15 Relatively Unknown Linux Apps
September 13, 2009 at 08:09:05 PM, by Blair Mathis
Most people go for the big apps when switching to Linux, and for good reason: they are easy to find, usually very polished, often updated, and there's a lot of online documentation for them. What if you're not looking for the most popular, but instead the best app for you? Below are 25 excellent, high-quality Linux apps that go neglected far more often than they should be. Some are popular amongst those who have been at the Linux game for awhile, and others have become a staple of certain distros while remaining relatively unknown by users of different distros. No matter the reason they've sat in the midline of popularity, you can be assured that these apps do what they claim to do, and they do it well.
6. Conky This little app is easy to configure and quite popular, as well as useful. It is a rectangle of specs you can place on your desktop, which can list just about anything you want: network activity, hard drive capacity, system heat, current weather, CPU and RAM usage, and much, much more.
7. Crashplan Crashplan is an online backup system with both free and pay accounts; it is similar to Mozy, and offers full Linux support, which makes it awesome. You can use this to backup that thesis you've been writing, archives code, sacred (or embarrassing) pictures, documents, and more.
8. Meld Meld is a cool program that many people will find useless and a sacred few will find as the alpha app they've spent their lives searching for. Meld is used to compare two similar documents and dynamically edit them; when you make updates and changes to one, it automatically updates the other. Very excellent app.
9. Gnumeric If you find Calc (OOo) to be too limiting, unstable, or some other distasteful thing, you can give Gnumeric a shake. This excellent spreadsheet app can open many other spreadsheet files, including ones from Calc and Excel, and does everything you'd expect from a spreadsheet program.
10. Devede Devede is an excellent alternative to Brasero if you're looking for one. This program is free (duh!), and can be used to create and author DVDs. It has very small requirements, and can handle any formats that MPlayer can handle. It's inclined towards the more technically skilled, but does have a very polished GUI for the brave newbie. back|next Page:2/3
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Comments
Kilgore Trout at 15:06, October 14, 2009
Yeah, I agree with the Mad Hatter. These are all well known. I wish someone could make a blog and review 10 unknown apps that work well and are not buggy. The package manager in Ubuntu has thousands of programs but I just don't have the time to check them all out. The same goes with other Linux distros.
The Mad Hatter at 20:04, September 20, 2009
I thought you were going to cover "Relatively Unknown" applications, which would have been interesting. Instead you've covered a bunch of popular applications. OK. They are good apps. Now doubt about it. But they aren't "Relatively Unknown".