[Definitive] Linux "Killer" Apps (2006)

[mitch00]

Well I’ve often come across such questions in the Linux forums requesting advice about certain apps, what’s best for such and such… I always end up seeing majority of the responses being the same types of replies recommending the same applications. I made a (quick) glance at the Completed HowTo’s and FAQs and didn’t see anything on first site, so I decided to make the thread myself.

I will try to just gather up the main apps, and use wikipedia definitions to describe them (more accurate and less time consuming). Also, I will try to only list Free Software and not Proprietary.

I will try to maintain and update the list as often as allows. Here it goes!

Audio Players:

iTunes style:

Amarok: Amarok (formerly known as amaroK) is a free software music player for GNU/Linux and other varieties of Unix. It makes use of core components from the KDE desktop environment, but is released independently of the central KDE release cycle, and is developed with a desktop-agnostic policy. It has been voted the most popular audio-playing application for Linux on several occasions.

Exaile: Exaile is a free software audio player for GNU/Linux operating systems, that aims to be similar to KDE's Amarok, but based on the GTK+ toolkit instead of the Qt toolkit Amarok uses. It is written using pygtk (previously wxPython). It also uses the GStreamer multimedia platform for audio playback, and Mutagen for reading and writing track metadata.

Banshee: Banshee is an audio player for GNU/Linux operating systems, that uses Mono and Gtk#. It also uses the Helix and GStreamer multimedia platforms to play, encode, and decode Oggs, MP3s, and other formats. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and play and synchronize music with iPods. Additionally, it is capable of reporting played songs to a user's Last.fm playlist. Banshee is free software, licensed under the MIT License.

Rhythmbox: Rhythmbox is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital music. Originally inspired by Apple's iTunes, it is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop, and uses the GStreamer media framework. It is currently under active development.

Quod Libet: Quod Libet is a GTK+-based audio player application written using the Python programming language. Its main design goal is to provide a way for users to organize their music library however they want. It includes a tag editor (also available separately as Ex Falso) which can alter the metadata of groups of files. Playlists can be constructed based on regular expressions. It can support very large music libraries relative to other audio players.

Listen: Listen, a music management and playback for GNOME

Winamp Style:

XMMS: The X Multimedia System (XMMS) is a free software audio player very similar to Winamp, that runs on many Unix-like operating systems.

BMP: The Beep Media Player (BMP) is a free audio player, based on the XMMS multimedia player. The BMP is mainly a port of XMMS to GTK+ 2 and, as such, integrates better with the look and feel of more recent versions of the GNOME desktop environment. Like XMMS, BMP looks like Winamp and even supports Winamp (and XMMS) skins. BMP supports most of the audio file formats supported by XMMS, since the main difference between input plugins used in both players is the graphical widget toolkit used for 'About' and configuration dialog boxes. However, BMP cannot directly use all XMMS plugins.

Audacious: Audacious is a free software media player for Linux or Linux based systems. It is a fork of Beep Media Player 0.9.7.1. William "nenolod" Pit**** decided to fork BMP after the original development team announced that they were stopping development, in order to create a next-gen version, BMPx.

‎‏BMPx: BMPx is the successor to the Beep Media Player. BMPx is a free and open-source media player for most modern Unix Operating Systems.

Other Style

Sonata: Sonata is a lightweight GTK+ music client for the Music Player Daemon (MPD). It aims to be efficient (no toolbar, main menu, or statusbar), user-friendly, and clean.

Muine: Muine is an audio player for the GNOME desktop environment which runs on Linux, Solaris, BSD and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems. Muine is written in C# using Mono and Gtk#. The default backend is GStreamer framework but Muine can also use xine libraries.

KMP: KMP is an MPD client that uses the QT GUI toolkit so it will comfortably fit in with your KDE desktop, although only QT is required.

GMPC: GMPC is a frontend for the mpd (Music Player Daemon). It's focused on being fast and easy to use, while still making optimal use of all the functions in mpd.

Pygmy: Pygmy stands for Python GTK+ MPD player.

Pymp'd: An iTunes style MPD client, written in Python, with PyGTK.

Image Editors and Viewers:

GIMP: The GNU Image Manipulation Program or just GIMP is a free software raster image editor. It also has some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

F-Spot: F-Spot is a photograph management application, designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop.

