5 Most Underrated Linux Apps
Yeah, I’m going crazy with the number five. Let’s just do it.
FOSS is evolving. Computers are getting faster and cheaper. Nowadays, even open source software has a lot of internal competition, and with more processing power, developers are now able to churn out feature-rich applications. But do we need them? Most people go for the most popular apps, which everyone uses. Consequently, there is a multitude of apps which people don’t know that well. They are excellent programs, sadly though, you rarely see them on your average Linux user’s desktop.So here is a list of what I think are some of the most underrated Linux apps.
With the release of the new version on August the 8th, I think it’s time to introduce you folks to Cinelerra. Some people might think it’s ugly, or unintuitive, but Cinelerra’s true power lies in its capabilities, which may even surpass other modern non-linear video editing software. It’s something like the GIMP versus Photoshop: You can do almost all the stuff you want to, if you just learn Cinelerra’s way of doing things.
XMMS 2
The X Multimedia System, the ultimate alternative to Winamp, is being slowly dropped by users in favor of powerhouse players, such as Songbird, Banshee or AmaroK. There have been numerous fork like Audacious because of XMMS’ supposedly hard-to-maintain code-base, but nevertheless XMMS 2 remains a solid choice for users who just want a little app to play music with.
A small, lightweight browser, with some nice features. Well yeah, you don’t have the CSS bling, but who needs it if you just want to say, check your web-mail? I was always wondering why gOS doesn’t use it.
My favourite IDE with very few dependencies and support for tons of file-types, Geany is a cute little code editor. It is blazingly fast and sports many features teh big boys brag about.
Gnome Do
Note: I know some of the apps can be built and run on other operating systems.
Yep, Geany is good. If you’ve ever used Notepad++, Geany is then (Notepad++)++.
Some of these apps I know pretty well: Cinelerra is way too resource hungry, ugly and unstable; there’s no “cinelerra way” imho; plus I don’t see why Xmms2 is better than Audacious? As for Dillo: it’s worse than links or links2! Do you use it for something? Geany is nice though
[...] 5 Most Underrated Linux Apps [...]
I’m still on windows, who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind
Cinelerra is nowhere close to your comparison between Gimp and Photoshop. It crashes half the time I was using it but its only saving grace is it being the best video editing tool on Linux.
It is true that Cinelerra crashes a lot. In order for it to work better, you have to compile it, but after that it works great.
@troll: Why don’t you go troll somewhere else? Or delete yourself from the Internet?
I don’t think you’ve quite understood what xmms 2 is about
Thanks for your recommending, i want to have a try on my Fedora 9 desktop.
Why does gOS not use Dillo? Dillo is fairly nice (with tabs and so forth in the Debian version), but Hv3 doesn’t use much more resources and it has CSS and more complete HTML support so most basic web pages look the same as in your most used rendering engines (i.e., Gecko, KHTML, WebKit, Trident).
[...] Sure, there are some things that are still not available on the Linux desktop, but with WINE and all of the other cool software we love (Geany, Banshee…) gives us the power we [...]
I found Lynx more useful than Dillo. Geany seems nice, but I seems to work really well with Medit, so that one’s for me.
Gnome Do FTW – I can’t live without it.