Tom's Definitive Linux Software Roundup: Internet Apps

[randomizer]

I sent you a PM Adam.

 

[cutterjohn]

I dual boot almost all of my machines with at least some version of Windows(2k, XP, Vista) and, generally, Ubuntu nowadays. (Mostly always have windows installed for gaming purposes as although wine has made HUGE increases in compatibility over the last few years there are still some games & apps that just don't run well with wine(I use the bi-weekly releases) + linux.

It's too bad that the author decided to no include Windows apps, as all of the IRC clients for linux aren't so hot for one reason or another, and uTorrent runs great with wine. (Yes, I tried all of the torrent apps in the article and still have some of them installed but haven't used them for quite some time. A great deal of games run well in wine, esp the more popular and cult sort of games although even some generally popular games will lack adequate support for some time. Also to note generally if you have a recent ATI GPU expect troubles as the proprietary drivers are alpha quality at best, and the OSS drivers do not yet support newer chips well and still lack good 3D support. ATI GPUs also tend to have more problems with wine as well as with linux + X.org in general. I learned this the hard way when I decided to give ATI a shot again and went for a notebook sporting a discrete 4850 mobility, but at least with ATI there is the hope for a good OSS driver. nVidia OTOH just has always had good linux + X drivers IME, with any bugs being fixed quickly, so no need for OSS drivers unless you are philosophically inclined to be a GPL bigot(I always preferred the freer licenses myself, e.g. BSD.).)

Web browsers:
Epiphany -- has two versions now, one that uses gecko and the one that I believe will be the default in the future that uses webkit. IIRC Ubuntu only has the gecko based one in the repos ATM as the webkit version is still alpha.

Chrome -- available on Ubuntu through a PPA, but well, Chrome is just arcanely useless especially given that I use firefox + a bevy of plugins whose functionality simply cannot be replicated with Chrome ATM.

Use the lynx CLI browser once in a while too, esp when I get docs in HTML and can't be bothered to open them through a full GUI browser, although if the app authors decided to be cute(and you don't override the colorization settings) such documents can be somewhat unreadable if the doc author played with various colorizations of the app, esp. the background colors.

Didn't see IRC apps listed, but I like the basic X-Chat 2 IRC client, not the GNOMEized version(UI sucks -- removed a host of useful options, plus the final display layout leves a great deal to be desired. CLI clients are useful at times as well.).

 

[cutterjohn]

Oops, just read another comment about wine with .net apps.

Sometimes you can get some .net apps to run well enough IF you use winetricks and install the .net framework.

winetricks also applies to games and apps where it is sometimes necessary to install native windows shared libs(.dlls) to get an app running. This is NOT the preferred wine method and the wine devs frown upon it and will limit(or not) support you at all with actual windows libs installed, but also seem to understand that it is sometimes necessary to get an app running.

e.g. sometimes you might need the M$ VC++ lib redist, some extra DX support libs, etc. This happens MUCH less frequently than it did in the past, as I mentioned above wine has MADE HUGE amounts of progress over the last few years.

Anyways back to .net, you have to just understand that some .net apps will still just not run at all, even if you install the windows .net frameworks with winetricks, but at least some will work now rather than none at all which was the case not too terribly long ago. (Basically in the past it was install mono + support libs, then hope that the .net app didn't use any PINVOKE calls. If the app did it just simply would not run any ways under wine + linux.)

Anyways since this article is about native linux apps, this is getting a little out of hand here, so I'll wander off to my hybrid corner.

 

[adamovera]

cutterjohn: I'll cover virtualization and emulation later on, and IRC clients are in the next segment.

 

[cutterjohn]

Gotcha.

Pretty decent article overall BTW, although you really should've noted that Arora is currently in alpha IIRC, and so shouldn't realistically expected to be stable/useful ATM.

Also, as you noted Galeon is the original project from which epiphany was derived, and AFAIK it's pretty much dead or may as well be as epiphany generally replaced it. Also IIRC the same dev started both projects.

