I just installed so i dont know any!! Phantasm recommended the Ximian desktop so im gettin that..
any good programs for linux that you guys/girls like?
post em here!

MPlayer is the media player of choice:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/news.html

If you get this right (might be a little challenging for novice, as you have to compile it from source code, place codecs in correct directories, etc) then you can easily play DVDs and Divx movies, etc.

LinZip is a little like Winzip (more primitive, but you get the picture):

http://shareware.about.com/library/l..._utilities.htm


Try going to http://linux.tucows.com/ for more freeware and shareware linux programs. Their top 100 chosen softwares are here:

http://linux.tucows.com/toppicks.html

where you can see that you do get Realplayer and Netscape for Linux as well. In fact, Netscape for Linux is very nice indeed! Just go to the Netscape home page and click on the download link.

Good luck!

[url]www.freshmeat.net[/url]

A great site for open-source software. As for a GUI, if you like Ximian stay with it, but I prefer Xfce. There's many browsers already built in though, so unless you don't like them you've probably got like five to choose from.

Does anybody have a good solution for this problem?

I installed the frontends for mplayer, but when I run gmplayer from a console I get this:

SKIN dir 1: '/root/.mplayer/Skin'
SKIN dir 2: '/usr/local/share/mplayer/Skin'

Then it just hangs... Any good ideas? I'll be on IRC for a while if you're interested (FYI) :angel:

On Linux, I use Firefox, Thunderbird, GAIM, the GIMP, N|Vu, OO.o, VLC

On Windows I use... exactly the same combination

Only Linux-only programmes I think of as being half way decent are k3b and Evolution. The rest are dodgy clones or on Windows as well..

So this means...that we should all go back to Windoze? :unch:

Certainly not. Linux has a number of very good programs, certainly more than just two.

However, I think people who expect a workstation environment better than Windows are barking up the wrong tree. Linux offers a more interesting, versitile and adaptable development environment, full of helpful and interesting stuff connected with databases, web servers, c++, java, perl, php, and so forth.

If, however, you are looking for a better workstation experience, you are probably going to be disappointed. Most Linux advantages are under the hood and involve things more interesting to hackers like UNIX, databases, networking and programming. If these things interest you, then Linux is for you. If you are just into hardware and games, then you are probably not going to find much interesting in Linux.

Novell/SuSE Desktop is supposed to be a neat workstation product without all the bloat that is useless to your average user. Unfortunately it is not free :\