[TriLUG] Best Linux Desktop and Desktop Apps?

[Benjamin Reed]

On 3/10/06, Tarus Balog <tarus at opennms.org> wrote:

> 1) What should I look at in terms of a nice, clean, powerful desktop?
> I like KDE. Is there a distro out there that is stable enough to use
> in a mission critical application (i.e. my desktop) that is current
> enough to contain lots of cool, bright, shiny things? I think Debian
> is out since I don't want to run sid. CentOS? Ubuntu? I doubt anyone
> has duplicated the usefulness of Exposé, but one can hope.

kubuntu sounds like the way to go, then  ;)

> Office: OpenOffice, KOffice?

OO. at this point, although KOffice 1.5 will have a bunch of updates,
it's still not got the momentum OOo has.

> iTunes: xmms?

There are a number of pretty spiffy itunes-like ("my music is a
database", as opposed to "my music is an album") apps out there now. 
Amarok for KDE is very full-featured and seems to handle even large
databases reasonably well.  There's also Banshee, which appears to be
shaping up to be a nice itunes competitor for mono (our very own Aaron
Bockover works on it).

> Photoshop: Gimp
> Mail: Thunderbird
> Browser: Firefox
> Widgets: ?

superkaramba for KDE does dashboard-like stuff, although I've never
played with it myself.

> Calendar: ?
> Address Book: ?
> Adium: ?

gaim?  kopete for KDE?  kopete seems reasonably like adium, haven't
used gaim for a while so I can't speak for it.

> iPhoto: Gallery?

I hear picasa runs under wine...  ;)

> iMovie: ?
> iDVD: ?

Not sure about this.

> 3) Connectivity: How is the current support for wireless (I love the
> "Location" feature of OSX) and bluetooth? iSync?

dunno about bluetooth and isync, but the FC5 previews and probably
others come with NetworkManager which does the "give me a connection
on whatever happens to be working" spiffiness that OSX does.