Help! Proliferation of applications! 7153

On Fri, 09 Dec 2005 15:11:57 +0000, Gordon

I've used Pan for Usenet for the last few years and been very happy with it - by far the best graphical newsreader I've seen.

I used to use Evolution as a mail client, but switched to Thunderbird recently - purely because I use Thunderbird if I'm stuck on a Windows box, and the consistency's nice. Its news client is and always will be junk IMHO though and I really hope they drop it soon and just concentrate on the email side. All-in-one bloated apps don't fit in the Unix world anyway!

Can't comment on RSS, I don't use it for anything. Same on the calendar front - that's what the post-it notes stuck to my desk are for :)

I use Opera for a web browser on both Linux and Windows; have done for many years. Again, the standardisation's nice. I'd be tempted by Firefox if they had an Opera bookmarks import, and if they hadn't just ripped off 95% of their features from Opera anyway :-)

KDE's Kate is a nice general text editor, whilst SciTe does a nicer job for source code I think.

What else? Ummm:

XMMS for playing mp3 audio, mplayer for video, GQView as an image browser, Imagemagick for image conversion transformation work, Openoffice (obviously) for wordprocessor spreadsheet, lots of shell windows for doing real work :)

No real complaints with any of those to be honest. GQView (at least the version I have) won't scale or rotate images, which is a shame. Imagemagick uses huge amounts of memory for large files regardless of bit depth as it promotes everything to 32 bit internally.

Things that I've found lacking:

A decent image editor. I hate Gimp with a pbuttion (it's bloated, disorganised, confusing, and too feature-packed), but there aren't any Linux alternatives. I run Wine and then Windows versions of either Photoshop (when I have to; it shares a lot of trends with Gimp and is overkill for 99% of jobs) or Paint Shop Pro.

Good quality PDF viewer that doesn't eat disk space. Acrobat seems to be the only one that can render quickly, not lock up on large files, and render fonts with decent quality - but the installation footprint is huge.

Nice equivalent to MS Windows' Explorer. Both the KDE and Gnome offerings seem a little clunky, and there are times when being able to manipulate files from a graphical tool would be quicker than using the shell.

My main complaint with Linux these days is that once you've decided what tools you want, it can be hard to eliminate traces of the equivalents that you don't want to keep. That and any package management tends to be pretty crude, so it can be hard just installing the bits you need without lots of extra unwanted apps or libraries coming along for the ride... it was so much easier ten or so years ago!

cheers

Jules