100 Popular Linux Applications
August 6th, 2008 | by John Doe |Mozilla Firefox Web Browser
Mozilla Firefox is a web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, managed by the Mozilla Corporation. To display web pages, Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which implements some current web standards plus a few features which are intended to anticipate likely additions to the standards.
GNOME Terminal Terminal
GNOME terminal, also identified as gnome-terminal, is a terminal emulator written by Havoc Pennington and others. It is part of the free software GNOME desktop environment software suite. This allows users of GNOME to execute commands using a real UNIX shell whilst still remaining on their graphical desktop.
Nautilus File Manager
Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. The name is a play on words, evoking the shell of a nautilus to represent an operating system shell. Nautilus replaced Midnight Commander in GNOME 1.4 and was the default from version 2.0 onwards.
Evolution Email and Calendar
Evolution provides integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring functionality to users of the GNOME desktop.
Evince Document Viewer
Evince is a document viewer for PDF, PostScript, djvu, tiff and dvi documents for the GNOME desktop environment. In developing the application the aim was to replace the multiple document GNOME viewers a single and simple application.
gedit Text Editor
gedit is a free software, UTF-8 compatible text editor for the GNOME desktop environment. It is mainly designed for editing program code, and structured text, such as markup languages. It is designed to have a clean, simple graphical user interface according to the philosophy of the GNOME project.
Mozilla Thunderbird Email
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser.
Totem Movie Player
Totem is a free software media player (audio and video) for the GNOME computer desktop environment which runs on Linux, Solaris, BSD and other Unix and Unix-like systems. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 (released in March 2005), but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments. The default backend is GStreamer framework but Totem can also use xine libraries. Totem is included as the default media player in many desktop Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Mandriva Linux and others.
Eye of GNOME Image Viewer
Eye of GNOME is the official image viewer for the GNOME desktop environment. Unlike some other image viewers, Eye of GNOME will only view images. It does, however, provide basic effects for improved viewing, such as zooming, fullscreen, rotation, and transparent image background control.
Rhythmbox Music Player
Rhythmbox is an audio player that plays and helps organize digital music. Originally inspired by Apple’s iTunes, it is free software, designed to work well under the GNOME Desktop using the GStreamer media framework. It is currently under active development.
File Roller Archive Manager
File Roller is the archive manager of the GNOME desktop environment.
XChat IRC Chat
XChat, commonly written X-Chat or xchat, is an IRC chat program for both Linux and Windows. It allows you to join multiple IRC channels (chat rooms) at the same time, talk publicly, private one-on-one conversations etc. Even file transfers are possible.
Epiphany Web Browser
Epiphany is the web browser for the GNOME desktop. Its goal is to be simple and easy to use. Epiphany ties together many GNOME components in order to let you focus on the Web content, instead of the browser application. As part of the GNOME project, Epiphany is Free Software.
Emacs Text Editor
Emacs is a class of feature-rich text editors, usually characterised by their extensibility. Development began in the mid-70s and, as of 2008, is still active. Emacs text editors are most popular with technically proficient computer users and computer programmers. The most popular version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, a part of the GNU project, which is commonly referred to simply as “Emacs”.
Bug Buddy (Bug Report Tool) Report a bug in GNOME-based applications
Bug Buddy is the crash reporting tool used by the GNOME platform. When an application using the GNOME libraries crashes, Bug Buddy generates a stack trace using gdb and invites the user to submit the report to the GNOME bugzilla. The user can add comments and view the details of the crash report.
GNOME System Monitor System Monitor
Gnome System Monitor is a GNOME process viewer and system monitor with a nice easy-to-use interface, It has some nice features, such as a tree view for process dependencies, icons for processes, the ability to hide processes that you don’t want to see, graphical time histories of CPU/memory/swap usage, the ability to kill/renice processes needing root access, as well as the standard features that you might expect from a process viewer.
Calculator Perform calculations
Gcalctool is the default GNOME desktop calculator. It has Basic, Financial and Scientific modes. Internally it uses multiple precision arithmetic to produce results to a high degree of accuracy.
Volume Control Adjust the volume level
The GNOME Volume Control application is an audio mixer that enables you to mix audio for two-channel sound cards.
Software Updater (Update-manager) Software Updater
GNOME application that manages software updates.
gThumb Image Viewer
gThumb is an open-source image viewer and organizer for the GNOME desktop environment released under the GNU General Public License. It was originally based on GQView, and is designed to have a clean, simple interface.
VNC Viewer VNC client application
VNC Viewer is a client for the Virtual Networking Computing protocol, it allows you to connect to a VNC server, or on modern Xorg, Gnome and KDE, to actual’s computer user desktop
OpenOffice.org Writer Document Writer
OpenOffice.org Writer is the word processor component of the OpenOffice.org software package. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel’s WordPerfect, with some of their features.
Yum Extender GUI front end for Yum
The Yellow dog Updater, Modified (YUM) is a free software/open source command line package management utility for RPM-compatible Linux operating systems. It was developed by Seth Vidal and a group of volunteer programmers, and is currently maintained as part of Duke University’s Linux@DUKE project.
Eclipse Eclipse Integrated Development Environment
In computing, Eclipse is a software platform comprising extensible application frameworks, tools and a runtime library for software development and management. It is written primarily in Java to provide software developers and administrators an integrated development environment (IDE).
Amarok Audio Player
Amarok is the music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface. Amarok makes playing the music you love easier than ever before – and looks good doing it.
Vi IMproved Text Editor
Vim is a text editor first released by Bram Moolenaar in 1991 for the Amiga computer. Vim was created as an extended version of the vi editor, with many additional features designed to be helpful in editing program source code; its full name is Vi IMproved.
Konqueror Web Browser
Konqueror is a web browser, file manager and file viewer designed as a core part of the K Desktop Environment. It is developed by volunteers and can run on most Unix-like operating systems. Konqueror, along with the rest of the components in the KDEBase package, is licensed and distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Take Screenshot Save images of your desktop or individual windows
The GNOME Screenshot plugin allows you to quickly take screenshots using the “Take Screenshot” (gnome-screenshot) program. You can choose to take a screenshot of the entire screen or just the current window. You can also optionally specify a delay to wait before the screenshot is taken.
GKrellM System Monitor
GKrellM (GNU Krell Monitors) is a computer program based on the GTK+ toolkit that creates a single process stack of system monitors. It can be used to monitor the status of CPUs, main memory, hard disks, network interfaces, local and remote mailboxes, and many other things.
OpenOffice.org Calc Spreadsheet Editor
OpenOffice.org Calc is the spreadsheet component of the OpenOffice.org software package. Calc is similar to Microsoft Excel, with a roughly equivalent range of features. Calc is capable of opening and saving spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel file format. It provides a number of features not present in Excel, including a system which automatically defines series for graphing based on the layout of the user’s data. Calc is also capable of writing spreadsheets directly as PDF files.
GNOME X-Chat IRC Chat
XChat-GNOME is a new frontend to the popular X-Chat IRC client which is designed with the user interface foremost in mind. Historically, the OSS desktop has been steadily improving in usability, accessibility, and general slickness, yet the world of IRC clients has not kept up. With IRC being one of the fundamental methods of communication within the open source community, it is bizzare that this area has been neglected.
PulseAudio Volume Control Volume Control
Inkscape Vector Illustrator
Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor application. Its stated goal is to become a powerful graphic tool while being fully compliant with the XML, SVG and CSS standards.
F-Spot Photo Manager Photo Manager
F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application for the GNOME desktop
Gajim Instant Messenger Jabber IM Client
Gajim is a free software, instant messaging client for the Jabber (XMPP) protocol which uses the GTK+ toolkit. It runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and Windows. The name Gajim is a recursive acronym for Gajim (is) a jabber instant messenger.
Configuration Editor Directly edit your entire configuration database
Gconf-editor is an application for the GNOME computer desktop environment. It can be considered the graphical equivalent of gconftool. Gconf-editor gives users the ability to access settings stored in the XML-based GConf configuration database. It is used primarily by developers to debug applications, or by power users to edit hidden and complex settings. It abstracts the values from the GConf database and presents them in an interface similar to Microsoft Windows’ registry editor.
Synaptic Package Manager
Synaptic is a computer program which is a GTK+ graphical user interface front-end to the Advanced Packaging Tool for the Debian package management system. Synaptic is usually used on systems based on deb packages but can also be used on systems based on RPM packages. It can be used to install, remove and upgrade software packages and to add repositories.
SeaMonkey Browse the web read email and news chat and edit HTML
SeaMonkey is a free, open source, and cross-platform Internet suite that is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite. Based on the same source code as the Mozilla Application Suite, SeaMonkey consists of a web browser, which is a descendant of the Netscape family, an e-mail and news client program, and an HTML editor. The development of SeaMonkey is community-driven, in contrast to the Mozilla Application Suite, which until its last released version (1.7.13) was governed by the Mozilla Foundation. The new project-leading group is the SeaMonkey Council.
Services Service Management
GQview Image Viewer
GQview is a free software image viewer created by John Ellis using the GTK+ toolkit, designed to run on the X Window System. For MS Windows, an unofficial port is also available.
