Best of FREE Linux Apps

We covered a list of best free Mac OS X apps few weeks back. It’s time to show the love to the penguin.

Lifehacker has again come up with an incredible list of free linux apps. A lot of the apps are what I use as well. So, here it is with a few of my own additions.

Productivity

• Gnome-do: A Launchy like app.
• OpenOffice.org – A Microsoft Office alternative that works great on all OSs.
• gedit: A customizable text editor and extensible with plugins.
• AutoKey: Texter for linux! You can save short keywords for long text blocks and insert it easily anywhere.

Internet/Communication

• Firefox – browser of choice for many
• Google Chrome – new Google’s browser worthy of a try
• Thunderbird – A great desktop email client
• Pidgin – one of the best instant messaging clients for Linux
• Skype – does it any introduction?
• Transmission – Not as feature-rich as the Mac counterpart but a great bittorrent client nevertheless.
• TweetDeck – Your social networking dashboard for Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn, etc.

Media

• VLC – The best media player client of my choice on any platform. [VLC review]
• Handbrake – One of the best media converter that can pretty much convert any format to your format of your choice.
• GIMP – Open source graphic editing programthat can save you hundreds of moolah.
• Rhythmbox – A great music player

Utilities

• Dropbox – One of the best multi-OS file sync that integrates with the native file system seamlessly.
• Wine – Even hardcore Linux fans sometimes have a need to run a Windows program. Wine makes it easy to run a Windows program from inside Linux.
• Conky – A customizable system monitor for linux
• Yahuake – a snappy dropdown terminal
• VirtualBox – a free virtual machine that lets you run other operating systems within Linux.
• p7zip – A linux version of 7-zip utility.

I posted a bunch of free apps I am thankful for and you will see I listed a lot of the above apps.

If you are looking for some of the best open source software to download in one shot, check out the OpenDisc project for Windows.

Also, check out Ninite project for more free windows software packaged for ease of use.

{ via Lifehacker }