Re: FN-FORUM: linux desktop

date posted 17th January 2005 20:08

Tony Crockford wrote:

> (gentoo won't install on my machine, so that's out)


That's a real shame - I went Gentoo after years of RedHat/Fedora and
will never willingly return. It powers for my dev machine, an older
Compaq laptop. However, gentoo installation *is* a sod, so it's probably
not the best if you're completely new to linux, though the docs are
fantastic.

> I've looked at the wiki and briefly scanned the Linuxiso pages. I
> think what I'm looking for here is to hear from those of you using
> Linux for everyday use, and which distros have the apps i need.
>
> looking for at least: openoffice, Gimp, Firefox. would be great to
> have a scanning app, PIM and IRC as well. would be keen to find one
> that has an easy application installer.


I'd go with Mandrake - just about any distro will give you what you
want, but you'll want one that's more aimed at the desktop than the
server market. And it's not installing the apps that's the problem 9/10,
it's configuring them...

Environment: Gnome. I'm too lazy to go learning whole new desktops and
it mostly does what I want.

Fave gui apps:

Web & mail: Firefox (+ Web developer extensions - in-line CSS editing -
just can't beat it :), Thunderbird.
IM: Gaim. Does Yahoo, MSN, AIM, IRC, blah, all in one.
Word processing: Abiword - much leaner than OO, saves to XHTML properly too!
Graphics: Gimp + Sodipodi (for vector stuff), though am just trying out
Inkscape for vector graphics too (it's got built in tracing)
Program editor: vim/gvim. Yeah, I'm old :)
WYSIWYG HTML: erm... not much out there. Am just trying out nvu, though.
Have had success getting Dreamweaver going under Wine before, too, but
it's not really my thing.
Other editors: Conglomerate is an interesting looking XML editor, mostly
focussed on docbook. Keep meaning to try out gPHPEdit - it's installed,
but I always fire up vim first.
P2P: mldonkey. The gui is pig ugly, but the web interface works fine.
Audio: XMMS (though getting the Monkey's Audio plugin compiled was a
nightmare). Audacity for editing, Grip for ripping.
Video: MPlayer
PIM: vim + TODO :-D

Then subversion, apache, php, postgres and quite a few web-based admins
(phppgadmin et al).

Don't fear the command line! There's lots of other stuff I can't live
without - network tools like ethereal, dig, nmap, plus a million and one
handy little utils like png2ico that do one thing well and just don't
need a full-blown gui.

The GUI stuff with Linux has improved massively in years I've been using
it. I hope that makes it easier for people to switch. But don't fool
yourself - there's still lots to learn, and lots to learn to love.

Best of luck.

Matt