With the release of Microsoft’s new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial shows people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that runs also on older hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.
Graphics:
- The GIMP – free software replacement for Adobe Photoshop
- F-Spot – full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop
- Google Picasa – application for organizing and editing digital photos
Internet:
- Firefox
- Opera
- Flash Player 9
- gFTP – multithreaded FTP client
- Thunderbird – email and news client
- Evolution – combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions
- aMule – P2P file sharing application
- Bittorrent client
- Azureus – Java Bittorrent client
- Gaim – multi-platform instant messaging client
- Skype
- Google Earth
- Xchat IRC – IRC client
Office:
- OpenOffice Writer – replacement for Microsoft Word
- OpenOffice Calc – replacement for Microsoft Excel
- Adobe Reader
- GnuCash – double-entry book-keeping personal finance system, similar to Quicken
- Scribus – open source desktop publishing (DTP) application
Sound & Video:
- Amarok – audio player
- Audacity – free, open source, cross platform digital audio editor
- Banshee – audio player, can encode/decode various formats and synchronize music with Apple iPods
- MPlayer – media player (video/audio), supports WMA
- Rhythmbox Music Player – audio player, similar to Apple’s iTunes, with support for iPods
- gtkPod – software similar to Apple’s iTunes, supports iPod, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod photo, and iPod mini
- XMMS – audio player similar to Winamp
- dvd::rip – full featured DVD copy program
- Kino – free digital video editor
- Sound Juicer CD Extractor – CD ripping tool, supports various audio codecs
- VLC Media Player – media player (video/audio)
- Real Player
- Totem – media player (video/audio)
- Xine – media player, supports various formats; can play DVDs
- GnomeBaker – CD/DVD burning program
- K3B – CD/DVD burning program
- Multimedia-Codecs
Programming:
- Nvu – WYSIWYG HTML editor, similar to Macromedia Dreamweaver, but not as feature-rich (yet)
- Bluefish – text editor, suitable for many programming and markup languages
- Quanta Plus – web development environment, including a WYSIWYG editor
Other:
- VMware Server – lets you run your old Windows desktop as a virtual machine under your Linux desktop, so you don’t have to entirely abandon Windows
- TrueType fonts
- Java
- Read/Write support for NTFS partitions
Ubuntu automatically installs the GNOME desktop. For KDE desktop.