(I had been trying to stay in a completely GNOMEized environment this time around with Ubuntu 9.04 on this notebook, but have recently installed a bevy of Qt/KDE based apps... oh well... Just don't try to install the KDE environment setup for Ubuntu ATM as the UI was AWFUL when I tried it last spring, and pretty well took over the system. Had a GREAT deal of difficulty getting rid of it as the normal removal process broke some things, they may possibly have had some false dependencies at the time which may have been fixed by now... Older Ubuntu releases didn't exhibit this problem so I was quite surprised by what happened. I expect if I can free up some disk space on the nb that I'll try it again after 9.10 is released and give a few weeks for the upgrade traffic on the repos to die down.)

 

[Guest]

hey
I can comment on Ubuntu gui vs windows 7 gui.
(my wife) best test subject for the unbiased opinion...
she lies windows 7 because it is pretter than ubunto for the desktop.
She likes ubuntu better when you have screen savers and movies and music playing.
She likes windows 7 for simpler Nas box access.
She wants a MAC but we cannot afford one.
all the rest is the same.

simple but rather good view.

 

[Guest]

Miro has lots of bugs, 100% cpu usage and memory leaks. So, it may work in ubuntu, but fe others. I run Fedora using gnome desktop. Log into miro bugzilla and you can see all the submissions.

I run a small business, Fedora has everything I need to keep for it. I keep the books, do usps and ups online shipping, GIMP and GQview for editing pics and organizing them. The gedit is sweet for making and editing html files. Thunderbird is my choice for email client.

My kids each have a fedora box and do all school work on it plus the social stuff as well like you tube, my space, music, and more. Most of their friends do not even notice it's not a windows machine.

I do have a windows XP game box that I use only for online gaming. Cannot get away from that. I also have a XP machine at work for running AutoCAD and another cad related program. Both are windows only apps. ACAD was once multi platform and had unix version. Now it's only windows and likely will never change. Cheaper to make and support only a single version.

 

[Guest]

It's Free AND Open-Source Software, not "Free or Open-Source Software (FOSS)". It's free as in free speech, not free as in beer. 😀

I'm enjoying your articles though, cheers!

 

[Guest]

I'm reading and writing this from the 64-bit Google Chrome (on linux). It's fast, takes up less screen real-estate by default (and still less than my tweaked Firefox), and I haven't had any annoying bugs in the last few days of using it (on Ubuntu 9.10 beta no less).

Aside from that, Midori is a good up-and-comer for browsers, it has just as many features as Arora, and Epiphany (and webkit is the new rendering engine for Epiphany, Gecko is on the out going version), and it's the favored browser for the XFCE DE. (and come on Galeon is surpassed at this point, listing it is like comparing IE 4 and Netscape Navigator against Firefox, a bit of hyperbole maybe, but it's old... )

 

[jospoortvliet]

Hey Tom,

If you want KGet (and all other KDE apps) to open not KDE but other apps (eg gnome apps) start systemsettings and go to 'default applications'. You can easily choose the defaults in there.

 

[hemelskonijn]

KDE is the default GUI for popular Linux distributions like openSUSE, Mandriva, and Kubuntu.

Let me rectify this a little for you Adam, While most distributions indeed have a default GUI openSUSE has none.
In openSUSE all GUI are equal (and no none is preselected during installation and yes there is one at the top of the GUI selection list GNOME to make things a bit more ironic).

 

[adamovera]

[citation][nom]hemelskonijn[/nom]Let me rectify this a little for you Adam, While most distributions indeed have a default GUI openSUSE has none.In openSUSE all GUI are equal (and no none is preselected during installation and yes there is one at the top of the GUI selection list GNOME to make things a bit more ironic).[/citation]
What you say WAS true up until very recently, but openSUSE actually decided to make KDE the default GUI by popular demand by their users (most of whom choose KDE). I think that Linux Magazine had the scoop first, but I'm not sure, Google it.

 

[hemelskonijn]

I stand corrected ... and will curse novel for it later !

 

[Guest]

GREAT presentation of torrent clients for linux....best i have ever seen...i really like the logos of different distros below the clients...