Hi,

Perhaps for most of you this will be a not inteligent question but I will ask it anyway.

I'm thinking to take the big step and leave windows behind me. For WebServers, mailservers and firewall Linux is well known, but now I wonder can I use it as desktop?
Do there exists programs like text editors, mail clients, GUI webdevelopment tools like Visual Interdev or must it all be done with Perl, JAVA and PHP?

Thx in advance for your feedback.

DC7

yes, there are many versions of each of the apps you listed.

for example, office suites:

star office, abiword, koffice, many more

html editors:

quanta+ , bluefish, more

mail clients, too many to list


go to http://www.suse.com/en/produkte/suse...rof/index.html and look at the included apps for more examples

[Edited by rshaw on 05-31-2001 at 04:26 PM]

Most types (if not all) of program are available for Linux (whatever distro you're using). However, a lot of them are only available as source code, and must therefore be compiled on your machine. This is not as hard as it sounds! There is bound to be a readme or install text file with the source code, which contains instruction on how to compile programs. Also, if you're feeling adventurous, you could try your hand at programming yourself - not everything is C/C++/Perl/Python/Java/etc. I recently discovered X-Basic curtosy of this web-site. Also, there is Euphoria (not really tried this yet, still getting to grips with Xbasic).

Do report back on your progress.

To my suprise when I first installed Linux, I was amazed at all the apps that came along with the install.
Compared to Windows, Linux came with about everything I needed and there was really no need to go download or even install anything else. Unless I just wanted to try it out.