7)  AcidRip DVD Ripper

Whilst it’s a legal grey area, most people have taken to ripping their DVD collection and converting them to video files on their PCs (for personal use only).  AcidRip is a one stop shop for ripping DVDs, allowing you to transfer the movie files onto your Linux PC with ease.  Once copied you can play these files within Linux using most of the video players that come as standard across all the distributions.  Though the interface can be difficult to get your head round, it doesn’t take long to yield satisfying results, once you’ve acheived this it’s simply a case of rinse and repeat for any other video files you need to copy.

8)  Miro

Miro is described as a platform for Internet television and video.  It allows you to search videos from a number of online repositories (including Youtube) and download any videos that meet your criteria.  It can also keep track of video feeds and download new episodic content automatically for you to view.  It’s a worthwhile tool if there’s ever an internet video that you need to access offline; just download it with Miro and it’s safe and sound on your hard disk whenever you need it.

9)  Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla are the people behind the Firefox web browser, the second most popular web browser after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  Thunderbird is their interpretation of what the perfect Email client should be like.  It’s better featured than any bundled Linux mail client, and it has a well thought out interface to make the best use of those features.  With the latest version all you should need to get started is your Email address and password, from there Thunderbird should be able to ascertain the appropriate server details and the Emails should start flowing.  If, however, your Email account isn’t recognised by Thunderbird (if you’re using an address from one of the smaller web based Email providers for instance) then you can still enter your details manually.  All in all, an excellent application.

10)  Wine

Wine is a product unlike any of the others listed here, it’s main function isn’t to allow you to absorb or create content.  What it allows is the running of Windows applications within Linux.  It’s not perfect, the process of allowing Windows programs to run on Linux is not a simple one, and the project is constantly being updated in order to provide a more stable solution.  For most simple applications it should work fine, and compatibility is improving all the time.  What’s more, users are able to vote how compatible an application is with Wine using a medal system (garbage, bronze, silver and gold) so you can see how useful or buggy an application is before you attempt to use it with Wine.

Conclusions

The above list is by no means exhaustive.  There are literally thousands of applications available for free for Linux.  Not all will work with every distribution, but every distribution has a handful pre-installed and better alternatives available online.

Linux is, as always, at the forefront of free software, no other platform offers as many high quality free applications.  If you can accept that some programs will not have all of the features you want then Linux could definitely be the platform for you.