What can Linux do for me?
Answering that question would probably take longer than watching grass grow. A better question would be, "What can't I do with Linux?" There really isn't much you can't do with Linux. With its rapidly growing popularity, not only is it opening doors to new possibilities but also creating a wide variety of doors to open. Graphics, developing, multimedia, and building servers are just a few areas in which many would say Linux excels. In reality, Linux is great all around.
Perhaps a more helpful question to ask would be, "What do I want to do with Linux?" If most of your experiences on Mac or Windows platforms have been doing simple tasks, then you, more than likely, have been using common communication, word processing, and web browser software. Rather than spend time talking about every linux application available to you we'll just focus on some of the the essentials to get you started.
Before we get too far into this I'd like to point out that linux applications fall into one of two categories. Applications with text interfaces and applications with graphical interfaces. The text based interface of linux is called the console while the graphical interface uses something known as X11 which you'll learn more about later. Since Linux is based on UNIX there's a large amount of console applications and utilities. It's only within the last few years that graphical interfaces have become a major focus, and since then graphical applications have began popping up everywhere and are evolving rapidly.
Now on to the essential applications...
Office Applications
Probably of most importance to many of you is the Office Suites, these are the applications that you do your documents and spreadsheets in. Some examples that you might be familiar with are Microsoft Office, Claris Works or even Apple Works. These are replaced by applications such as StarOffice, KOffice, Applixware, Corel Wordperect and many more
Email Clients
The Internet and Email are almost synonymous and linux is certainly able to handle both quite well with such mail clients as kmail, spruce, netscape and mozilla. There's also a number of more traditional console mail programs still in use such as pine and mutt.
Graphic Editors & Manipulators
Probably one of the best known applications is The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). The Gimp is a freely available graphics package with features that rival commercial available programs such as photoshop. There's also the set of image utilities known as ImageMagick that can be used either interactively or from commands typed into the console. If you want an image viewer electric eyes or xv should be able to handle darned near every image.
Audio & Video
For video clips xanim is a compact player able to play a variety of types including avi, and quicktime mov. DVD's can be played with some help from the folks at Livid and an mpeg player like gtv or mtv. You might want to check out the HOWTO on getting DVD's working under linux here although it's abit complicated at this point.
For the audio enthusiast xmms is a full featured clone of the popular winamp/macamp software. For those of you running linux on older computers that don't a fancy theme able interface a simple console mp3 player such as mpg123 will probably do the trick.
Netscape is one of the more common browsers in use under linux, featuring a familiar graphical interface and integrated mail and news it's an all in one client. Mozilla is a project based on the Netscape source that was released in 1998, mozilla consists of periodic releases called milestones which mark mark the current progress. Arena though not as flashy as some of the others is a small fully functional web browsers. A more complete list of web browsers is available here.
Internet Chat
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is used in the linux community as a way of working with others and getting technical assistance. One such IRC client is XChat which is similar to the windows mIRC program, another program for those that prefer console applications is BitchX. You'll also find replacements for ICQ and AIM clients such as GICQ and GAIM
Card Games & Desktop Toys
No desktop would be complete without a solitaire and minesweeper, so here they are PySol, minesweeper, gnome-freecell and there's plenty more distractions where that came from.
Finance Managers
You'll find a variety of accounting software here at Metalab's linux archive, also available are X-Accountant and Freeside. I should point out that gnucash which is listed in the Metalab archive also has a website here.
Web Page Editors
Trying to start a webpage but don't want to write it out by hand in a text editor? The folks at the world wide web consortium (w3c) have an excellent editor called Amaya. You can also download a beta version of IBM's TopPage html editor for linux.
Voice Recognition
If you need a way to run linux without a keyboard, or just want a cool way to impress your friends there's a few voice recognition applications available for linux. IBM has a linux version of their popular ViaVoice software. Xvoice and CVoiceControl are also good, XVoice works on any X11 application while CVoiceControl is intended for use on the linux console. More...
System Utilities, Backup & Recovery
This would probably be a good place to talk about virus scanning programs with the exception of the fact that there aren't any known viruses for linux. The reason there aren't any any viruses for linux is mostly two key things, linux uses user permissions such that a user is unlikely to have permissions to hurt the system and also the fact that linux programs are generally distributed ins source form -- if there's a potential bug chances are someone's spotted it and posted a patch before you'll run across it.
More?
This is by no means a complete list of applications available for linux and only lists some of the more common ones to get you started. If you're still looking for something check Linux.com's links section and also freshmeat which keeps track of what's new in unix/gnu software.
