Home > Linux > My Favorite Applications
When switching to a new OS one of the main question is "Will I find equivalent software ?". Now Linux suits around 99% of my needs and I consider myself as a very exigent user...
For me Video Editing was the main problem on Linux and by some aspects illustrates the forces and weaknesses of the Open Source. There are numerous (video or not) projects launched but most of them do not go very far (or progress very slowly) and finally stay and die at alpha status. It would be better to have one or two main projects for important purposes. I think there is a huge spread and so loss of efforts... But I don't blame anybody, I would not have so much skills to do such stuff myself :o) And it will always be better than nothing !
Fortunately there are also numerous software that provide amazing results, sometimes even professional ! Below are the Linux applications that I think worth to use. I often spend a lot time to find relevant applications for any need but this list is far to be exhautive... I tested and I use most of them but there is also a few that I've just heard about. Even if some are designed for KDE, installing relevant libraries allow a use on Gnome. Some of them are not Linux specific and can be found for other OS. Enjoy !
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Image Viewers/Editors & Drawing |
| A Linux desktop can be customized at will so it is attrative to set some Eye-Candy stuff. Basically I use two or three. Conky is a nice light-weight system monitor. GKrellm also does the same but I think it is less pretty despite skins available. I also set Engage which is a nice MacOSX like dock bar. There is a lot of similar stuff but Engage is, for me, the more robust and nice despite if is not easy to configure and understand at the beginning. But once set it rocks ! I also use GDesklets which provide some nice widgets but I had some issues (vanished desklets...) which let me think that it is not fully stable so I use it with moderation.
Engage dock in action...
Like me you will probably be astonished by Synergy, an amazing application that lets you share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers (and screens) very easily and conveniently. |
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| I'm unsure if is it still necessary to present OpenOffice, the complete office suite... Abiword is also nice as text processor, more simple but may be less advanced (largely enough for most of the uses although !). I also like xCHM, a CHM filetype reader, KPDF, a PDF reader, and Cups a virtual printer to create easily PDF files. |
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| Here no surprise, I use ThunderBird and Firefox, the mail client and web browser from the famous Mozilla Project. I don't see any reasons to search for something else for these purposes :o) I also like Liferea, a simple desktop news aggregator, Amule and Frostwire are good "classical" file sharing clients and KTorrent is a nice torrent client application. |
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CD copy is easy and can be done without effort with any burning application (see further), but DVD copy is more difficult. There is numerous apps, graphical or not, easy or not, that lead to different results... Here are those I've tried or simply heard about : dvd::rip, dvddump, dvdbackup, thoggen, k9copy, xdvdshrink, lxdvdrip, VanReD, shrinkta, tkdvd, vamps, growisofs, Molphin, etc... Whew ! :o) Some of them offer only a part of the duplication process (eg only extraction or authoring...) and are called by other ones. In this jungle, I finally chose to use mainly K9Copy which is an easy to use DVD9 to DVD5 backup tool. This is the best (for me) as it allows to get the exact DVD copy with all the stuff around the movie (menus, bonus...). Another interesting is Lxdvdrip which is a "one-step duplicator" ! Unfortunately it manages only main track for now. For burning I use K3b which really excellent. Some other like GnomeBaker and Graveman are good but less powerfull (I think). Brasero is also very promising. |
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| This a category where there is a lot of choices. For now I use Amarok, an excellent "Itunes like" music application with a pretty interface and a lot of (nice !) features : Player (MP3, OGG...), Music Manager (playlists...) , equalizer, automatic covers and lyrics download, radio streaming, podcast... Listen is an Amarok equivalent for Gnome, whic seems currently less advanced but should be promising. Else for basic listening I sometimes use Audacious, a "Winamp like" audio player (which "replace" the aging XMMS). I also use Audio Tag Tool to tag my files, StreamTuner to listen web radios and SoundConverter for... I let you guess ! ;o) |
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Here again there are tons of apps. My favorite video player are VLC and Totem. MPlayer, Xine, Kaffeine and AviPlayer are also useful for me when my first choices have problems with some filetypes. |
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| Here I like : Elisa, a nice Media Center like FrontRow in MacOSX, PeerTV and Televidilo GUI apps that concentrate and facilitate accesses and URLs of TV streams... |
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No need to introduce the famous Gimp even if it is a little bit complex for me. So basic image editor I would prefer something like Krita. Inkscape is very nice for vectorial drawing. For viewers I like Showimg, which has the most close ACDSee behaviour for me, and gThumb. |
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| Here I also include the Windows Managers. There is a lot of them. Most of the time distributions provide by default Gnome and/or KDE. I like the simplicity and clarity of Gnome so this is the window manager that I use most of the time. I also like XFCE which is simple and lightweight but also a powerful and easily configurable environment. Personally I'm not a fan of KDE which is probably the most used desktop environment and one of the most closed to Windows appearance. I think it is a little bit fuzzy (menus...) but there are a lot a applications developped for it and it is easily customizable. However annoucements of next KDE versions (from v4) sound very exicting... Here are some captures of the desktops that I had or have with Ubuntu & Kubuntu :
Else in this category I like : the Apt-Get system which manages my packages very easily with Synaptic which is a GUI for this, Firestarter, a simple firewall, Automatix, an Ubuntu application which automates a lot of install, XBindKeys, to bind some keys combinations to actions, Krename, for bulk renaming of files, SearchMonkey, a powerful file finder, WineHQ, to run some Windows applications on Linux... |
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 Games |
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Else there is now tons of games on Linux... Some of my other favorite games are Frozen Bubble (mythic), Wormux (a Worms like), Gnome Sudoku, GnuBg (BackGammon), Quarry (a boarg games GUI) and gRhino (an Othello/Reversi like), Blobby... |
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I use Cinelerra, a video editor as much as powerful than complex. I tried several times to start to work on it and finally abandoned. After a while I was able to get some results but after lot of configuration work and tests. The interface is far to be user-friendly however this is defintely the best video editor on Linux. Here you will find a more complete description of my use of Cinelerra.
It exists some other free/open source software like Kino (nice, especially for DV capture, but too simple yet to perform advanced editing), Pitivi and some others but also a commercial one, MainActor. After some tests of the trial I found it quite powerful and friendly but also quite unstable which not really expected for a US$200 software... Diva, a very promising project, seems now dead, what a pity... Else Avidemux can be considered as the "Swiss Knife" for video on Linux... The excellent Audacity can perform all the audio editing that I need. |
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Regarding DVD Authoring I use the nice and simple DVDStyler or also QDVDAuthor which is more powerful. Varsha is nice too. Finally there is also KMediaFactory but I did not make extensive tests with it. If you want to embellish your DVD with a slideshow you can create one easily with Slcreator, a GUI for the nice DVD-Slideshow. |
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To partition my disks I tested QtParted and gParted which are quite good and the very efficient Partimage to backup my partitions to a single image file which worked perfectly for me. The only small drawback is that target partition to backup must not be mounted so you have to reboot and run it from a live CD (but I think it is a minor problem). Partimage is available on several Live CD compilations.
Else I prefer Grub as boot loader and I like GAG as (graphical) boot manager. |
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| Linux, and any *nix OS in general, offers many possibilities for development (languages & environments). I mainly use : Bash Shell Script in simple text editor, Lazarus (RAD with Free Pascal ie a Delphi-Like), HTML with BlueFish (sometimes QuantaPlus or Nvu instead), PyGTK which is Python + GTK (GUI created with Glade)... For website development I use the very nice and efficient XAMPP, a LAMP (Linux - Apache - MySQL - PHP) package. For examples please see My Scripts page (under construction). |
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