Krita: Krita is the bitmap graphics editor software included with the KDE based KOffice suite. Designed to be both a painting application and a photo editor, Krita is Free Software and distributed under GNU General Public License.

Eye of Gnome: Eye of GNOME is a simplistic image viewer for the GNOME desktop environment. Unlike many other programs that call themselves image viewers, Eye of GNOME will only view images. It does, however, provide basic effects for improved viewing. These include zooming, full screen, rotation, and transparent image background control.

GQview: GQview is a free software image viewer created by John Ellis using the GTK+ toolkit, designed to run on the X Window System. For MS Windows, unofficial Cygwin and native win32 ports are also available.

Fluttr: Clutter based Flickr photo viewer.

Feh: Feh is an image viewer at heart, though it does other cool stuff.

digiKam: digiKam is a digital photo management application for the KDE desktop environment. It supports all major image formats, and can organize collections of photographs in directory-based albums, by date, or with tags. Users can also add comments and a rating to their images, search through them and save searches as 'smart folders'.

Video:

MPlayer: MPlayer is well known for its wide format support and is known to support more multimedia formats than any other player. In addition to its wide range of supported formats MPlayer can save streamed content to a file. Also, a companion program, the movie encoder MEncoder, can take an input stream or file and transcode it into several different output formats, optionally applying various transforms along the way.

VLC: VLC media player (initially VideoLAN Client) is a media player from the VideoLAN project. It supports many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs and various streaming protocols.

Xine: Xine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. It can play CDs, DVDs, and Video CDs, as well as common computer multimedia formats like AVI, WMV, MOV, MP3, FLAC, Theora, Speex, and Vorbis.

Ogle: Ogle is a free software DVD player for Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems; originally developed in 1999 by a few students at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. It was the first open source DVD player to support DVD menus, but it does not play any multimedia content except DVDs. Ogle supports playing CSS encrypted DVDs. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License

Note: With the exception of Ogle, these are all full featured media players that are also used as backends for many other players such as Totem, Kaffeine and others.

Kino: Kino is a free software, GTK+-based non-linear digital video editor. Its vision is: "Easy and reliable DV editing for the Linux desktop with export to many usable formats."

Avidemux: Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities.

LiVES: LiVES began in 2002 as the Linux Video Editing System. Since it now runs on more operating systems, LiVES is a Video Editing System. It is designed to be simple to use, yet powerful. It is small in size, yet it has many advanced features.

Cinelerra: Cinelerra is a free non-linear video editing system for the GNU/Linux operating system. It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

K9copy: K9copy is a DVD authoring program for the Linux operating system. It is generally seen as the Linux equivalent of the Windows-based DVD Shrink, as it shrinks a DVD-9 DVD down to a DVD-5 DVD, allowing for movies on dual layer DVDs to be shrunk down in order to fit on a single layer DVD.

MythTV: MythTV is a Linux application that turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a digital video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or Home Theater Personal Computer. MythTV is free software licensed under the GPL.

FreeVo: Freevo is a GPL open source application for Linux and BSD designed to run a homemade personal video recorder.

Kdenlive: Kdenlive! (pronounced Kay-den-live) is a Non-Linear Video Editing Suite for KDE. It is released under the GNU Public License. The project was initially started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of developpers. Kdenlive uses MLT as it's video rendering engine to display and manipulate video clips.

DeVeDe: DeVeDe is a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by Mplayer. The big advantage over other utilites is that it only needs Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, VCDImager and MKisofs (well, and Python 2.4, PyGTK and PyGlade), so its dependencies are really small.

Web Browsers:

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers.

SeaMonkey: SeaMonkey is a free, open source, and cross-platform Internet suite that is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite.

Galeon: Galeon is a web browser for GNOME based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine. Galeon's developer's self-declared mission was to deliver "the web and only the web.

Epiphany: Epiphany is a web browser for the GNOME computer desktop. It is a descendant of Galeon.

Konqueror: Konqueror is a file manager, web browser and file viewer, which was developed as part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) by volunteers and runs on most Unix-like operating systems.

Swiftfox: Swiftfox is a web browser offshoot of Mozilla Firefox. It is optimized for several architectures, and is available for Linux only.

Lynx: Lynx is a text-only Web browser and Internet Gopher client for use on cursor-addressable, character cell terminals.

Email Clients:

Evolution: Evolution is the official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. It combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions. It has been an official part of GNOME since version 2.8 in September 2004.

