Scott Sampson

Hav­ing recently switched to Linux (Ubuntu to be spe­cific) from Win­dows, I thought I’d share some of my favour­ite applic­a­tions with you.

Some of these have come from hardened Linux users that I know (Cheers !b, Cheers Ben), whilst oth­ers I’ve dis­covered through trial and error.

Firstly, and prob­ably my favour­ite app, you have Guake. It’s a drop down ter­minal win­dow in the style  of the game quake (hence the name), which is avail­able at the touch of a but­ton (F12 by default), and it also keeps your ses­sion per­sist­ent, which comes in handy. It sup­ports mul­tiple tabs, which again is a handy fea­ture if you do a lot of com­mand line work. My only com­plaint with Guake, is it doesn’t have the option to start auto­mat­ic­ally as default, how­ever this is eas­ily rec­ti­fied by adding a com­mand in the Sessions/Start-up applic­a­tions sec­tion of the Sys­tem > Admin :)

Next, we have Geany. It’s a text editor/developers note­pad, with some pretty handy fea­tures like syn­tax high­light­ing, tag com­ple­tion etc. Small foot­print, fast load­ing, ideal for php, html, python etc.

Next, there’s DeVeDe. It’s an applic­a­tion for cre­at­ing DVD image files from avi/mp4 etc, which can then be burnt using your favour­ite disc writ­ing program.

Next up comes Song­bird. A music player, with integ­rated web browser based on the moz­illa engine. I don’t use the browser per­son­ally, but the music inter­face is by far the best I’ve dis­covered. Clean, cus­tom­is­able and fast load­ing. Infin­itely bet­ter than the default Ubuntu player RhythmBox.

Next up — aMSN. It’s a win­dows live mes­sen­ger clone for linux, with all the fea­tures of WLM (plus many more), in a famil­iar interface.

Finally, we have Screen­lets. Think Win­dows Vista side­bar wid­gets, but with more class and style.

This is by no means an exhaust­ive list, but it’s enough to get any­one star­ted. I’ll be expand­ing this list over the com­ing months as I delve deeper into the world of Ubuntu.