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I have overwhelmingly observed that the majority of computer users, do not want a truly free, democratic, autonomous, or self-empowering scenario, where their use of a computer is concerned.

With computer use, we now essentially have two groups of people. A minority of specialised, elitist programmers who write software for an almost completely unskilled, disinterested, and technophobic majority; and said technophobic majority themselves.

It seems that the proverbial "owner driver," of computers (a group among whom I gladly self-identify) are becoming a dying breed. I sat up all night last night, until 7 am this morning, compiling and re-compiling sources for my new NetBSD/amd64 vm. I have found use of that system tricky; and the current install is my third attempt. It is uneven in some areas, and there are many jagged edges. Nevertheless, I am determined, and while it has been somewhat frustrating, I have enjoyed the process; to the point where I have since only had six hours' sleep, in part due to my level of enthusiasm to get back into it.

People need to understand that maintaining their freedom requires vigilance, personal initiative and responsibility, and active defense. The psychopaths are tireless in their attempts to take it away from us; and more, to convince us that we should actually want them to take it away.

Learn to program yourself; but when I say this, I do not merely mean the new languages that are popular, which will win you approval from a manager. I mean the old languages, like C, FORTH, Tcl/Tk, shell, awk, m4, and LaTeX. Learn simple HTML, and use RMS' own web site as a code example if you do not know how. Java might bring you money, but in my observation at least, it will not bring you joy.

Use the BSDs. Get comfortable with compiling something from source code. A lot of applications are designed much more smoothly than they used to be, so this is nowhere near as difficult as it once was. Get VMware Player, and install an Open or NetBSD guest. Use it to teach yourself the command line and shell scripting, and then realise that there is no reason for you to pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft for Windows if you don't want to. You can buy a perfectly good computer from here, which has completely Free Software compatible hardware, and then run one of the BSDs natively, and dual boot it with Windows if you want. I don't hate Microsoft at all; I just think people should have that choice.

In addition to your use of Twitter, consider downloading XChat 2 and discovering Internet Relay Chat. Many open source software projects have IRC channels, so if you do start using *BSD, that will also be a good way of getting help if you need it.

In addition to your use of Reddit, get Forte Agent and find out if your service provider maintains a Usenet server. If they don't, Forte sells Usenet access at $3/month for 20GB.

I know many of you want the new, shiny thing; but voluntary simplicity is becoming a major movement in other areas of life as well, and truthfully I really think it's time we brought it to computer use as well. I am certified as a Permaculture designer, and I truthfully view use of the BSDs as being as close as I can get to using a computer in a Permacultural manner. The word Permaculture is short for "permanent culture," and UNIX is timeless.

X-Chat does this.

X-Chat is a very good IRC program. I use it on Windows. I was looking for an open-source chat program, I found X-Chat, and decided I liked it.

I didn't like their philosophy. They claimed that making a Windows build was "hard" somehow, but anyone who knows anything about programming knows that once you have the dev environment set up properly, making a new build is a matter of minutes. They'd obviously set up the dev environment properly, so why were they charging money for the Windows version?

However, there's somebody who makes Windows builds of X-Chat. For free. Unaffiliated with the actual group, of course, but fully functional. So I downloaded from him . . . and donated $10 to him for providing a useful service without demanding money.

Still haven't given a cent to the "main team" and I don't plan to until they get rid of that braindamaged policy.

If you split your userbase among bizarre lines, and demand money from one group, you may very well piss off the people who you're demanding money from. Be careful about things like this.

its the same for xchat on windows: http://silverex.org/compiling/

You have to download 20 zips, place them right, edit paths in files, need to replace files in your visual studio lib directory so it links to the right dll(so you cant even keep your build environment easily isolated), ipv6 openssl and mmx tinting are again annoying subjobs with specific tasks. and if you want to update your gtk libraries you link to.. well, have fun starting again from the beginning.

in the end i tried it 2 times, but always gave up after a few days.(the guide is for an older version, i had unmentioned problems)

on the other hand, on gentoo its installing xchat, then unpacking the /usr/portage/distfiles/xchat*bz2, configure, make, works. debian very easy too with apt-get source and build-dep commands

The silverex build of x-chat for windows is very good, I use it regularly to get books off chat channels (it has pdf, html, etc, so I like it better than project gutenberg). Sure, you get queued, but with x-chat auto-accept is actually safe, not like with mIRC.

Try burnatonce (www.burnatonce.com). It's very simple and to the point. It itself is not open source, but uses open source projects.

My favorite OSS for Windows:

Glest (www.glest.org) - fun RTS game with commercial quality graphics / sounds.
Battle of Wesnoth - fantasy TBS game.
vPod - for loading music on my iPod.
Filezilla - nice FTP client / server
Putty - SSH / Telnet client
XChat - www.silverex.org - yes, it's a GPL windows compilation.
7-zip - Unpack .zip .tar .rar .ace .rpm .deb, etc.
DevCPP - C/C++ compiler IDE.
PDFCreator - self explanitory.
SciTE - I use this instead of Dreamweaver at work.
Audacity - Recording audio (rarely used, but a quality app).
ClamAV - No-bloat antivirus.

On the other hand, the question is about windows. Here's the best freeware list I've found, taken off of the neowin.net forums. These are not guaranteed Clean, but most of them are. Also, you might want to check tinyapps.org, which specializes in SMALL apps (usually not enough space for ad/spyware).
Category 3D Graphics: ----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/CharacterCountF ilterForAValidList----
3Delight Free - http://www.3delight.com/index.htm
Anim8or - http://www.anim8or.com/
Aqsis - http://www.aqsis.com/
Blender - http://www.blender3d.org/
gmax - http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/
Houdini (Free Edition) - http://www.sidefx.com/apprentice/index.html
Maya Personal Learning Ed. - http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services...ple/i ndex.shtml
Now3D - http://digilander.libero.it/giulios/Eng/homepage.h tm
OpenFX - http://www.openfx.org
SOFTIMAGE|XSI EXP - http://www.softimage.com/products/exp/v3/
Toxic - http://www.toxicengine.org/
Wings 3D - http://www.wings3d.com/
Category Anti-Virus:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Char acterCountFilterForAValidList----
AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com/
Avast - http://www.avast.com/i_idt_1018.html
AVG - http://www.grisoft.com/
ClamWin - http://www.clamwin.com/
Category Anti Spyware:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
Ad-aware - http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Bazooka - http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/index.html
Diet K - http://www.dietk.com/
SpyBot Search & Destroy - http://spybot.safer-networking.de/
SpywareBlaster - http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.htm l
SpywareGuard - http://www.wilderssecurity.net/spywareguard.html
Category IRC Clients:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
BersIRC - http://www.bersirc.com/
BitchX - http://bitchx.org/download.php
HydraIRC - http://www.hydrairc.com/
TinyIRC - http://www.tinyirc.net/
XChat - http://www.silverex.org/news/
Category Audio Players:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
1by1 - http://www.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/~pesch
Billy - http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy
CoolPlayer - http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
DeliPlayer. http://www.deliplayer.com/
Foobar 2

I'm personally not so happy the Windows build of X-Chat costs money, so here you go kiddies.

I know this is slightly off topic, but free X-Chat for Windows builds are still available, as one guy is and has been making them. I'm no expert on this sort of topic, but because X-Chat's page declared that anybody could make their own Windows builds freely available, I can't see it as a violation of the GPL.