue,” Tucows’ Michael Goldstein told us. “But we’ve been growing like crazy the last couple of years (from wonderful customer-focused, subscription services) and we realized it’s no longer worth the money to be associated with that nonsense. We considered just shutting the download site off but decided it felt more right to keep it running (with just a fraction of people’s time here) as a sort of public service.”

So there you have it: Tucows doesn’t offer the junk anymore. There’s just a small bit of advertising for other Tucows services, like domain registration.

Download.com Abandons Its Installer

RELATED:Download.com Has Finally Stopped Bundling Crapware

Download.com finally ended its “CNET Installer” program sometime in early 2016, although it did this without any public announcement. You can now visit Download.com and you’ll get direct links to download programs without any additional junkware.

Geek Downloads Free

This website still has a little ways to go, however. We’d like to see them clean up their advertising and getting rid of ads with misleading green “Download” buttons that encourage visitors to click the wrong thing. But Download.com deserves credit for abandoning its much-hated installer.

FossHub and Ninite Remain Excellent

Shareware And Freeware Software

While we’re at it, we should highlight a few high-quality freeware download sites that never sold out their users, too.

FossHub is an excellent download site that many projects switched to when they were abandoning SourceForge. It’s a download hosting site for free and open-source software (or “FOSS”). FossHub has never bundled any junkware with its downloads. Download pages just have a single unobtrusive advertisement to help pay the bills–that’s it. FossHub remains trustworthy site.

RELATED:Spread the Word: Ninite is the Only Safe Place to Get Windows Freeware

Ninite is also great. For awhile, it was the best centralized place to get Windows freeware safely, and nothing’s changed there. Among the big general freeware download sites, Ninite was the only one that won’t try to force junk onto your computer–after all, FossHub is just for open-source software.

Ninite offers an especially useful tool to quickly download and install software on a new PC, and it has never bundled junkware. Ninite even lets you install software that normally includes its own, developer-added junkware and skips it for you. For example, you can use Ninite to install Java without it offering Java’s usual installer junkware.

Geek software freeware mac

These aren’t the only places you can download software safely, of course. Many software projects offer downloads on their own websites and these downloads can be clean, although many software projects make money by adding junkware to their own downloads.

RELATED:PUPs Explained: What is a “Potentially Unwanted Program”?

GitHub is generally fine–for open-source projects hosted on GitHub, you can download the latest software builds without any junkware. But GitHub is more about code hosting, and the download experience for users who aren’t developers isn’t as user-friendly.

Geek Software Freeware

For big freeware download sites, FossHub, Ninite, SourceForge, and Tucows seem to be the ones that aren’t out to get you. We’d love to see more download sites follow SourceForge and Tucows, but they’ll need business models that allow them to make money without “potentially unwanted programs.”

This list may look small now, but hopefully this trend continues, and more sites start cleaning up their acts and doing what’s best for their users. Our goal is to keep this list up to date, so if and when more sites cut the crap(ware), we’ll add them to this post. So stay tuned.

READ NEXT
  • › How to Quickly Create Your Own Chrome Browser Theme
  • › How to Create Aliases and Shell Functions on Linux
  • › What Is Apple Arcade? Here’s Everything You Need to Know
  • › What Is Ultra Wideband, and Why Is It In the iPhone 11?
  • › How to Use a Mouse With Your iPad or iPhone