This past weekend, Lifehacker had a nice link to an article on applications for an Ubuntu Newbie. This is all well and good, but there seems to be some kind of misconception about Ubuntu and Linux. And that misconception is that they are not the same thing. People say “Ubuntu” like they are not talking about Linux. I am not sure why this is, but I really want to start by explaining that they Ubuntu and Linux are the same thing. Ubuntu is just a flavor of Linux that strives to be easy to use from a non-geek perspective. Applications that run in Ubuntu will just as easily run in Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, or even SuSE. They might not install the same way but they will run.
With that in mind, I wanted to give everyone a list of some Linux applications that I use on a daily basis that I think are worth mentioning.
Banshee: This little music player application has one flaw, it lacks a browser. So in order to find the music you want you need to use a combination of searching and playlists. This is seriously Banshee’s only downfall and it will be fixed in the next major release. Other than that, this is a nice little music player.
Beagle: Beagle was released just shortly after Google introduced Google Desktop. Beagle was in development for at least a year before that. Beagle is desktop searching written in C# (under Mono). While not recommended for computers with small amounts of RAM, it is a completely awesome search utility. By default it will index music, documents, chat conversations, and emails. Anything it can read will get indexed without fail. If you install the Firefox extension, it will also index the pages your visit and those pages will come back in your searches.
EasyTag: For ID3 tag editing, EasyTag is a great program. It is probably one of the best ID3 tag editors in Linux. While the interface is a bit irrational at times, it does get the job done. Until someone creates a program like Tag & Rename for Linux, this is as good as it gets.
Beryl: Everyone likes eye-candy, including me. Personally I enjoy showing people all the effects Beryl is capable of, especially those that are Vista enthusiests. Beryl just makes your desktop look cool. While it is not for the newbie, there are plenty of sites out there that will walk you through setting it up in Ubuntu with ease. If there are instructions for Ubuntu, you can be sure that there are instructions that are equally as good for other Linux flavours.
Those are just some applications that I use on a regular basis to get me through my day. Linux has many applications available for day to day use that are just as good (and sometimes better) than their Windows equivalents. Do you use Linux and have an application that you can not live without? Tell us about it in the comments.
Michael Koby 