The GIMP Image Editor
The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs. Typical uses include creating graphics and logos, resizing and cropping photos, altering colours, combining multiple images, removing unwanted image features, and converting between different image formats.
Liferea Feed Reader
Liferea is an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader, a news aggregator for online news feeds. It supports the major feed formats including RSS/RDF and Atom and can import and export subscription lists in OPML format. Liferea is intended to be a fast, easy to use, and easy to install news aggregator for GTK+ that can be used with the GNOME desktop. Liferea also supports Podcasting.
Terminal Server Client Connect to a remote computer
tsclient (Terminal Server Client) is a frontend for rdesktop and other remote desktop tools. It is a GNOME application. Notable visual options include color depth, screen size, and motion blocking.
Gnumeric Spreadsheet Editor
Gnumeric is a free spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME desktop and has Windows installers available. It is intended to be a free replacement for proprietary spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel, which it broadly and openly emulates. Gnumeric was created and developed by Miguel de Icaza, but he has since moved on to other projects. The current maintainer is Jody Goldberg.
Revelation Password Manager
Revelation is a password manager for the GNOME desktop, released under the GNU GPL license. It aims to be HIG-compliant and user-friendly.
Claws Mail E-Mail client
Claws Mail, (formerly known as Sylpheed-Claws), is a GTK+-based e-mail client and news client for Linux. It started in April 2001 as the development version of Sylpheed, where new features could be tested and debugged, but evolved enough to now be a completely separate program. It forked from Sylpheed in August 2005. The software is intended to be light-weight and it has a similar interface to that of Sylpheed’s.
Ekiga IP Telephony VoIP and Video Conferencing
Ekiga (formerly called GnomeMeeting) is a free and open source VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME and Windows. Ekiga supports both the SIP and H.323 (based on OpenH323) protocols and is fully interoperable with any other SIP compliant application and with Microsoft NetMeeting. It supports many high-quality audio and video codecs.
Tilda Tilda
Tilda is a GTK+ terminal emulator. Its design was inspired from consoles in computer games such as Quake which slide down from the top of the screen when a key is pressed, and slide back up when the key is pressed again.
Virtual Machine Manager The GNOME virtual machine manager
The “Virtual Machine Manager” application (virt-manager for short package name) is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines. It presents a summary view of running domains, their live performance & resource utilization statistics. The detailed view graphs performance & utilization over time. Wizards enable the creation of new domains, and configuration & adjustment of a domain’s resource allocation & virtual hardware. An embedded VNC client viewer presents a full graphical console to the guest domain.
Terminal Command line
Command Line Interface (CLI) is a mechanism for interacting with a computer operating system or software by typing commands to perform specific tasks. This contrasts with the use of a mouse pointer with a graphical user interface (GUI) to click on options, or menus on a Text user interface (TUI) to select options.
Devhelp Developer’s Help program
DevHelp is a GTK+/GNOME browser for API documentation; it works natively with gtk-doc (which is the API reference format for GTK+/GNOME documentation). It is integrated in GNOME development tools such as Glade and Anjuta.
K3b CD & DVD Burning
K3b (from KDE Burn Baby Burn) is a CD and DVD authoring application for the KDE desktop environment for Unix-like computer operating systems. It provides a graphical user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD/DVD, as well as more advanced tasks such as burning eMoviX CD/DVDs. It can also perform direct disc-to-disc copies. The program has many default settings which can be customized by more experienced users. The actual disc recording in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord or wodim, cdrdao, and growisofs. As of version 1.0, K3b features a built-in DVD ripper.
Deluge BitTorrent GTK+ BitTorrent Client
Deluge is a BitTorrent client, created using Python and GTK+ (through PyGTK). Deluge is currently usable on POSIX-compliant operating systems. It is intended to bring a native, full-featured client to GTK desktop environments such as GNOME and Xfce.
GnuCash Finance Management
GnuCash is an accounting software which implements a double-entry bookkeeping system. It was initially aimed at developing capabilities similar to Intuit, Inc.’s Quicken application, but also has features for small business accounting. Recent development has been focused on adapting to modern desktop support-library requirements.
AbiWord Word Processor
AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.
Geany Integrated Development Environment
Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features.
Meld Diff Viewer Compare and merge your files.
Meld is a visual diff and merge tool. You can compare two or three files and edit them in place (diffs update dynamically). You can compare two or three folders and launch file comparisons. You can browse and view a working copy from popular version control systems such such as CVS, Subversion, Bazaar-ng and Mercurial.
StarDict Lookup words
StarDict is a Cross-Platform and international dictionary Software. It has powerful features such as “Glob-style pattern matching”, “Scan selection word,” “Fuzzy query,” etc.
