Best Free Software for Linux

These may or may not be available for your distro.
This guide will be updated frequently.
Be sure to check out Calvin's Linux Switcher's Guide.

Internet

Web Browser:
Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Opera: http://www.opera.com/download/index.dml?step=2&opsys=Linux i386&platform=Linux i386
Konqueror: http://www.konqueror.org/

Communication:
Xchat: http://www.xchat.org/
Pidgin: http://www.pidgin.im/
Kopete: http://kopete.kde.org/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
Evolution: http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/

Media

Music Players:
RythmBox: http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/
Banshee: http://banshee-project.org/
AmaroK: http://amarok.kde.org/
Exaile: http://exaile.org/

Video Players:
Mplayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
VLC: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Media Codec Packs:
Gstreamer: http://www.gstreamer.net/

Safety

Anti-virus/Firewall/Anti-Spyware Protection:
ClamAV/KlamAV: http://www.clamav.net/ / http://klamav.sourceforge.net/klamavwiki/index.php/Main_Page

System Tools

File Managers:
Thunar: http://thunar.xfce.org/index.html
PC Man: http://pcmanfm.sourceforge.net/
Nautilus: http://www.gnome.org/projects/nautilus/
Dolphin: http://enzosworld.gmxhome.de/

Screen Capture/Recording:
Record My Desktop: http://recordmydesktop.iovar.org/about.php

Application Docks:
Avant-Window-Navigator: http://code.google.com/p/avant-window-navigator/
Cairo Dock: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CairoDock

Disk/Image Ripping/Burning:
K3b: http://k3b.plainblack.com/
Brasero: http://www.gnome.org/projects/brasero/

Tweaking:
Ubuntu Tweak: http://ubuntu-tweak.com/

Download Managers:
Kget: http://www.kde.org/
Gwget: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gwget/
Wget: http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

Misc. Utilities:
Ubuntu Customization Kit: http://uck.sourceforge.net/
DOSBox: http://www.dosbox.com/
Memtest86+: http://www.memtest.org/
Wine: http://www.winehq.org/

Partitioning:
Gparted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Productivity

Office:
OpenOffice.org: http://www.openoffice.org/
AbiWord: http://www.abisource.com/
Gnumeric: http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/
Scribus: http://www.scribus.net/

Image Editing:
GIMP: http://www.gimp.org/
Inkscape: http://www.inkscape.org/

Video Editing:
Cinelerra: http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3
Avidemux: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

Audio/Video Encoding/Converting:
Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Virtualization:
VirtualBox: http://www.virtualbox.org/
Vmware Server: http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

Virtual Network Computing:
TightVNC: http://www.tightvnc.com

Text/Code Editors:
KompoZer: http://www.kompozer.net/
Vim: http://www.vim.org/
Emacs: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

Calendars:
Sunbird: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/

Posting Guidlines
Software hast to be free.
No Shareware or Limited time offers.
Must provide a link, description, and why you think it should be added.
NO TORRENTS!

 

Nice port of my list to Linux, not too shabby.

Add:
Screen Capture/Recording: Xvidcap, vnc2swf

 

Video Player: Xine (Kaffeine is a KDE front end) http://xinehq.de
very Lightweight music player: Xmms (very similar to Winamp) http://xmms.org

 

You forgot Konversation (communications), irssi (communications), CenterIM (communications), Kaffeine (media player), and xine (codec pack).

 

Thanks, Ill look into them.

 

Development

Integrated Development Environment:

Eclipse www.eclipse.org

Compiler:

Gnu Compiler Collection http://gnu.gcc.org

These are saving me hundreds of dollars compared to buying MS Visual Studio Professional + Intel Visual C++/Intel Visual Fortran

Edit: I'd also add TeXLive and Kile, but that's a little too unusual LOL. Maybe more common would be KTorrent..

 

I'll check eclipse out, but as you may know, gcc is included with every distro, its apart of GNU.

 

Its not a part of MS Windows

 

Hence "distro", rather than "os"

 

Firestarter is a nice and easy gtk firewall-GUI for the IP-tables. (Guarddog is for KDE but I've never used it).

Avast Linux Home Edition is my prefered AV on Linux (for whatever reason you'd wish to have/use it, I know ). I rate it much much higher then Clam AV.

Wine-Doors for easy installing of CoD2 (and other Windows programs).

PAN newsreader, multithreaded downloads, supports yENC and NZB. Can't live without it.

 

The Opera web browser is a very nice browser but it is not free software. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

 

Actually, that does bring up a point. The name doesn't make sense at all, most if not all Linux software is free, so people wil automatically think it means free as in freedom. The name needs changes.

 

That does bring up a point.
Is this for free as in speech or beer?
Please post comments.

 

I think it would be best for it to be free as in beer in any case, and you just rename the thread to something more appropriate.

 

Maybe a non opensource(but free) section and a free section?

 

That would be tedious to maintain, but if you feel that's the proper way to do it then nothing is holding you back. It's just my opinion on the way i would do it.