Thursday 22 January 2009

Top 10 Applications to Install After Installing Ubuntu

Amarok - in my opinion, this is the greatest music player and collection management for the Linux platform. I think it's also a killer application for Linux with all the features it has.

SMPlayer - one of the most powerful video players for Linux using the mplayer engine, and including support for DVDs, DVD ISO images, Matroska video files and much, much more. A must-have.

KTorrent - for me this is the BitTorrent client of choice. It has all the features I need, including the possibility to only download certain files in torrents, a feature which some other clients lack.

XChat - I think there is no other (graphical) client for IRC as powerful as XChat. Maybe KVirc, but regarding the scripting/plugins part, XChat wins over Konversation or KSirc easily. It supports scripting in Perl and Python by default, C plugins, and a Tcl scripting plugin is also available, but not by default. It can also be easily customisable via the /set variables.

BasKet - BasKet is a notes-taking application which I also reviewed in the past; it has a wonderful approach of letting you make full projects, not only simple notes, and it organises your data in baskets and sub-baskets. Except for the fact that the current version does not support printing (well, you can always export notes to an HTML file and print that one) it is definitely full-featured. I strongly recommend this application over other notes-taking applications.

Wesnoth - this is a turn-based strategy game, well-maintained, with a strong community and a beautiful gameplay, both in single-player mode and online. I must say, I love this game and I really appreciate all the work it has been put for creating and maintaining it.

K3b - definitely the most full-featured CD/DVD burning application, and it allows to create ISO images too. No KDE 4 port yet though, and it looks like development is currently stalled.

Emacs - I find Emacs to be an essential tool and one of the most powerful and popular IDEs out there.

Yakuake - a terminal application which acts just like consoles in FPS games (e.g. Quake, ET, UT). Yakuake can be hidden or shown using the F12 keyboard shortcut.

TVTime - this application is useful to those who own a TV card. In the past I also tried kdetv, but nothing compares with TVTime in my opinion.

14 comments:

gdp77 said...

transmission has all the features of ktorrent (also allows to download certain files from a torrent)

Michael Stephenson said...

KDE fan perhaps?

Anonymous said...

Sweet! YAWTDAIU. Thats right. Yet another what to do after installing ubuntu...

thumbs down. not for the application choice but these types of blogs are really getting old.

wiz said...

This goes for Kubuntu.

Unknown said...

There is, of course, nothing Ubuntu-specific about this list. I have all these things on my opensuse system.

Greg said...

I do not like TVTime if you have a Digital TV card try Me-TV for Gnome or Kaffeine for KDE. Deluge is great for torrents.

Anonymous said...

Regarding Ktorrent, I switched to Deluge, which hase the same features as Ktorrent, but isn't a memory hog

Anonymous said...

Well, these are personal choices, but

I'd opt for:
- Deluge in stead of Ktorrent
- Guake in stead of Yakuake
- VLC in stead of SMPlayer

And would add repo's for wine & virtualbox.

I'd also add Gnome-Do, Desktop Drakes & Fusion-Icon.

It would've added some value & been more useful if you'd add links & screenshots.
It's a little weird most of the apps you add are KDE-based, while Ubuntu is all Gnome.

Anonymous said...

Quite funny because I am probably the opposite on almost the entire list. One is that I am not a KDE fan nor of most of its apps. But that is ok it is still a good list with some great applications, just not what I would have chosen.

Anonymous said...

You forgot to mention Vim ...

raphtee said...

xchat looks terrible. Use pidgen. It is part of the standard install and has a native look and feel (unlike xchat which has the look of an late 80's x windows program).

Anonymous said...

I stick with non-KDE apps on my Ubuntu install for the most part.

Banshee over Amarok
VLC over SMPlayer
Transmission over KTorrent
Pidgin over XChat
Brasero over K3b

You might want to think about installing Kubuntu instead given your choices. The only KDE app I use is KXMame (for arcade emulation) given there doesn't seem to be a decent GNOME based alternative...

Anonymous said...

Got a Dell Mini 9 and decided to stay with Ubuntu for 3 months to give it a chance.
Except for three programs which I added right away:
VLC instead of the archaic/slow Totem.
Kopete instead of Pidgin because it does Im video with my Yahoo account.
Amarok instead of the rest.

VLC, Kopete, Amarok.
All the other apps I can live with no problem. I cant say the same for the limited choices in customization, the annoying two taskbar system and having the top text always be visible plus the other GNome foibles (and the fact taht it looks like an old OS) and the disease that is Mono.


Gentoo/E17 user

Anonymous said...

I like to use xbmc to watch dvds in Ubuntu. It is a little harder to install for newbies but it is SWEET! Not to mention that it is great for songlist,pictures etc. I can even get the weather forcast and current conditions from 3 different locations! just my 2 cents