OpenOffice.org Impress Presentation Editor and Viewer
OpenOffice.org Impress, a part of the OpenOffice.org office suite and developed by Sun Microsystems, is a presentation program similar to Microsoft PowerPoint.
Pan Newsreader Pan Newsreader
Pan is a news client for the GNOME desktop, developed by Charles Kerr and others. It supports offline reading, multiple servers, multiple connections, fast (indexed) article header filtering and mass saving of multi-part attachments encoded in uuencode, yEnc and base64; images in common formats can be viewed inline. Pan is free software available for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X and Windows.
Disk Usage Analyzer Disk Usage Analyzer
Disk Usage Analyzer is is a graphical, menu-driven application to analyse disk usage in any Gnome environment. Disk Usage Analyzer can easily scan either the whole filesystem tree, or a specific user-requested directory branch (local or remote).
Baobab, or Disk Usage Analyzer, is a GNOME graphical disk-space analyzer. It is a part of GnomeUtils.
J-Pilot Desktop organizer application for the Palm Pilot
J-Pilot is a desktop organizer application for PalmOS devices. It is meant to be an alternative to the Palm Desktop for those who run the most popular Operating Systems in the World, Linux and Unix.
KTorrent BitTorrent Client
KTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in C++ for KDE using the Qt user interface toolkit. It is maintained in the KDE Extragear.
Kate Advanced Text Editor
In computing, Kate is a text editor for KDE. The acronym “Kate” stands for “KDE advanced text editor”.
Dictionary Check word definitions and spellings in an online dictionary
GNOME Dictionary, also identified as gnome-dictionary, is a DICT client written in C by Emmanuele Bassi and others. It is part of the open-source GNOME desktop software suite, inside the gnome-utils meta-package. This allows users of GNOME to look up words on dictionary sources.
Terminal Terminal Emulator
A terminal emulator, terminal application, term, or tty for short, is a program that emulates a “dumb” video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a command line shell or text terminal, the term terminal covers all remote terminals, including graphical interfaces. A terminal emulator inside a graphical user interface is often called a terminal window.
Glade Interface Designer Design user interfaces
Glade Interface Designer is a graphical user interface builder for GTK+, with additional components for GNOME. In its third version, Glade is programming language–independent, and does not produce code for events, but rather an XML file that is then used with an appropriate binding (such as gtkada for use with the Ada programming language).
Audacious Play music
Audacious is a GUI-based free software media player for POSIX systems, such as Linux.
EasyTAG Tag Editor
EasyTAG is a utility for viewing and editing tags for MP3, MP2, MP4/AAC, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, Monkey’s Audio and WavPack files. Its simple and nice GTK+ interface makes tagging easier under GNU/Linux or Windows.
Galeon Web Browser Web Browser
Galeon is a web browser for GNOME based on Mozilla’s Gecko layout engine. Galeon’s self-declared mission was to deliver “the web and only the web.”
Bluefish Editor Create web pages
Bluefish is a free software/open source text editor for POSIX-conforming operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X. Its use is suitable for many programming and markup languages, with particular focus on their use for web development.
Add/Remove Software Add/Remove Software
Yakuake A Quake-style terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology.
Yakuake (Yet Another Kuake) is a KDE terminal emulator. Its design was inspired from consoles in computer games such as Quake which slide down from the top of the screen when a key is pressed, and slide back up when the key is pressed again.
gFTP Graphical FTP Client
gFTP is a free/open source multithreaded FTP client. It is most used on Unix-like systems, such as Linux and Mac OS X. It includes both a GUI (which utilizes the GTK+) and a command-line interface. gFTP is released under the terms of the GPL and has been translated into 41 languages.
Audacity Sound editor
Audacity is a digital audio editor application. Audacity is cross-platform, using the wxWidgets software library to provide a similar graphical user interface on several different operating systems. It is currently used in the OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.
Kaffeine Media Player
Kaffeine is a media player for Unix-like operating systems running KDE.
FreeCell Solitaire Play the popular FreeCell card game
FreeCell is a solitaire card game played with a 52-card standard deck. Although implementations vary, most versions label the hands with a number (derived from the random number seed used to generate the hand).
Character Map Insert special characters into documents
gucharmap is a Unicode character map program, part of GNOME desktop.
Wireshark Network Analyzer Wireshark traffic and network analyzer
Wireshark is a free packet sniffer computer application. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. In June 2006 the project was renamed from Ethereal due to trademark issues.
