I am writing this out of three simple reasons:

- architecture students won't have the money to buy professional software. They are kind of sick of educational versions printing their logo over their presentations.

- I support Open Source software, as it permits on a larger scale to advance software corresponding to the actual needs of users, and it has generally scripting plugins which permit personalization of your software.

- I don't like the monopol position of certain software producers.


You have to know though, that Open Source Software can have buggy plugins, that there is no garanty it will actually work, and you don't have professional help lines or similar services. This means, that if you are working on large scale commercial projects, using Open Source software can reveal beeing risky. But as student its quite perfect. Following online discussion boards permits you to get help, understand the functioning of your software, and even be helpful in designing the next release, whitout knowing how to program. It is not a miracle solution, its just quite helpful.

Here is my software suite, suitable for architects, designers and alike. I am a PC user, but these programs exist in MacOS and Linux versions.

Office suite:

OpenOffice, including Word processor, Table calculator, Presentation maker, ... (like Office)
Works very fine. Sometimes scaling, moving pictures can become an aim the control point exercise, but it finally will work.

Graphic suite:

The Gimp, photo editor (like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro)
The Gimp I don't like so much, but I'm not very used to it, seems powerful though, but won't make happy a hardcore Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro user.

Inkscape, vector drawing utility (like Illustrator, Corel Draw)
It's very clean, one look at the interface and you know everything. Very stable. The style functions are though missing, but the overall functionality is great. I like the easy aproach.

Scribus, large scale formating tool (like inDesign, PageMaker...)
Lots of functions, it is even more flexible than professional products. Impressive.

Blender, 3D modelling and rendering tool (like Cinema 4D, 3DS)
Here's an issue. It's, well quite powerful. But the interface approach is tricky, even if it is quite fast in the end, you really have to work your way into it, meaning tutorials, etc... The community is very helpful and on forums you get answers in a day, even tricky ones. It is python scriptable which is quite interesting, but the Blender API is very confusing. It remains the best piece of open software out there in its category. With a little bit of practice you might get very neat results. It gets an overall "confusing" label.

Qcad, 2D cad drawing tool (like good old Autocad)
12€... It's not free. BUT, you get garanties from the seller. I like it. It's a simple CAD drawer, no fancy modelling and parametric stuff though. You can create and run scripts. You have blocks and libraries, a command line and context menus. I find it quite fast and on my 2 computers very stable. Exports directly as pdf and common dxf, dwg formats.