Linux Know-How provides a collection of introductory texts on often needed Linux skills.


Best Linux Applications

Here is my own (totally unbiased) ranking of Linux applications.

The scores are from 10 to 0, where: 10 = perfect, 9 = excellent, 8 = very good, 7 = good, 6 = perfectly usable, 5 = usable, 4 = almost usable, 3 = can use it if I have to, 2 = still fundamentally lacking, 1 = unusable but promising, 0 = started, that's the best we have. X = cross platform application.



Our first choice

Score

Shortcommings

Alternative

Score

Word processor, full featured

oowriter


7X

slow speed, weirdness with spellchecking, ugly equations, poor or no cut-paste to/from other application, keyboard shortcuts incompatiblities with KDE, hangs when trying to open really complicated word form, on MS Windows, makes itself a default application for opening *.doc even if MS Word is installed, populates my home directory with too many subdirectories and files that apear of no use to me.

kwrite

2

Word processor, light-weight

abiword

6X


-


Text editor (GUI)

kate

8


who needs another one?


Text editor (text mode)

pico

8


nano

5

Web browser (GUI)

mozilla

8X

Sometimes ugly or overlapping fonts appear at some screen magnifications

konqueror

6

Emailer (GUI)

mozilla mail

8X


kmail

8

File manager

konqueror

8




Desktop environment

kde

8


gnome

6

Spreadsheet

oocalc

5X

Poor x-y graphs, very slow with larger spreadsheets, limited number of rows, lack of usable array functions (QuattroPro like) for ease of editing and smaller file size,  problems with importing of ASCII delimited files.

gnumeric

5

Bitmap graphics editor

gimp

7

Complicated to use. Way too many separate pannels, cannot find the icon I need.



Simple sketch

oodraw

6X




CD writer

xcdroast  (GUI to cdrecord)

7



7

Disk duplicator (text mode)

cdrao

8

A GUI would be nice



music player (mp3, etc)

xmms

8

GUI is tiny and ugly



video player (mpeg, etc)

xine

8




cad (2D)

qcad

4X

Supports only *.dxf files (no *.dwg).  Some elements from drawings converted from AutoCad are misplaced or misaligned.  Generally still lacking features.




Last Update: 2010-12-16