One of my favorite things about using Linux is that for pretty much anything I ever find myself wanting to do, someone has written a free and open source program that allows me to do it.  The other day I needed to edit a specific type of vector graphic, so I opened up Ubuntu Software Center, downloaded a suitable program, and had finished what I needed to do in no time flat.  No messing with bureaucratic proprietary software, or fighting trial programs, I just got the tools I needed for free and finished exactly what I needed done.

So to pay tribute to the awesomeness of the open source community, and to show off a few of the more interesting programs I have come across for Linux, here is my brief list of cool Linux apps.

Development

Aptana

Aptana is a great, fully featured cross-platform web development environment. I have searched long and hard for a good studio to write html, css, php, etc. in, and though I oft find myself defaulting to my beloved Gedit, Aptana is a great alternative for when I want more than a plain text editor. It's based off of Eclipse, but you can get it as a standalone or as an Eclipse plugin. I have had a few problems with using Eclipse installed from the Ubuntu Software Center + a bunch of web plugins, but Aptana downloaded from its website and installed as a standalone seems to work fine. Any slight annoyance that I get from these more complex editors usually sends me straight back to Gedit, but Aptana seems to be pretty solid and its very nice having all the features that a studio like this provides.

Bluefish Editor

Bluefish is a lightweight, simple web design studio. I actually used this a lot as an alternative to Gedit. It has all of the basic features that you'll use on an everyday basis, with all the more fancy stuff that Aptana and Eclipse have stripped off. The result is a much faster and more lightweight application that is almost as quick as Gedit.

However, a few things were a deal breaker for me. First, it has a pretty poorly implemented search function that, if I'm not terribly mistaken, will only find the first occasion of the string you specify. This can be very annoying, and it's kind of strange since its search and replace works great, it's just the straight search that doesn't go past the first instance. Also, on a few occasions I have found Bluefish to save my files in some sort of weirdly corrupt fashion. At a certain place in my file it will insert an invisible character or something that can't be seen in Bluefish, but incidentally will cause my code to not work. Only by eventually finding the location and backspacing it, or redoing the file in trusty Gedit, can I circumvent the error.

Bluefish is otherwise a pretty great program, but I cannot be spending tons of time digging for the random invisible character error when it appears, so I have moved more away from Bluefish recently. However, that was awhile ago and version 2.0 has recently been released, so I have a strong feelings that a lot of these annoyances have been improved. I'll try it out again at some point.

Media

VLC Player

You know this program. It's a great lightweight, reliable, play-anything type of media player (especially video). The default Ubuntu media players can be kind of clunky, and if you really need to give these a try if you have never branched out from those. By the way, it's cross platform, so you can quit fighting with Windows Media Player too.

Songbird

Another cross platform one, this program is Mozilla's take on a music player. You may have also noticed how the default music playing programs for Ubuntu are lacking, but this one seems to take care of most of my complaints. It has most of the features that a program like iTunes would (while being nowhere near as bloated), and has a lot of cool customization features like all of Mozilla's products.

I've been using it myself since the beta, and it has become pretty stable and featured since then. If I'm not mistaken, the Windows version can even play protected iTunes music using a Quicktime plugin...

If you download this, be sure to install the lyrics add on and the music info add on. It's really useful having all that come up right when a song starts playing, you learn things about your music that you otherwise would never have looked up on your own. Oh, and this one is not in the Ubuntu repositories so you'll have to download from Mozilla and install.

Amarok

If the previous music player was too big or not Linuxy enough for you, Amarok is a good alternative. Yes, it was originally for the K desktop environment so it doesn't quite have the same Gnome feel, but it is lightweight and gets the job done in a reliable and organized way. I used this for awhile before Songbird, and I still think it clearly edges out the default Rhythmbox (and iTunes for that matter, if I can compare the two).

Graphics

Gimp

If you are editing images in Linux and haven't tried Gimp then go get it right now. In fact, you probably already have it since its included with Ubuntu. I use this program constantly, on Linux and Windows, and it handles almost everything I need image editing wise. It can probably do everything Photoshop can, especially including its addons, and it does it all while being free, open source, and much much less bloated.

Inkscape

This is the program from my anecdote in the intro. It's great fully featured vector graphics editor that helped me realize the value of scalable graphics. Whether you want to convert an existing image of yours to a vector graphic, or you want to draw something altogether new (and be able to scale it to any size perfectly), this program gets it done. Even if you don't have too much of a need for scalable graphics, you might want to give this a shot just to messing around with its tools. It's a breath of fresh air from Gimp, and you can actually create some pretty good looking graphics with it.

Random

GNOME Do

I think I pretty much randomly downloaded this and then was hooked on it.  It's a simple program that allows you to do a few basic tasks by typing, with the goal of increasing the speed that you get these tasks done.  Basically, you press Meta + Space to call up the program, start typing, and press Enter to executed the command on the screen that GNOME Do thinks you mean.  You can use it to launch applications, search for files, do Google Math esque calculations and conversions, and more.  It may sound pretty pointless, but it can actually save you a lot of pointing and clicking, which is especially helpful for laptops.  I find myself really missing its presence when I use a Linux school computer.

As a sidenote, the Firefox extension Ubiquity is kind of like a browser based version of this.  Another good click saver.

Conclusion

Well there you have it, a brief overview of some of the cool programs I have ran into while messing around on Linux. Yes, it may have been a bit more Windows focused than intended, but some programs are just as awesome on both. I will continue to update this list as I run into more stuff, so check back for more or email me with your own at mcjustin@umich.edu.