After four months on Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) I surprised myself the other
day by realising how few programs I’ve actually changed from Windows Xp.
Of course I used a lot of open source on windows anyway, and there
have been a few programs I haven’t been able to replace on a practical level.

So here’s a list (everybody’s making them, so why not me).

PDF viewer:
Xp: Adobe
Ubuntu: Adobe

Browser:
Xp: Firefox
Ubuntu: Firefox

Mail:
Xp:Thunderbird
Ubuntu: Thunderbird

html editor:
Xp: 1st Page 2000
Ubuntu: Bluefish

Simple Graphics:
Xp:Irfan View
Ubuntu: Irfan View (via WINE)

Complex Graphics:
Xp: Photofiltre:
Ubuntu: Gimp (still too complicated for me but see Gimp Quickies).

Photo organizer:
Xp:Picassa
(K)Ubuntu: Digikam

Music Organizer:
Xp:Songbird
Ubuntu:Songbird

FTP
Xp: Filezilla 2.5
Ubuntu: Filezilla 3 beta

Word Processing:
Xp: Open Office
Ubuntu :Open Office

Genealogy:
Xp: Personal Ancestral File, GenealogyJ
Ubuntu: Gramps (haven’t downloaded crossplatform GenealogyJ yet)

Anti-virus:
Xp: AVG
Ubuntu: AVG for Linux (they say you don’t need it but…)

Firewall:
Xp: Agnitum Fireall
Ubuntu: Firestarter

Dictionary/Thesaurus:
Xp: Wordweb
Ubuntu: Wordweb (via WINE)

Colour Picker:
Xp: Color Cop
Ubuntu: Color Cop (via WINE)

Mind Mapping:
Xp: Freemind
Ubuntu: None (haven’t downloaded Freemind yet and apparently it’s tricky to install on Ubuntu)

Media Pre-Production:
Xp: Celtx
Ubuntu: None.(haven’t downloaded Celtx yet. No script to write at present ;>)

Astronomy:
Xp: Stellarium
Ubuntu: None (haven’t downloaded Stellarium yet).

Sound Editor:
Xp: Audacity
Ubuntu: Audacity (except it isn’t working in Ubuntu - due to clashing sound codecs?)

Collection Manager:
Xp: MediaMan
Ubuntu: Tellico

File Extractor:
Xp: Zipgenius
Ubuntu: Nautilus Extract Here

OCR:
Xp: Omnipage SE
Ubuntu: hopefully the software on the 3-in-1 scanner when/if I get it working.

Unit converter
Xp: Numerical Chameleon
Ubuntu: None (Haven’t downloaded crossplatform Numerical Chameleon yet)

Tellico is for KDE, not Gnome, which I use, but works delightfully. Likewise DigiKam (I’d probably look at more in KDE, if every program didn’t have a K in it! The other new programs I’m very happy with are Bluefish Editor, Gramps Genealogy Project, and Geany Text Editor.

I’d prefer to make a clean sweep and not use WINE, but GIMP is too complicated at the moment (just takes time, I suppose), and I couldn’t get a powerful enough dictionary that I could install. Bluefish doesn’t have everything I want, but I can work around that very well. I tried to use Aptana, but it was too much for what I needed at present.
Zim Desktop Wiki is another new program which has proved useful (get it in Applications/Add Remove)

That’s it, I think. Comments welcome, as usual.