Sylpheed Claws: Sylpheed is an e-mail and news client based on the GTK+ library. It offers quick response, easy configuration and an abundance of features.

Mozilla Thunderbird: Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation.

Balsa: Balsa is an e-mail client that runs on GNU/Linux under the GNOME user interface system. Balsa has a graphical front end, support for MIME attachments coming and going, directly supports POP3 and IMAP protocols. It has a spell checker and direct support for PGP and GPG for encryption. It has some basic filtering capabilities, and natively supports several e-mail storage protocols. It also has some internationalization support, including Japanese fonts.

KMail: KMail is the e-mail client of the KDE Desktop Environment.

Office Apps:

Openoffice.org: OpenOffice.org is a free and open source office suite, including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing and database components.

AbiWord: AbiWord is a Free Software word processor licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Gnumeric: Gnumeric is a free spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME desktop.

KOffice: KOffice is an office suite for the K Desktop Environment (KDE).

GnuCash: GnuCash is a Free Software double-entry book-keeping personal finance system. It was initially aimed at developing capabilities similar to Intuit's Quicken application, but also has features for small business accounting.

Chat:

Pidgin: Pidgin (formerly Gaim) is a multi-platform instant messaging client that supports many commonly used instant messaging systems. Gaim is free software available under the GNU General Public License.

Kopete: Kopete is a multi-protocol, free software instant messaging client supporting Jabber, Google Talk, ICQ, AIM, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, IRC, .NET Messenger Service, SMS, and Yahoo! Messenger. Although it can run in numerous environments, it was designed for and integrates with the KDE desktop environment.

aMSN: aMSN is an MSN Messenger clone licensed under the GPL. Its main objective is to assist users who are new to the Linux operating system keep in contact with those who use the Microsoft program which is available only on Windows and Macintosh. To achieve this objective, aMSN attempts to emulate the look and feel of MSN Messenger, and supports many of its features.

Mercury: Mercury Messenger is an instant messaging program written in Java for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. It connects to the Windows Live Messenger (Formally MSN Messenger) and Jabber protocols.

X-Chat: X-Chat, commonly written XChat or xchat, is one of the most popular IRC clients for Unix-like systems.

Konversation: Konversation is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Konversation is currently maintained in the KDE Extragear module, which means that it has its own (KDE independent) release cycle. It provides modern features like multiserver support, IPv6, SSL and UTF-8, and is scriptable using shell scripts.

Psi: Psi is a GPLed instant messaging client for the Jabber (XMPP) protocol which uses the Qt toolkit. It runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X. Ready-to-install RPM and deb packages are available for many Linux distributions. Successful ports of Psi were reported for FreeBSD and Sun Solaris operating systems. Due to Psi's free/open-source nature, several private (unofficial) builds have appeared, which usually contain features that will appear in future official Psi versions.

Monkey Messenger: Monkey Messenger is an open source (MIT licensed) MSN client written using the MONO framework, gtk+ and the MSNPSharp library.

Irssi: Irssi is an IRC client program originally written by Timo Sirainen, and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License in Jan 1999. It is written in the C programming language and in normal operation uses a text-mode user interface.

File Transfer:

BitTorrent: BitTorrent is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution client application, its related file sharing protocol, and a company that maintains these, BitTorrent Inc., all of which were created by programmer Bram Cohen.

Azureus: Azureus is a Java based BitTorrent client, with support for I2P and Tor anonymous communication protocols.

BitTornado: BitTornado is a BitTorrent client. It is the successor of Shad0w's Experimental Client, and is programmed by the same person.

Transmission: Transmission is a free, lightweight BitTorrent client. It features a simple, intuitive interface on top on an efficient, cross-platform back-end.

aMule: aMule is a peer-to-peer file sharing application that works with the eDonkey2000 network and the Kad Network, but offers more features than the standard eDonkey client, including support for Kademlia.

KTorrent: KTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in C++ for KDE using the Qt user interface toolkit. It is maintained in the KDE Extragear.

FrostWire: FrostWire is an open-source peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program. It uses the Gnutella network and is heavily based on the better-known LimeWire program.

gFTP: gFTP is a free/open source multithreaded FTP client. It is most used on Unix-like systems, but it can be used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It includes both a GUI (which utilizes the GTK+) and a command-line interface. gFTP is released under the terms of the GPL and has been translated into 41 languages.

