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due to realising how much Windows sucks. I'd like some recommendations for:and I think that'll do for now. Note that a large portion of my media library is in Monkey's Audio format, so I'll need a player that supports that. I hear amaroK works nicely but on the off chance there are other, better programs that support it, I'd like to hear about them.
- Media players
- SFTP clients
- Messenger programs
As far as media players go, Amarok is my favourite. It's been getting bigger and bigger recently and it's kinda turning into another iTunes (not there yet though), which is not so good if you're into the more minimalistic players. There is Xmms2 if you want something similar to Winamp; Rhythmbox is a nice little player, though it's a bit handicapped by the interface.
I never really used SFTP from linux much (never needed SFTP so I just used ftp from the console), but recently needed to set up SFTP on a work server for a client - I installed gftp. It seemed to do the trick from my limited testing.
For messenger programs, you basically have Pidgin (Gaim), AMSN and Kopete to choose from. Pidgin is by far the best - it's better than any other client on Windows either, imo.
Be aware that Ubuntu comes with Gnome and uses GTK+ apps by default. If you want apps like Amarok and Kopete (written for KDE) to look nice when you run them, you should install the Qt libraries.
amaroK 2 came out and has sucked in every major version I've used so far. If you can get the 1.5 version it's like the best music player I've ever used, but so far 2 has been so buggy and lacking in features that I haven't been able to stand using it. I've become a convert to Songbird, though, which I think is pretty great, but ymmv. I don't know about its monkey support though, I've never looked into it.
Filezilla is a great FTP program that supports SFTP.
Pidgin is pretty good, and the Linux versions just recently got voice and video support for XMPP (Google Chat basically). But if you need voice and video for anything else, well... there's Skype, I guess, which is hella outdated on Linux these days (though it still works). I think AMSN has some voice/video support though just for MSN.
Also, an addendum to Mike's thing about GTK/KDE: The Ubuntu package manager will automatically install any dependencies you need for apps so it's not a huge concern. The newest version (9.10) has a pretty awesome program manager, too, that makes it really easy to search for apps you might want. The only one I think I mentioned that (afaik) is not available in the Ubuntu repositories yet is Songbird, though you can find binaries for it without having to look too far.
Thanks for the advice, both of you. I've already installed and started running Pidgin and I'll probably add amaroK 1.5 and either Filezilla or GFTP tomorrow when I'm less tired. At some point I'll probably also want to add a torrent client as well; which one would you recommend?
Deluge has always been a favorite of mine on Linux, though I haven't used it in a few years (I do most of my torrenting on Windows these days, when I actually do any) There's one that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu but it's not terribly robust.
I'll look into Deluge then, thanks. I presume there's no Linux build of uTorrent?
To the best of my knowledge, uTorrent is Windows only. It can be run in Wine, I believe, but you have to deal with a few finicky things to do that.
Yeah, apparently a lot of Windows programs can be run on WINE with a bit of effort. I may have to look into that. Honestly though, I can probably handle switching programs.
I mostly just used torrent and ktorrent. I also instaled Vuze just to see what it was like.... but yeah. It did the trick, and about 50 other tricks as well, so no surprises if you don't want to install that. :p
There are some programs you'll just want to run in wine rather than use the Linux equivalent. Foobar2000 was one for a while, as was utorrent.
Something worth pointing out is that Aptitude (the backend package manager) operates off of a bunch of "sources," or repositories. If you can't find the package you're looking for in the default repos, you can usually add a new source and find it there. It saves having to compile source by hand. :p
Thanks for all the help. In other news, am I the only one who can't avoid thinking of the O RLY owl every time I look at the Pidgin logo?
... well NOW you're not, now I'm gonna do it XD
Glad to be of service. :desu: