Recently I was browsing through a list of all of the applications that I use, some of them are not very popular but they are very useful. I needed away to cut-down the list and so I decided to list cross-platform applications only. Each of these apps can be run from the major operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux, and they are free to use.

Clementine

Clementine is powerful cross platform music player. It supports a wide range of internet radio stations and it will even stream from Dropbox, SkyDrive (OneDrive) and a few others. Clementine also allows you to manage your iDevices and all for a whopping price of absolutely nothing.

In our tests the application performed very well with a large song library and performance was smooth. Clementine also has a few hidden features for the hackers, you can use a Wii remote to control Clementine (only if to have set it up)

Clementine also has an Android version and remote app, perfect for parties and media centre computers.

Download Clementine (Windows, Linux, Mac)

Plex

Plex is a powerful and fully features media centre for Windows, Linux and Mac. Plex has DLNA and cloud sync built-in for you have easy access to all of your devices and share those great pictures up on the big screen. You might be saying to yourself what sets this media centre apart from others and that is a great question with a great answer. Plex offers you a great mobile streaming option and when I say great I mean great. The buffering is minimal and there is little frame drop.

Plex only has one downside and that is some of the feature will require a subscription to access, but the free features and enough

Download Plex (Windows, Linux, Mac, NAS, Roku, Chromecast)

DigiKam

Linux has a great number of applications for managing and editing pictures and by far one of the oldest and best known is DigiKam. DigiKam offers you a great number of features like creating slideshows and calendars from your collection. DigiKam has the ability to handle RAW images and allow custom tagging of all your images for easy management.

DigiKam also offers you a great deal of plugins that allow you to export to Facebook and a few others. You can also create a KML map of where you took all your pictures.

Download DigiKam (Windows, Linux, Mac)

LibreOffice

Everyone loves free software, especially free software that allows us to do something useful. LibreOffice is the most commonly used office suite  in the world of freedom-ware.  LibreOffice offices allows you to do quite a lot of impressive things. Yon create and edit advanced math formulae and you can even create posters with the awesome powers of LibreDraw. LibreOffice also has a great add-on framework for even further expansion.

Download LibreOffice (Windows, Linux, Mac)

Manager (Accounting)

Manager is not quite a replacement for Quicken, but it does offer some great features. Manager makes invoicing and ledger management a snap. This amazing tool can manage your entire client base and all for free. You can easily calculate  GST or other use one of the many other reports available. If you need a tool to replace Quicken (with a few features missing) then this is the tool for you. Manager is a very small install and is very responsive on the slowest of systems.

Download Manager (Windows, Linux, Mac)

Other Software

If you have any cross-platform tools that you use, let us know in the comments below.