MLDonkey: MLDonkey is an open source, free software multi-network peer-to-peer application. It is also the name of the peer-to-peer overlay network that the MLDonkey uses. Originally a Linux client for the eDonkey protocol, it now runs on many flavors of Unix-like, Mac OS X, Windows and MorphOS and supports numerous peer-to-peer protocols.

Deluge: Deluge is a BitTorrent client, created using Python and GTK+ (through PyGTK). Deluge is intended to bring a native, full-featured client to Linux GTK desktop environments such as GNOME and XFCE. An official Windows port is also in development. The program uses the libtorrent C++ library, through the python-libtorrent bindings for Python.

Kasablanca: Kasablanca is an FTP/FXP/FTPS client program using the Trolltech QT toolkit and integrating with the K Desktop Environment (KDE).

FileZilla: FileZilla Client is a free, open source, cross-platform FTP client. Binaries are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. It supports FTP, SFTP, and FTPS (FTP over SSL/TLS). As of August 10, 2007, it was the 12th most popular download of all time from SourceForge.net

File Managers:

Konqueror: Konqueror is a file manager, web browser and file viewer, which was developed as part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) by volunteers and runs on most Unix-like operating systems.

Nautilus: Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. The name is a play on words, evoking the image of a nautilus shell to represent an operating system shell.

Thunar: Thunar is the name of the project dedicated at developing a new file manager to replace the aging xffm in the 4.4 branch of the Xfce Desktop Environment. The interface is very similar to the Gnome file manager Nautilus.

xffm*: xffm is the previous default file manager in the Xfce Desktop Environment. *My own definition, none available on Wikipedia.

ROX Filer*: The ROX Filer is a lightweight File Manager, it is the core of the ROX desktop. *My own definition, none available on Wikipedia.

Dolphin: Dolphin is not intended to be a competitor to Konqueror, the default KDE file manager: Konqueror acts as universal viewer being able to show HTML pages, text documents, directories and a lot more, whereas Dolphin focuses on being only a file manager. This approach allows to optimize the user interface for the task of file management.

PCManFM: An extremly fast and lightweight file manager which features tabbed browsing and user-friendly interface.

Burning Apps:

K3B: K3b is a free software CD and DVD authoring application for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems designed for the K Desktop Environment.

GnomeBaker: GnomeBaker is a free CD/DVD authoring application for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It is part of the GNOME desktop environment.

Graveman: Graveman is a free CD burning tool for Linux. It is technically a front-end for cdrecord, mkisofs, readcd, sox, flac, dvd+rw-format, dvd+rw-tools and cdrdao.

Desktop Search:

Beagle: Beagle is a search tool for Linux, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists in a similar way to Spotlight in Mac OS X, or Google Desktop under Microsoft Windows.

Kerry*: Kerry is the KDE Front End for Beagle. *My own definition, none available on Wikipedia.

Tracker: Tracker Desktop Search tool is a File indexer and Search tool

Editors:

Gedit: Gedit is a free software, UTF-8 compatible text editor for the GNOME desktop environment. It is designed to have a clean, simple interface inspired by the ideals of the GNOME project.

KWrite: KWrite is a lightweight text editor for the K Desktop Environment (KDE).

Leafpad: Leafpad is a text editor written in GTK2. It focuses on being simple and lightweight.

Bluefish: Bluefish is an open source text editor for POSIX-conforming operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X. Its use is suitable for many programming and markup languages, with particular focus on their use for web development.

Nvu: Nvu is a WYSIWYG HTML editor, based on the Composer component of Mozilla Application Suite. It is intended to be an open source equivalent to proprietary software like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver and is one of the primary WYSIWYG editors for Linux. Nvu is designed to be easy for non-technical computer users. Knowledge of HTML or CSS is not required.

jEdit: jEdit is a text editor for programmers available under the GNU General Public License. jEdit is written in Java and runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and a number of other operating systems. There are dozens of plug-ins for numerous application areas. Syntax highlighting is natively supported for over 130 file formats (support for additional formats can be added manually using XML files). jEdit supports UTF-8 and many other encodings. jEdit is highly customizable and can be extended with macros written in BeanShell, Jython, JavaScript and some other scripting languages.

Quanta Plus: Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment. The vision with Quanta has always been to start with the best architectural foundations, design for efficient and natural use and enable maximal user extensibility. We recognize that we don't have the resources to do everything we would like to so our target is to make it easy for you to help make this the best community based desktop application anywhere. Pretty much everything in Quanta is designed so you can extend it. Even the way it handles XML DTDs is based on XML files you can edit. You can even import DTDs, write scripts to manage editor contents, visually create dialogs for your scripts and assign script actions to nearly any file operation in a project. You can even look at and communicate with a wide range of what happens inside Quanta using DCOP.

Gobby: Gobby is a free software collaborative real-time editor available on Windows and Unix-like platforms. (It runs on Mac OS X using Apple's X11.app). It was initially released in June 2005 by the 0x539 dev group. It features a client-server architecture which supports multiple documents in one session, document synchronisation on request, password protection and an IRC-like chat for communication. Users could choose a colour to highlight the text they have written in a document. Gobby is fully Unicode-aware, provides syntax highlighting for most programming languages and has basic Zeroconf support.

Other:

Tomboy: Tomboy is an open source desktop note-taking application for Unix-like systems written in C# for Mono and Gtk#. Tomboy is known as being a part of the GNOME desktop environment.[1] It uses a Wiki-like linking system to connect notes together.

gDesklets: gDesklets is a GNOME program which provides the architecture for small applets (desktop widgets) to be placed on top of the user's desktop. This program is similar to SuperKaramba for KDE, Yahoo! Widget Engine for Windows Mac OS X, DesktopX for Windows, and Dashboard for Mac OS X. The applets placed on the desktop are meant to be quick ways for the user to retrieve information and not get in the way of normal activity.

SuperKaramba: SuperKaramba is a tool that allows one to easily create interactive eye-candy on a KDE desktop. Currently, only Linux is officially supported, although it also works well on FreeBSD and NetBSD. This program is similar to gDesklets for GNOME.

Wine: The Wine project aims to allow a PC running a Unix-like operating system and the X Window System to execute programs originally written for Microsoft Windows. Alternately, those wishing to port a Windows application to a Unix-like system can compile it against the Wine libraries. The name 'Wine' derives from the recursive acronym "Wine Is Not an Emulator".

GKrellM: GKrellM is a computer program based on the GTK+ toolkit that creates a single process stack of system monitors. It can be used to monitor the status of CPUs, main memory, hard disks, network interfaces, local and remote mailboxes, and many other things. Plugins are available for a multitude of tasks, e.g. controlling the XMMS media player or a SETI@home client from within the stacked monitor. GKrellM has become popular among users of GNU/Linux and *BSD systems. It comes in many different themes and uses small amount of RAM but it's not as extensible as other simillar programs like gDesklets are.

VirtualBox: VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Avant-Windows-Navigator: Avant Window Navgator (Awn) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen (in all its composited-goodness) tracking open windows.

Screen: Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells).

Easy Crypt: Easy Crypt is simply a Graphical GUI of the simplest nature for the Security Command Line product TrueCrypt

Gnome Launch Box: Gnome-Launch Box is generally an application launcher. It's very influenced by Quicksilver for Mac OSX.

Gnome-Do: GNOME Do (also known as simply Do) is a popular free application launcher for Linux by David Siegel [1]. Unlike other application launchers, it not only allows you to search for applications and files but it also allows you to specify actions to perform on search results by providing instantaneous, action-oriented search results that adapt to reflect user habits and preferences. While it is designed primarily for the GNOME desktop, it works in other desktop environments, such as KDE. GNOME Do was inspired by Quicksilver for Mac OS X, and GNOME Launch Box.

Vector Illustration

Inkscape: Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape's main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development

Desktop Publishing

Scribus: Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.

Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

News Aggregators

Liferea: Liferea is an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader, a news aggregator for online news feeds. It supports a number of different feed formats including RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, and OPML.

Akregator: Akregator is an open source news aggregator for KDE, an open source desktop environment primarily used on Unix systems. It supports both RSS and Atom. Feeds can be sorted into categories. Akregator will aggregate all feeds in a particular category into a single list of new entries so that, for example, all news in the category "Politics" can be shown in one list. It has an incremental search feature for the titles of all the entries in its database.

YARSSR: Yet Another RSS Reader is an RSS aggregator and reader that displays its results in the GNOME notification area. To view the contents of the feed just click the menu-item and it will launch in your favorite browser. It is written in Perl and uses gtk2-perl for it's interface.

