mario a. spinthiras

Ubuntu always had a super challenging task of proving worthy to desktop users. This task is Ubuntu’s burden twice as heavy as any other operating systems simply because there weren’t enough believers in the world to back it up. Now that Ubuntu has been proven to be the nicest of things Linux has given us , supersede it’s expectations and continues to grow strong ; here are some applications which you might have not noticed before but are essential to improve your desktop experience and make Ubuntu on your puter just a little better , enhancing the Ubuntu experience and making your life easier.

Gnome-Do: Those of you who have used Launchy on Windows or Spotlight on a Macintosh will fall in love with gnome-do. Hit <super>+Space and voila , up do comes , and awaits for your instructions. Personally I think its the bets launcher I have ever seen and I am surprised other operating systems have nothing like this ! It can definately improve your application launches and quick searches. It also supports plugins that allow you to include more desktop functionality into gnome-do.

Screenlets: If you were ever envy of an Apple’s dashboard or surprised Google never got widgets and the sidebar running on the Linux version of Google Desktop then maybe you shouldn’t be anymore. Screenlets is an application that offers modular widgets for your desktop that offer a pleathora of uses depending on each widget. They can be made sticky , widget , kept below or above other apps and they offer some very nice eye candy and functionality.

Avant-window-navigator: Once again if you ever felt the Apple’s dock is just beautiful then you are going to love awn. AWN is a macintosh-like dock , fully customizable , theme-enabled and ties in wth Ubuntu’s desktop functionality almost perfectly. This began as a Google summer of code project and grew into something very nice. Can fully replace your panel with window lists and give a better look.

Listen: Listen is a music player much like Rhythmbox but surely a little more functional. The look doesn’t change that much from one to the other but it feels like a smarter music player never the less. With smart playlists and other intelligent functions. It also includes plugins for lyrics , last.fm integration and Jamendo live streaming music.

Emerald: Emerald is a window border manager for composite window managers such as beryl and compiz-fusion. It actively replaces metacity (or kwin if you are running KDE) with a much more customizable backend. The functionality allows themes to become very stylish since it supports more than the default window border manager (metacity).

Google Desktop: Those of you who don’t know what Google desktop is , wake up! It’s the smartest app to index all your files into one big database for easier and clever searching of your files. The Linux version comes in .deb packages to make installation a 2-click process. After that hit ctrl twice , and enjoy searching your desktop the proper way.

network-manager-vpnc: This is a plugin that adds Cisco VPN compatible functionality to the gnome network-manager. It makes VPN session handling a breeze.

VLC: VLC stands for Video Lan Client. It can play pretty much everything you throw at it. Not exactly the prettiest player in the world but it can play any format you give it.

Ubuntu-resitricted-extras: Installing this package will pull in support for MP3 playback and decoding,
support for various other audio formats (gstreamer plugins), Microsoft fonts,
Java runtime environment, Flash plugin, LAME (to create compressed audio files),
and DVD playback.

Ubuntu-laptop-mode: Laptop mode is a Linux kernel feature that allows the system to reduce power
consumption by allowing the hard drive to spin down for longer periods of
time. Do note that this package removes ubuntu-desktop package which is a set for the desktop users.

Gparted: gparted is an application that handles partitions. You can easily and effectively create , resize , destroy and format partitions on the fly.

I am very sure there are more available to Linux than just the above but all I wanted to mention were the applications that I notice on my desktop and how they make life a little more functional and easier with Ubuntu. Congratulations to how Ubuntu is going and we hope to see more in the future.