Hi guys,

I'm slowly but surely starting to work on an article that will list the best desktop Linux applications.

So what your favorite and most useful desktop Linux apps? Feel free to list as many as you want. I will take a peek and maybe add them to the article I'm working on.

I may do some follow ups that break things down into categories. But I thought I'd start with one article that lists the best Linux desktop applications across all categories.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and suggestions. B-)

Firefox and Thunderbird, obviously.

I also use Gimp, Pidgin, Kompozer, FileZilla, Google Earth, FlightGear flight simulator, VirtualBox, and FreeCiv on a pretty regular basis. OpenOffice for the little word processing or spreadsheet work I have to do.

My finances are done on (commercial) software called MoneyDance. They have binaries for Linux, Windows, and Mac. Good stuff - like Quicken with all the videos and ads cut out of it, and pretty reasonably priced.

Most of the rest of what I do is on web apps any more, or on my Blackberry.

Nautilus(file manager), Firefox, Chromium browser, VMWare Player, Gnumeric, K3B, Gthumb, GnuCash, KMplayer. Neverball/Neverputt, Aisle Riot Solitare(for playing Backbone), PokerTH, SDLMame, DOSBox.

I like Seamonkey as my overall Internet presence - useful for Web browsing, Email, News groups, IRC Chat, and Web Page Composing. If I want something smaller, I like Midori and Google Chrome.

For casual text editing, just fast, simple GUI editing, Leafpad is fine. An equally simple editor at the console is nano. For more full featured editing I use both of the classics, Vi and GNU Emacs, though GNU Emacs is what I live in if I am writing scripts or anything of the sort.

When multimedia comes into play, I use K3B to burn CDs and DVDs, mostly to test distributions, I use either Kaffeine or XINE to view videos. Not a big fan of KDE's Dragon Player, but the old KMPlayer works fine on legacy SimplyMEPIS systems too. I do not use Music Players often enough to have any favorites, though I have gone on occasional tangents listening to Jazz or Classical music through Internet radio feeds.

Great suggestions, guys! Keep them coming! B-) (woot)

I just upgraded Seamonkey(2.0.4) from the PCLOS repos and it installed the apps separately in the menu. I had been trying to figure out how to launch the editor separately for a while now and PCLOS figured it out for me. I have not tried the latest "off the rack" Seamonkey. It may work the same way. At any rate, you just launch the seamonkey command and put a -mail, -edit, etc... at the end.

I could have sworn I tried this in earlier versions without success. This is especially good since I only use the editor. It is still one of the best around.

I use Seamonkey the majority of the time at home. I either use the current release, 2.0.4 at the moment, or I use a nightly build of the next pre-release, in this case, 2.0.5-pre. Both work well and I have been using the Pre release versions since 1.1.18 was current and 2.0 was in testing, so they have proven reliable for quite a long time now.

I am on antiX right now and they happen to have a current version of Iceape 2.0.4, a Debian branded version of Seamonkey 2.0.4.

By the way, to run Seamonkey and go DIRECTLY to the Mail component, you can call Seamonkey interactively with the -mail option, just as you have mentioned. There are, again as you have mentioned, a variety of command line options. The man command for Seamonkey isn't terribly useful at all to describe the operation of the Seamonkey suite, but it does have the details of what all of those command line options are. You will see if you disassemble the GUI links precisely how the vendor specifies the various options. Of course, we also know that we can get to the Composer, the Browser, the Email, the Chat, and the Address Book by clicking on the icons in the bottom left corner of the Seamonkey user interface or by selecting the appropriate feature in the menu at the top of the screen - so that makes AT LEAST three ways to get at the Seamonkey features. :-)

Mozilla Prism is a really handy tool. It is a browser of sorts, but it differs in some ways from the typical browser. When you start it up, you specify which URL you want to visit and which application is associated with that URL. If the site has an icon, it associates that icon with the particular instance of Prism, thereby giving you application specific instances of Prism. You may recall that recently Peppermint OS One released their Cloud and Mint based release with Prism, included a few sample applications with Prism application instances preconfigured, and included a way to invoke Prism on your own to start up Web based applications. Today I installed Prism in my personal directory on a Windows XP system in the office (with no other Mozilla based applications present). First of all, Prism handily outperforms Internet Explorer, that shouldn't surprise anyone, right? ;-) Second, it was easy to start specific application instances. Third, at least the way I had it set up, the browser URL window cannot be edited, so this is really an application specific setup. It's clearly not right for general browsing, but we have Firefox for that. Prism is a very useful Web based application browser and it works very well, even on Windows!

I am sure it has been mentioned ( my bad I did not read through <G>< ), but one of my favorite and most used other than browsers is K3b..one of the reasons I prefer KDE if I don't plan to add all those dependencies ...

With a big partition ( why not with today's 2TB Hard drives and beyond ), for the office suite, Open office of course. Let hope the recent acquisition does not effect that too badly Not that some of the smaller word processor types don't do a good job with the lighter WM.

gimp of course. I don't really have an opinion about the various notepads, as the K one is the only one I have used much.

The sad thing is, we probably use dozens of other specific utilities and applications that make our WM choice, without even realizing we do so OOPS.

As for browsers, Firefox, ( or Iceweasel ) or Seamonkey WILL be one any long term full desktop I use. Not because any of the rest are inferior ( although some may be ), it has to do with familiarity...with me being lazy. I have tested and used Morphes (sp), Opera, Chrome, and others and they OK I suppose....if I wanted to learn to use them well- <G><
My first impression with Chrome was, what the heck, everything of juxtaposed....bass ackwards But it seems to be quit good... for someone else