Alternatives to resource hungry programs

Who better at a job, to use a tool, than a man who created the tool right? WRONG! I have seen many cases of this.

>First off, is Adobe's acrobat reader. The resource hungry proggie does little to enhance readability, and takes long times to load images within a PDF file. Moreover, the reader doesnt even provide a PDF "document printer", that other open source proggies provide, which enable users to "print" into PDF files from any other format. I stumbled on a software called "Foxit Reader". Better than Acrobat Id say...

>This isnt an isolated case. I have found OpenOffice .org to be much more flexible than MS office, simply because it is free, and platform independent. So, I dont have to use an emulator on a virtual machine within my linux box to get the same environment.

>Adobes' Photoshop finds a worthy alternative in Gimp, which comes bundled with most Linux distros these days. Its free, as in freedom :) in addition to being very fast, and responsive..


So, tell me brothers and sisters of cyberspace, would you go about using a proggie that hogs up all of your memory, and is not free, as opposed to open source, FREE alternatives that are both fast, and compatible with their paid rivals' file formats?