Best Software Per Category

I will be learning and using Linux soon, and I'm trying to learn what the best apps are for daily productivity and entertainment tasks.

I plan on using Slackware and trying Arch, and a few Slackware based distros such as Frugalware and others. I will most likely start out with Frugalware.

I know that a DE I want to try XFCE, but I will start out with either Gnome or KDE, not sure wich yet. It depends on the native apps available for both, and which apps a prefer. I will definately use Firefox as my browser, OpenOffice for my office software, and I would like to use the GIMP, but I don't really have much other experience or knowledge of other software that runs on Linux.

Can you please recommend the top picks by category, or point me to some sites that will help me learn of the best apps available? I understand that to some degree the term "best" is rather subjective, but just try and understand what I mean.

I'm looking for everything from ripping and burning, to a PDF reader like Adobe Reader. I need a movie viewer that can view Windows Media, Quicktime, and whatever other standard formats, an iTunes/WinAmp type program that can rip and play all of the standard audio file formats; MP3, WAV, and I'm very interested in FLAC. I also need a CD/DVD player/burner software that can create and burn ISO files. I don't want half baked, buggy, low featured, premature software, but the good and thoroughly usable ones only.

I don't want anymore overlap in functionality than absolutely necessary. If there's a good app that can do more than one thing well; all the better, if there's an app that does only one thing, and does it better than any other app, that's great too. In one sense I'm a minimalist, but in another sense I like powerful, full featured software that can get the job done, and without needing "helper" programs, or too much work on my part to get it done. I like synergy, and efficiency.

What are your suggestions?

 

>I need a movie viewer that can view Windows Media, Quicktime,
>and whatever other standard formats,

Xine, Kaffeine

> I also need a CD/DVD player/burner software that can create
> and burn ISO files.

k3b

For graphics:

Gimp (photo)
Inkscape (vector)

 

I'll check those out, thanks!

 

Good choice with XFCE. I like it myself.

My fav. media player is mplayer. It'll play anything you throw at it, but it is mainly command line (which I prefer).

Music players:
Audacious is the 'winamp'-like solution for linux, but there are many others with better playlist management, etc. Amarok is a very popular choice.

PDFs:
Of course adobe is available. Also 'evince' (depends on Gnome I believe) is good. xpdf is minialist and was OK last time I used it. Ghostview (gv), used for postscript also does pdf reasonably well.
I use adobe myself, but am getting frustrated with it's continued bloat. If anyone has recent reviews of xpdf or other lighter pdf readers, I'd like to hear.

Cheers, and have fun. Don't be afraid to install a pile of stuff to try out.

 

It kind of depends on your WM/DE. For example, if I'm using Gnome (which I am at the moment) I'll use evince for pdf viewing. But if I'm in XFCE or pekwm I'll use xpdfview or gv. There's also acroread which is typical Adobe bloatware, but it does of course render more consistently than others. Evince has gotten very very good, though. Likewise for image viewers, in Gnome I really like gthumb, other times I'll use feh or mirage.

For ripping I use rubyripper, it rips everything two or more times (configurable) until it matches chunks a user defined number of times. Running EAC in wine is another good option. I'm extremely anal about my output, though, and then encode everything in FLAC using metaflac to apply replaygain tags.

A video player is another one that I jump around a good bit. I don't like gstreamer, so that rules out a few. In Gnome I use totem-xine because the interface doesn't entirely suck. Gxine is also very nice, but I don't like having to right click and go through menu levels to show the controls in full screen mode. In XFCE there's xfmedia, which also has a xine backend. In the past it's been rather incomplete, not disabling the screen blanking/screensaver for example. I haven't used it for quite some time, so I'm sure some things have been fixed. I also have vlc installed no matter what else I'm using on a daily basis. I don't like it's interface, though it is very powerful, but it plays some files other things refuse to play well/at all. For example, I have Bladerunner in a .mkv which stutters like crazy in Xine, but is totally smooth in VLC. It plays some .bin/.cue files that nothing else will even consider playing. Anyway, for xine compatability is all about installing the proper codecs, and most distributions will usually have a Windows codec package, sometimes in a third party repository. Arch just has it as the 'codecs' package, and it's required by xine and mplayer.

