Applications for Switchers

This section will highlight and explain some of the applications available in Ubuntu that are similar to standard tools on other operating systems, and allow for doing tasks like word processing, image manipulation and video, media players, web browsing, local area networking, and instant messaging. Many of these applications look and act similar to their counterparts on other operating systems.

Office Software

The Open Office package is suite of tools for word processing, spreadsheet creation, presentations, academic writing and other document creation common to an office. A lot of the tasks you might do in the Microsoft Office suite on Windows can be done using Open Office. The basic layout and functionality of the two suites is very similar.

All the Open Office application components are available under Applications->Office .

Image Manipulation and Video Software

The Gimp, which stands for The GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a program for drawing, painting and editing images. Many of the tools and plugins available in The Gimp are similar to the ones in Adobe Photoshop, or other bitmap based editors. The Gimp also provides scriptable operations and manipulation with bindings to various open source scripting languages.

The Gimp has support for reading and writing a variety of media types including proprietary formats such as those of Adobe Photoshop (.psd files). Support for scanners and printers is also available. There are a lot of other tools for image manipulation covering a massive range of formats, though The Gimp is one of the few applications that presents its tools and functionality through a Graphical User Interface similar to products on other platforms.

Media Players

Ubuntu has a wide variety of tools for manipulating, formatting and editing digital video. Many media formats are proprietary and protected by international patents. To ship support for such formats requires payment of royalty to the respective patent and copyright holders. As a result of this the media players shipped with Ubuntu do not support such formats out of the box.

One of the first media types you are probably wanting to play if you have come from another operating system is mp3. To do so you need to install an mp3 player. Ubuntu has XMMS in its repositories. It is very similar to Winamp.