Finding Applications
From ArkWiki
What applications can replace your favorite Windows/Mac applications on Linux? All applications listed below and at Finding Applications That You Need (formatted as a table) are freely available.
[edit] Audio Editing
Rezound, soniK, Kwave, and (for format conversion) Konqueror right click action menus
Konqueror is part of a standard Ark Linux installation, the others are freely available through Mission Control -> Install Software.
[edit] Desktop Publishing (replacing e.g. PageMaker, Publisher)
A relative newcomer to open source, is "Scribus", a very worthwhile desktop publisher. Not quite as feature-rich yet as Adobe Pagemaker or Microsoft Publisher, it is nonetheless very effective. You may also want to check out KWord -- it's a word processor that heavily borrows desktop publisher design elements.
Scribus is included in a standard Ark Linux install. kword can be installed through Mission Control -> Install Software.
[edit] Development Environment (replacing e.g. Visual Studio)
KDevelop and Qt Designer are nicely GUI. For CLI, we have the nearly universal gcc/g++ system. KDevelop and Qt Designer can be installed through Mission Control -> Install Software, and are included in the Ark Development Suite add-on CD.
[edit] Office (replacing e.g. Microsoft Office, WordPerfect Office)
OpenOffice is very close to a total replacement for Microsoft Office, including Word (OpenOffice Writer), Excel (OpenOffice Calc), and PowerPoint (OpenOffice Impress). It also has an Access equivalent (OpenOffice Base), though Base is not quite up to snuff yet. kexi (installable through Mission Control -> Install Software) is a better Access replacement for the time being. OpenOffice works very well and is the most compatible, but for more speed on older hardware, you may prefer KOffice.
OpenOffice is included in a standard Ark Linux installation, KOffice is available in Mission Control -> Install Software.
[edit] PDF Creation and Viewing (replacing Acrobat)
OpenOffice, KOffice, and Scribus will easily generate PDFs from any of their content. kpdf reads PDFs very well, and it automatically integrates itself with the Konqueror browser and file manager.
OpenOffice, Scribus, kpdf and Konqueror are part of a standard Ark Linux installation, KOffice is available in Mission Control -> Install Software.
[edit] Photo and Image Management
Konqueror (in icon view mode), Digikam and Digikam's ShowPhoto, and Gwenview
Konqueror and Gwenview are part of a standard Ark Linux installation, Digikam is available in Mission Control -> Install Software
[edit] Raster Image Editing (replacing PhotoShop, PhotoPaint)
Krita is included in a standard installation, and works very well.
GIMP is also available in Mission Control -> Install Software. GIMP has some functionality that Krita is currently missing, but it is much harder to use.
[edit] Text Editing (replacing e.g. notepad)
kwrite is the default, and is rather nice for many purposes. There are quite a few more available, including kate, kedit, nano, and others.
[edit] Vector Graphics (replacing e.g. CorelDraw, Xara)
For vector graphics, we have Karbon14, Inkscape, and OpenOffice Draw.
OpenOffice Draw is part of a standard install, the others are available in Mission Control -> Install Software.
[edit] Video and Audio Players (replacing e.g. Windows Media Player, iTunes)
Kmplayer can play virtually any video file, and is included in the standard installation. Amarok, also included in the standard installation, can play pretty much every audio file, including iTunes.
Several other video and audio players, such as Smplayer, Xine, Kaffeine, and VLC are ready to install through Mission Control -> Install Software.
[RealPlayer for Linux] can be retrieved from Real, however, you will find Kmplayer and Smplayer do a better job unless you need support for Real's proprietary video format.
[edit] Video Editors
cinelerra and kdenlive are available in Mission Control -> Install Software
[edit] VNC
A Linux port of VNC is available -- on the server side, use x11vnc (available through Mission Control -> Install Software).
On the client side, Ark includes krdc. This is the standard VNC client for the K desktop environment. It does both VNC and RDP, the remote desktop protocol set up by a certain very large company whose name begins with M.
[edit] WWW (replacing Internet Explorer, others)
Konqueror is included in the standard installation.
Firefox is available in Mission Control -> Install Software, but we (the developers) recommend trying Konqueror even if you're used to Firefox -- Konqueror has many advantages, such as being tightly integrated with the rest of the system, allowing better handling of many downloaded files. It can also disguise itself as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape Navigator for pages that will load in only those browsers.
[edit] Getting actual Windows applications to run
Finding a native Linux application is almost always a better choice - but many Windows applications can run on Ark Linux (just click on a .exe file to try to launch it)-no promises that it will work, though, because Wine (the Windows application interface for Linux) is yet incomplete.
Some applications may need tweaking in order to run - see How to get Windows applications to run for some examples. More examples may be found at http://frankscorner.org/