Dia Diagram Editor Edit your Diagrams
Dia (pronounced /dajə/) is free software/open source general-purpose diagramming software, developed as part of the GNOME project’s office suite and was originally created by Alexander Larsson. Dia uses a controlled single document interface (CSDI) similar to GIMP and Sodipodi.
gPodder Media aggregator
gPodder is a podcast receiver/catcher written in Python utilizing PyGTK for its graphical interface. Versions are available for Linux and FreeBSD.
gSTM gSTM
gSTM is a front-end for managing SSH-tunneled port redirects. It stores tunnel configurations in a simple XML format. The tunnels (local, remote and dynamic) can be managed and individually started/stopped through one simple interface.
PulseAudio Manager Manager your PulseAudio sound server.
A simple GTK frontend for the PulseAudio sound server
Leafpad Text Editor
Leafpad is a simple, lightweight, fast GTK text editor for Unix systems with few dependencies on external libraries. It is an example of computing minimalism and features a fast, almost instantaneous startup time on most modern hardware. Recent versions support printing. Mousepad, the standard text editor of the XFCE desktop environment is based on Leafpad.
Disc burning application Brasero Write and copy CD / DVD
Brasero is a free disc-burning program for Unix-like systems, which serves as a graphical front-end (using GTK+) to cdrtools, growisofs, and (optionally) libburn.
Crack Attack! A Puzzle Game
Crack Attack! is a free OpenGL game created by Daniel Nelson based on Tetris Attack for the Super Nintendo.
Sudoku GNOME Sudoku. a logic puzzle
Sudoku is a logic game with a Japanese name that has recently exploded in popularity.
KWrite Text Editor
KWrite is a lightweight text editor for the K Desktop Environment (KDE).
aMSN MSN Messenger for Linux
aMSN is a Windows Live Messenger clone licensed under the GPL. Its main objective is to assist users who are new to the GNU/Linux operating system keep in contact with those who use the Microsoft program which is available only on Windows and Macintosh. To achieve this objective, aMSN attempts to emulate the look and feel of Windows Live Messenger, and supports many of its features.
Firestarter Desktop Firewall Tool
Firestarter is a free and open source personal firewall tool that uses the Netfilter (iptables/ipchains) system built into the Linux kernel. It has the ability to control both inbound and outbound connections. Firestarter provides a graphical interface for configuring firewall rules and settings. It also provides real-time monitoring of all network traffic for the system. Firestarter also provides facilities for port forwarding, internet connection sharing and DHCP service.
Mahjongg Game. Disassemble a pile of tiles by removing matching pairs
Mahjongg is a solitaire (one player) version of the classic Eastern tile game, Mahjongg. The objective is to select pairs of similar tiles.
Sound Juicer CD Extractor
Sound Juicer is an application Front-End to the Cdparanoia CD ripping library. It allows the user to extract audio from compact discs and convert it into audio files that a personal computer or digital audio player can understand and play. It supports ripping to any audio codec supported by a GStreamer plugin, such as mp3 (via LAME), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and uncompressed PCM formats.
digiKam Photo Management
DigiKam is an image organizer and editor for the KDE desktop environment. It supports all major image formats, and can organize collections of photographs in directory-based albums, or dynamic albums by date, timeline, or by tags. Users can also add captions and ratings to their images, search through them and save searches as ’smart folders’. With the plugins they can also export albums to Flickr, Gallery2, Google Earth’s KML files, Simpleviewer, burn them on CD, or create web galleries.
Gaim Internet Messenger
Pidgin (formerly named Gaim) is a multi-platform instant messaging client. The software supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various different services from one application.
System Log View or monitor system log files
gnome-system-log – the GNOME System Log Viewer
Encryption Key Manager Manage your encryption keys
Seahorse is a GNOME front-end application for managing PGP and SSH keys. Seahorse integrates with Nautilus, gedit and Evolution for encryption, decryption and other operations. It has HKP and LDAP key server support.
Dolphin File Manager
Dolphin is a file manager for KDE. It is the default file manager for the current version, KDE 4, and can be optionally installed on KDE 3. Although replaced as the default file manager for KDE 4, Konqueror is still the default web browser, and can be used as an alternative file manager for power users.
Gtk-Gnutella P2P Client
gtk-gnutella is a peer-to-peer file sharing application for Unix-like computer operating systems, which runs on the Gnutella network. gtk-gnutella uses the GTK+ toolkit for its graphical user interface.
Software Installer Software Installer
gDeskcal A desktop calendar
gDeskCal is a calendar for your desktop. It features transparency with smooth alpha-blending and its appearance can be changed completely by using skins. It can also store and remind you about your appointments, and can even include the calendars of other iCalendar-compatible applications, such as Novell Evolution
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