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Notes: While all of these programs are for Linux, different ways of obtaining them differ from distro to distro. Although the package formats differ (.deb, .rpm, .tgz, etc.) they are still the same program and will work on whatever distro you choose.

If anyone would like to add something just post it and I'll add it to the original post.

edit: For anyone who cares, I'm cleaning up this entire post to make it a little cleaner and easier to understand. Please be patient it's taking a while and I don't have much free time. :)

Edited September 21, 2008 by mitch00

[chavo]

Yeah, you should add Konversation. It's a KDE IRC client and it rocks, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konversation.

[karma_police]

Vector Illustration

Inkscape: Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.

Inkscape's main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development

http://www.inkscape.org/

Desktop Publishing

Scribus: Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.

Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

http://www.scribus.net/

[metal_dragen Veteran]

You should change the File Transfer heading to File Sharing. File transfer, at least to me, implies FTP, SFTP, etc.

[tkjp]

Kaffeine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffeine)

Kaffeine is a full featured media player for UNIX(-like) machines running the KDE (K Desktop Environment).

By default it uses xine-lib as the backend. It can also use KPlayer if installed. With the release of version .7 the developers made a GStreamer KPart, therefore it now supports the 3 most used media frameworks for Linux. Because of those 3 media frameworks it is able to play nearly every known audio and video format, however some may only be played with proprietary codecs.

Features include streaming, DVB, DVD, Video CD and CD audio.

Banshee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banshee_(music_player))

Banshee is an audio player for GNU/Linux operating systems, that uses Mono and Gtk#. It also uses the Helix and GStreamer multimedia platforms to play, encode, and decode Oggs, MP3s, and other formats. Banshee can play and import audio CDs and play and synchronize music with iPods. Additionally, it is capable of reporting played songs to a user's Last.fm playlist. Banshee is free software, licensed under the MIT License.

KTorrent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KTorrent)

KTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in C++ for KDE using the Qt user interface toolkit. It is maintained in the KDE Extragear.

jEdit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JEdit)

jEdit is a text editor for programmers available under the GNU General Public License. jEdit is written in Java and runs on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and a number of other operating systems. There are dozens of plug-ins for numerous application areas. Syntax highlighting is natively supported for over 130 file formats (support for additional formats can be added manually using XML files). jEdit supports UTF-8 and many other encodings.

jEdit is highly customizable and can be extended with macros written in BeanShell, Jython, JavaScript and some other scripting languages.

Quanta Plus (http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/)

Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment. The vision with Quanta has always been to start with the best architectural foundations, design for efficient and natural use and enable maximal user extensibility. We recognize that we don't have the resources to do everything we would like to so our target is to make it easy for you to help make this the best community based desktop application anywhere. Pretty much everything in Quanta is designed so you can extend it. Even the way it handles XML DTDs is based on XML files you can edit. You can even import DTDs, write scripts to manage editor contents, visually create dialogs for your scripts and assign script actions to nearly any file operation in a project. You can even look at and communicate with a wide range of what happens inside Quanta using DCOP.

Linux DC+ (http://linuxdcpp.berlios.de/articles.php?um=index)

FrostWire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrostWire)

FrostWire is an open-source peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program. It uses the Gnutella network and is heavily based on the better-known LimeWire program.

Psi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psi_%28instant_messenger%29)

Psi is a GPLed instant messaging client for the Jabber (XMPP) protocol which uses the Qt toolkit. It runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X. Ready-to-install RPM and deb packages are available for many Linux distributions. Successful ports of Psi were reported for FreeBSD and Sun Solaris operating systems. Due to Psi's free/open-source nature, several private (unofficial) builds have appeared, which usually contain features that will appear in future official Psi versions.

I hope that all of software listed above is free. And i think that there is a plenty of other software...

Edited August 26, 2006 by Thalassinus

[Barney T. Administrators]

Nice work, Mitch! :yes:

I also like Gkrellm as a monitoring utility (along with GDesklets)!

Barney

[tkjp]

I forgot Opera in previous post :p

Opera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser))

Opera is an Internet suite which handles common internet-related tasks, including visiting web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, and online chat.

