PaintSupreme is a powerful image manipulation tool available for Linux, with support for various painting tools, layers and effects, and written using Qt4. The paid version costs $5.99, however a trial version is available for those interested in a commercially supported alternative to Photoshop on Linux.
Besides from being a powerful development environment, Emacs is cataloged by some as an entire operating system, since it provides many more features. Let’s have a look at some of the features that come with Emacs, which are pretty much programs in their own right, although included in Emacs.
Emacs is a very powerful integrated development environment – but not only:
jAlbum is a feature-rich web gallery creator written in Java which provides a 30-day trial, after which you can purchase a paid license to continue using it. Although not free, you get a powerful photo and video manager in return.
Also known as WPS Office Suite (Writer, Presentation and Spreadsheet), Kingsoft Office is a commercial, closed-source office suite which offers both a free version and a paid variant of its suite. While the paid version bears the name Professional Office 2013 and is available for $69.95, I will overview the free suite, which looks powerful and feature-complete.
Midori is a GTK-based browser with a clean interface that resembles the one of Google Chrome, using the WebKit rendering engine, and offering plenty of the usual features browsers like Firefox or Chrome ship with.
There was a time when office compatibility was a bit of a problem on Linux, but with the latest office suites out there available for Linux, this is not an issue anymore. The applications here mimic MS Excel’s behavior, so switching to one of them should be pretty straightforward. Exporting and importing to and from MS Excel format works as well, and there aren’t many compatibility issues – however, the native format these programs use is the OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) format.
LibreOffice Calc
This is the spreadsheet application which comes with the powerful LibreOffice suite. This seems to be the most feature-rich and powerful spreadsheet application for Linux. It has support for formulas, charts, text/cell formatting, inserting images, macros, exporting/importing files from MS Excel, saving to OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) format, PDF export function, powerful configuration options.
XBMC is a home theater application which runs in fullscreen, has a beautiful, modern interface, support for pictures, music and video collections and playlists, television and radio.
A few days ago I overviewed Calligra, the KDE office suite, which also includes Krita, the powerful image editing tool. Although I’ve mentioned it as being free, it looks like Krita Gemini, which is the name by which Krita goes on Steam, actually costs $22.99, covering the work needed to build, release and maintain it on Steam.
Krita 2.8.1 in KDE:
Medit is a somewhat simple text editor with all the usual features you would expect from it: it has support for tabs, syntax highlighting, indentation and more.
One of the new changes in the latest release of SMPlayer is the version system, which changed and now follows a two-digit year and month number, in a similar way to Ubuntu for example. Hence, the latest version is 14.3, and was put out a few hours ago, while the previous version was 0.8.6.
When it comes to file managers, there’s such a rich range to choose from on Linux, one could get confused and just go with the default one provided by their distribution or desktop environment (like most do, actually). However, Dolphin or Nautilus are not the only kids on the block here. After reviewing Sunflower, it’s time to have a look at yet another twin-panel file browser, namely, Double Commander, which is a powerful twin-panel file manager which provides interfaces for both GTK and Qt, so it blends well in both GNOME and KDE, depending on which version you install, and comes with a bunch of configuration options and usability features.
Although it describes itself as a minimalist file manager, I have only words of praise for Sunflower, since it rather gathers a lot of features in a compact interface, and I do believe it needs a bit more attention. Sunflower is a twin-panel file manager with a somewhat different approach compared to standard GNOME/KDE/Xfce file browsers, written in GTK with several notable features and support for plugins.
This is an overview providing 10 Linux open-source replacements for various commercial power tools, most of them available only on Windows.
Computer-Aided Design: AutoCAD
Replacement: QCAD
It’s true, QCAD has some paid plug-ins, but they can be removed very easy and QCAD will offer most of AutoCAD’s features in a similar fashion, but with an interface that is maybe 10 times faster. The good thing about QCAD is that those who are used to AutoCAD can make the transition pretty easily, since QCAD has similar syntax for commands, and similar menu entries.