For burning CD's, honestly, I've been using the Nautilus cd burner, it does most of what I need. For burning audio CD's Serpentine is nice. Of course, both of these require Gnome. Graveman has been fairly nice in the past, but it hasn't worked for me lately. Gnomebaker has been fairly nice, and xfburn looks like a possibility though I haven't tried it. A lot of people use k3b, including a lot of people who install QT/KDE libs strictly for that app. It is nicely refined, I have to admit, but I don't know if it's worth all the overhead. There's also always nero-linux, though it's unfree in every way possible.

For music playback I use my video player for playing CD's. I play maybe one CD before I rip it a year, so it's not a big deal for me, but even if I played more I don't think I'd see the point of another app. I have used Apolos once or twice in the past. For flacs I use MPD. I searched far and wide for a music player when I started with Linux, and it tooks me years to find. It stands for Music Player Daemon, and is started at boot time most commonly. It maintains a database, handles playback, and can be controlled over a network. It's completely gapless (which can be disabled for MP3), understands replaygain tags, can normalize on the fly, can crossfade, and will keep playing through anything short of a nuclear attack. Seriously, it runs in the background so you can quit the client (of which there are many), change your runlevel, or just about anything short of reboot or stop the daemon and it will keep playing. You can also run several clients at the same time. For example, the last.fm logger I use is another daemon which is really just a client which grabs playback data and uploads it. You can run a web based client on a laptop while you run something like Sonata on a media center. And there's a cli that gives you some pretty robust scripting ability.

XMMS2 is a similar project, and has nothing to do with XMMS. It's younger, though it might have more promise. We'll see.

Honorable mentions are Audacious, which is a fork of BMP when they decided to rewrite the codebase and base it on xine. BMP itself was a gtk2 fork of XMMS, which itself is gtk1. BMPX is also quite nice, though very young and buggy. For Gnome there's Listen and Banshee and Muine. I don't particularly like any of them, there's always a glaring defect in my eyes, but they're all competent. In KDE there is, of course, Amarok, which could be the most popular player. It's also probably most iTunes like.

UNIX traditionally has programs which do one thing, and do it well. So having a media player which also rips and encodes music, and burns CD's is against the traditional philosophies. That's not to say they don't exist, but don't expect as much support for those apps..

 

Damn, sorry, I'm long winded tonight (hah, tonight!)

Oh, and I almost forgot...

I like Sylpheed for email, and Deluge for bittorrent.

 

I second mplayer, its the most awesome thing out there. And then I use ncmpc for music.

 

Here is what I like to use :

Watching movies/DVD's ... : vlc + associated plugins
Burning Cd's : GnomeBaker
Listen to MP3/WMA : Xmms
Graphics : Gimp
Office things : OpenOffice
Web : Firefox
Complex document / publicity : Scribus

A lot of people use K3b for CD burning but keep in mind that it will install a lot of KDE libraries and stuff, I personally don't like it as I prefer the Gnome environment.

VlC has been great so far, playing everything I throw at it with no problems at all.

 

So I've just learned that certain apps work best, are developed and intended for certain DEs. something I never new before. Keep in mind that I'm really less than a newbie with Linux, not even a user yet, but getting ready to be.

It seems to me that in order to get up and running ASAP, I would be better off starting with either Gnome or KDE. So far I'm really torn between them, because they both seem so great, and have from what I've seen so far, they both have awesome apps available. I'm editing my original post to reflect this change in DE choice.

Right now I'm leaning towards KDE, but I'm not really sure yet. Is there a list kept somewhere, and can you share with me what apps are particular to either Gnome or KDE?

Also I'm leaning towards Frugalware Linux as my choice of distro. It seems to be easy enough for a newbie to get up and running quickly, yet still have great accessibility and functionality for the power user. I like the direction that the developers seem to be headed with it as well.