Opera is developed by Opera Software, based in Oslo, Norway. It runs on a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, FreeBSD and Linux systems. It is also used in mobile phones, smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants, game consoles and interactive televisions. Technology from Opera is also licensed by other companies for use in such products as Adobe Creative Suite.

Lynx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)) - text based browser, this is not very useful for desktop systems, but anyway...

Lynx is a text-only Web browser and Internet Gopher client for use on cursor-addressable, character cell terminals.

Skype (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype)

Skype (pronounced to rhyme with "type") is a proprietary peer-to-peer Internet telephony (VoIP) network founded by the entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstr?m and Janus Friis, also founders of the file sharing application Kazaa. It competes against existing open VoIP protocols such as SIP, IAX, and H.323. The Skype Group, acquired by eBay in October 2005, is headquartered in Luxembourg, with offices in London and Tallinn. It has experienced rapid growth in both popular usage and software development since launch, both of its free and its paid services.

mitch00, btw, i like your idea about this thread:))

Edited August 26, 2006 by Thalassinus

[mitch00]

Thalassinus I'm going to add those, with the exception of Opera and Skype. I considered the point for a while and decided not to include propietary software. Banshee is already included in the list.

[tkjp]

Sorry, I didn't see Banshee on the list.

[tmahmood]

I hope this fits here

Nautilus Actions Configuration

Lets you add custom action to File browser menu. Nautilus actions is an extension for Nautilus, the GNOME file manager. It allows the configuration of programs to be launched on files selected in the Nautilus interface

Open Terminal here is another useful Extension...

[mitch00]

No problem Thalassinus, no harm done ;)

tmahmod I'm sorry I won't be adding those, I'm trying to keep this a list of applications only and not extensions to other apps. Have to draw the line somewhere I guess, otherwise I'd have to start listing all the cool gDesklets and SuperKaramba widgets etc.

[tkjp]

Akregator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akregator)

Akregator is an open source news aggregator for KDE, an open source desktop environment primarily used on Unix systems. It supports both RSS and Atom. Feeds can be sorted into categories. Akregator will aggregate all feeds in a particular category into a single list of new entries so that, for example, all news in the category "Politics" can be shown in one list. It has an incremental search feature for the titles of all the entries in its database.

MLDonkey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLDonkey)

MLDonkey is an open source, free software multi-network peer-to-peer application. It is also the name of the peer-to-peer overlay network that the MLDonkey uses. Originally a Linux client for the eDonkey protocol, it now runs on many flavors of Unix-like, Mac OS X, Windows and MorphOS and supports numerous peer-to-peer protocols.

Akregator is my favourite RSS reader and I have seen that it's quite popular :)

MLDonkey, another p2p app.

[The_Napster]

Thank you so much for this thread! Exactly what ive been searching for! :)

[red.]

nice guide! i think it should be pinned.

[vertex]

I have a small addition to your "file transfer" section. A torrent-client called Deluge.

[Barney T. Administrators]

nice guide! i think it should be pinned.

Excellent idea. Pinned

[mitch00]

Updated. my first pinned thread. yay!

[Barney T. Administrators]

Updated. my first pinned thread. yay!

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy! :yes:

[mitch00]

:blush: Thanks barney

[Omegatron]

Add K9copy is DVD Shrink replacement on Linux.. and sure libdvdcss (do the same as AnyDVD)

[chezy666]

MythTV, FreeVO and the like for HTPC, wine for Games.

[hopecon]

Misc.

Avant-Windows-Navigator.

Avant Window Navgator (Awn) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen (in all its composited-goodness) tracking open windows.

http://code.google.com/p/avant-window-navigator/

Gnome-Launch-Box

Launch Box is generally an application launcher. It's very influenced by Quicksilver for Mac OSX. Remember that this is only a first release so don't get your hopes up too much. Launch Box is written for the GNOME 2.10 platform and depends on GTK+ 2.6, evolution-data-server 1.2 and gnome-menus. These are currently hard dependencies but the plan is to split out the backends into different optional backends.

http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gnome-launch-box

Audio Player

Listen

Listen, a music management and playback for GNOME

http://www.listen-project.org/

Virtualization

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

http://www.virtualbox.org/

[mitch00]

Updated

[TenebraruM]

A linux software list without so much as a mention of Emacs?

[gigapixels Veteran]

A linux software list without so much as a mention of Emacs?

Well that's practically standard with most popular distros (at least as far as I've seen).