Computersight -

If you have read about Linux, I’m sure that you will have heard that the software is free and there are thousands of choices of programs to install within the operating system. This article discusses the most popular Linux alternatives for Windows software.

Microsoft Office

The most popular office software in Linux is OpenOffice.org, which importantly, has been designed to be a replacement for MS Office and so can open up and save documents created in Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org includes Writer which is word processor and can also edit webpages like MS Frontpage, Calc spreadsheet software, Impress presentation software, Base database designer, Draw vector drawing program and Math formula editor. In the most popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org comes installed as default. There are also Windows and Mac versions.

Microsoft Publisher / QuarkXPress

A great program that I really enjoy is Scribus, which is a desktop publishing program that is constantly improving and is even being used by professional businesses. It can be used to create items from PDF presentations to books, posters, magazines and brochures and includes some good example files for these. More examples and templates of professional quality created by other users can be downloaded.

Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express

I would recommend either of two programs. The first is Evolution which includes an e-mail reader, contact manager, sticky-notes, to-do list and a calendar and comes pre-installed in many Linux distributions. The second program is Mozilla Thunderbird which is a popular e-mail program that has a great feature in that many user created extensions that can be downloaded that improve the program in many different ways, from themes to dictionaries.

MSN Messenger / AIM / Yahoo Messenger

The most popular messenger program is Pidgin, which not only allows you to long into your msn account, but also includes support for multiple messenger services such as Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, GoogleTalk and others that I’ve never heard of. Other good programs include aMSN which tries to copy the feel of MSN and Kopete for the KDE desktop environment.

Internet Explorer

The most popular alternative on both Linux and Windows is Mozilla Firefox which is a great web-browser that like the Thunderbird e-mail software can be changed and configured with various themes and a great number of add-ons such as advertisement blockers, RSS readers, spell-checkers and many more. An alternative is the Opera browser which is very quick at opening web-pages. Also, The Konqueror file manager can even be used as a web browser.

Skype

Even though the most popular alternative is Ekiga, Skype runs perfectly in the most popular Linux distributions so there isn’t really a point to changing.

BitTorrent / uTorrent

Azureus is probably the most popular choice for downloading .torrent files, however I think the Transmission or Deluge programs are just as popular and tend to use less system resources to run.

Photoshop

Even though it’s not yet as feature-rich as Photoshop, a program called The Gimp is a great alternative and there is constant development on it to improve it.

Itunes / Windows Media Player

For listening to music and organizing your music files the two most popular programs are either Amorak or Rhythmbox which come with many features such as CD player, library, playlist, MP3 player support and online radio station support.

For playing videos, VLC is a great program that can play all types of video formats, DVD’s and music files.

Partition Magic

GParted is a great free program for managing partitions which is included in most of the major Linux distributions and can even be downloaded and booted separately of a CD.

Nero / DVD and CD Burning

For burning video CD’s and DVD’s I recommend an excellent program called DeVeDe, and for burning audio, data, image files and copying disks, Brasero is an excellent program (and also includes video burning)

However, if you want to install Linux but don’t want to change from the Windows software, some Windows programs such as MS Office can be run from within Linux. This is done by using an emulator such as the free WINE or the not so free crossover Office which can successfully install and run some Windows programs from within Linux.