This page was written to showcase some applications that may not get as much attention or use due to them most times not being included in major distributions or perhaps because people don't know about them. The intention of this page is to remind or introduce users to some other alternatives to the most popular applications that are out there. I will feature applications that are lightweight and also feature applications that are run through the command line. Lightweight applications are good because they can help speed up a system virtually no matter what speed it is and also tend to take up much less disk space which is useful for users with smaller hard drives or those who just like to save space.

Another method of saving space is to use cli (command line interface). Command line applications are very useful at any level, but especially so for those who prefer working in the terminal and also anyone who may have a system that may be too slow to run a graphical interface or perhaps contain a video card that is unsupported in graphical mode. A lot can still be accomplished using Linux even if only using text. If fact, for those users who are mainly using the major applications, most of the things that are done can be done without any use of a gui (graphical user interface).

NOTES....

* A lot of information was used from the link for Linux equivalents for windows application page in the Linux Help section, see there for more listings and details on applications.

* For those people who only like things to "look pretty" and can't be bothered even customizing, you might as well leave this page right now, cause a lot of these apps are not as flashy as the ones that are more popular or well known.

* The really important thing to remember when using the lightweight applications is that you are defeating the purpose to a large extent if you are going to use Kde, Gnome or Dropline because that will slow things down. If you are using the lightweight applications, please use a lighter window manager. I really like Enlightenment, but other examples are Blackbox, Fluxbox and some slightly more intensive ones are IceWM and XFCE4. The point is, if you are going to try this out, you might as well get the most out of it.

* In some cases, there was no lightweight application so I listed an alternative. For those, I put a * symbol next to them.

* I was going to put links on each of the applications I listed on the chart, however; due to urls being updated and changed, I decided it would be best left to Google :) So if you would like to know more about any of the applications I have listed search using Google.

* The best example of a distribution that takes advantage of a lot of the lesser known lightweight applications but still contains the serious tools for doing multimedia is EvilEntity. Feel free to check it out, you can visit the #EvilEntity irc channel on Freenode for more information. Also, check out the EvilEntity guide on this site under the "Linux Distros" heading.

The following chart shows some examples of how you can replace some popular applications with some lighter ones or text based ones.