Best Open Source Softwares
 

Hello all !

I am trying to make the list of the best Open Source Softwares on Linux.

I have made a first try at my web site.

Here it is :
CD BURNING : K3B
ANTIVIRUS : NO VIRUS WITH LINUX !
EXPLORER : FIREFOX
DOWNLOAD MANAGER: ?
EMAIL CLIENT : EVOLUTION ?
CHAT : XCHAT
P2P : BITTORENT ?
FTP CLIENT: GFTP
INSTANT MESSAGING : GAIM
WEB SERVER : APACHE
FIREWALL : IP CHAINS
OFFICE : OPENOFFICE
PDF : XPDF
DATABASES : MySQL
PROXY : SQUID
MUSIC READER: XMMS
TV CARD: KWINTV
IMAGE READER: GIMP
VIDEO READER: MPLAYER
ZIP : GZIP
SCANNER : XSANE
3D MAKER: BLENDER
GAMES : FreeCiv, TuxKart, FlightGear, TuxRacer, FreeCraft, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (ET), Half-Life Server, Persistent Online Worlds, BZFlag
MONEY MANAGER: GNUCash

What do you think of it ?

Not to shoot you in the knee caps, but this has been done more than a few times on this site. Annually there's something of an awards given to best app in a certain category. Nevertheless:

I like XCDRoast or cdrecord for cd burning.
Prozilla for downloading (althoug it can get you killed on some servers :D)
EMail Client: Pine w/fetchmail
Web Server: c'mon there is no other web server besides Apache (even on a Windows box) ;-)
Image Manipulation: Gimp for doing it by hand, ImageMagick for scripting
Games: You mean there are other games besides BzFlag? :D

Cheers.

Several of the games you listed are not free as in open source, only free as in free beer. Perhaps you should consider it a list of good free (as in beer) apps instead?

Viruses do exist for Linux, and Linux systems often propagate Windows virii (through email, etc). The fact that virii are less common on Linux than on Windows is not an excuse not to use antivirus software, especially on servers that handle email and/or share files with Windows users. There are several antivirus programs for Linux (McAffee, and more), both commercial, free (Bitdefender, F-Secure, and so on) ones and open ones (can't remember any names at the moment).

wget and curl are good downloaders, although not the pretty GUI ones you often see in Windows. There are GUI ones for Linux though, but I expect most or all of them just are frontends for the above mentioned command line utilities.

I also consider lftp very superior to gFTP.

Håkan

gcc...

I would venture to say:
FIREWALL : IPTABLES
and my P2P would be DCGUI

the rest is pretty much on target.

Best Open Source Softwares
 

Hello all,

thanks for your nice answers.

First I intend to make a list of the "best available Open Source softwares". Rootyard : I didnt mean I was the first to do that.
I sure dont want to list free or commercial softwares, but only -Open Source-, which I think is the best way to have high quality and of course high end programms.
I made this list for myself first : I am tired to have dozens of softwares on my linux box which I dont know about or will never use !
I would like to clean it up and only keep the best open source softwares to run on it.
So after the kernel, the XFree and the gnu tools, I had to make a choice :-)
I dont know every software that exist, thats why I am asking different people here to help me make a better choice. It goes faster than searching them all myself and trying them all.
On the list I would like to keep only one software (except for the games of course) : the most up to date and of the best quality. One with a GUI would be nice too...even if I use man online commands. Thats a tough question I know because quality is subjective, but lets try it anyway. Why having 2 different softwares which do the same thing ? Taking the best is more appropriate and especially for the open source community, it is good to concentrate our efforts. FORKING the tree is the thing to avoid, isnt it ?

About viruses, ok let us not forget to scan them if we find them : so who knows about an open source antivirus ?
For downloading client : Prozilla ? wget ? curl ?
Email Client : Pine w/fetchmail ? EVOLUTION ?
Games : the open source games. So that will be : BzFlag .. ? no idea LOL
Ftp client : lFTP or Gftp ? why is lftp better ?
FIREWALL : I thought that Ipchains were newer and more efficient than IPTABLES ?
P2P : nothing else than DCGUI ?
Lets add some gnu tools to the list ?
compiler : gcc
Editor : emacs
etc.

Thanks for your help.

not all open source is created equally. There are many unstable open source projects because code is added and it's just not right or they used a run around to get it to work. I program some and I know that if I have to I'll use a run around to get something to work(in the case of little utility software for personal use).
I'm not saying something on that list is a bad program...just don't assume that opensource is always better.

Keep in mind that if you're planning to "clean it up and only keep the best open source softwares to run on it" that many GUI applications are merely frontends for console apps (k3b and xsane for examples)...if you remove the engine, the frontend won't work.

p2p= BITTORRENT
Browser= Firefox
irc= BitchX
Gimp
XmmS
mplayer
gcc
joe

iptables is newer I thought because you cannot run it on earlier kernels.

Onemessedupjedi :
It happens exactly the same for closed source : unstable code, many run arounds. But the worst thing is that we dont know it (because we cannot see the source).
Independance and freedom are the keys for quality. Money doesnt make quality.
GPL and GNU are vital for linux. "Best things in life are free". Linux is one of them :-)

Mossy
Mea culpa Iptables are more recent and better. I was too quick to answer...

mikshaw
how do I know which engine is related to a GUI ?
and how to be certain to keep only minimum when cleaning up ?

I am still wondering about these :
DOWNLOAD MANAGER : PROZILLA ?
EMAIL CLIENT : PINE, EVOLUTION ?
ANTIVIRUS : any open source ?

By the way my web site is http://www.ifrance.com/programmershouse/
The softs list is at : http://www.ifrance.com/programmershouse/SOFT-EN.HTML

This is something you'll need to research...sometimes doing "man <application>" will give you a text which will tell you if a particular application is a frontend to a particular engine....sometimes you'll need to consult a README or the developer's website.
In addition, some applications tend to be a bit vague about the fact that they are essentially only frontends. Take K3B for example....the developers claim it to be a CD burner with many features....only after you dig a little deeper into the documentation do you discover that the true magic is in cdrecord, mkisofs, and dvd+rw-tools. Without these prerequisites, K3B is useless.

I have used neither, but there is ClamAV and OpenAntiVirus:

http://openantivirus.org/ - Seems dead :(

http://clamav.net/

-uniQ

I reckon Mutt for email.

# Comment on Linux viri
In order for a Linux virus to work, you have to be dumb enough to run it as root. So you really only need antivirus software for Linux servers that share files with Windows users, or if you are stupid.

# Favorite Programs
Multimedia: XMMS
CD-Burning: X-CD-Roast
P2P: LimeWire

# Synopsis
I was too lazy to go on.