Best Under the Radar Linux Apps

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Now that Jessie's dropped and PowerPC users are more or less working out the kinks, I thought it was time to share some of our favorite under the radar Linux apps that don't get the publicity they deserve. By "under the radar," I mean applications that generally don't get bundled with full desktop environments like Gnome or LXDE. So no VLC, no Evince, no Abiword, no default applications or anything like that. Instead, these are apps you had to hunt down yourself and were rewarded with unexpectedly great features and ease of use.

So here are a few of my favorites:

Qalculate! – This is a calculator app that's as comprehensive as I've seen. Currency exchange, functions of every kind, and graphing are among the many features.

Xournal – Seems to be primarily a handwriting app, but it also features simple PDF editing. This is great for filling out government forms where you only have to enter some text and a signature and you don't want to deal with LibreOffice.

Artha – An offline dictionary, you can also have it running in the background and call it up by highlighting a word and hitting a key-combo. Really comprehensive information, and did I say it was an offline dictionary

Shutter – Zen loves this and so do I. It's a screenshot plus markup utility and uploader. So it's a lot like Skitch.

LMMS – Linux Multimedia Studio, this is actually distributed with some audio production-centered distros, but in my opinion it should be distributed with every distro (like a Garageband for Linux). It's that good, and it's perhaps the best example of open source software, one that's intuitive and fun like classic Mac software used to be.

What are your favorite under the radar Linux apps?
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21 comments:

  1. Alberto Mi14 June 2015 at 23:29

    I just only have a few apps working on my main machine but they are the best for me:
    - Kupfer. I discovered this great piece of software thanks to Zen, and is so simple and powerful that I need it daily.
    - FocusWriter. My main writing software. Plain and simple.
    - Remmina. Remote desktop for others computers in my network.
    - Rawtherapee. powerful software for photo edition. I moved from Lightroom to this one, and i am in love with it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. zen15 June 2015 at 18:01

      I actually found out about Kupfer from Dan, so he deserves that credit.

      Delete
    2. Dan15 June 2015 at 23:30

      I'm interested in Remmina. I'll have to check that out.

      Delete
    3. rican-linux19 June 2015 at 09:43

      Remmina is really good client. I used it to VNC into my VMs that I ran as containers.

      Delete
  2. zen15 June 2015 at 06:29

    I do like Shutter a lot, yes, but my personal favourite under the radar app would be SMplayer. It's a fork of Mplayer for those that don't know.

    As a CorePlayer owner I do most of my video playback on Mac OS, but when on Linux I always use SMplayer.

    I also like Kupfer a hell of a lot, and few people seem to be aware of it, so I guess it's under the radar also.

    ReplyDelete
  3. fiftysixk15 June 2015 at 10:50

    I'm not sure if this is under the radar or not but I really like Geany. It's a nice graphical text editor with syntax highlighting. So far I've used it for some basic Python lessons.

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    Replies
    1. Dan15 June 2015 at 23:43

      This looks impressive, more like a lightweight IDE than just a text editor.

      Delete
  4. rican-linux15 June 2015 at 18:00

    Here are some of mine:

    slypheed a lightweight email client with gpg support

    glances a cli system monitoring tool

    quassel a robust IRC client.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. zen15 June 2015 at 18:05

      Sylpheed is bundled with Lubuntu, and I think at least one Puppy distro, so that excludes it based on Dan's guidlines.

      I haven't used Lubuntu since 13.04, so maybe it isn't bundled any longer. I'm not sure. It was at least.

      Delete
  5. rican-linux15 June 2015 at 18:09

    It is not in 14.04 but I think you are right in that it is still listed on the Lubuntu Blog.

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    Replies
    1. zen15 June 2015 at 18:13

      So what is the new default mail client in Lubuntu?

      Delete
    2. rican-linux15 June 2015 at 18:21

      They did not include one in 14.04 at least not in the PowerPC distribution. I had to install it.

      Delete
  6. Anonymous16 June 2015 at 05:41

    Docky is pretty great.

    ReplyDelete
  7. B-rock19 June 2015 at 05:21

    I love the RSS feed aggregator Liferea and the Twitter client Turpial. I'm not on Twitter a whole lot, but I like to use it to share small useful tidbits of information, mostly for my own notes. I'd also second Remmina. I use it for both RDP and VNC connections.

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  8. Jacob Latmer19 June 2015 at 05:35

    For me it would be pretty much any chess game that works well. I'm addicted to chess.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous19 June 2015 at 06:42

    Netatalk is great. It doesn't seem to be available in Jessie though, because I cannot find it in any package manager.

    ReplyDelete

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