Hello,

Nearly two years have  passed since my move to Ubuntu

gotta say, It’s an interesting BSOD-less experience :P

Of course I won’t claim it’s perfectly stable but for me it’s way more stable than windows.

kind of I had some problems most are solved, others needed workarounds, but mostly what i need to do is done at the end thanks to ALLAH

The continues problem was that my surrounding colleagues are not Ubuntu familiar/users and I’m working on that problem right now ;D

Anyway, I’ll list now the apps I found useful during those 2 years and I use them frequently.

First, for archiving purposes, this is my current desktop screenshot

Chromium

The Ubuntu version of Google Chrome, I’ve been with this browser since it was a piece of crap software, I used Firefox by that time but now it’s the best from my point of View

Hotot

The best twitter client I’ve ever used!

I can use the term that is always used in the review, It’s a sexy twitter client, try it and you won’t regret

Pidgin

I just love that client!!

It’s not perfect but I just love it, there is a trend to replace it with empathy but i don’t think i’ll take that step at least for now,

It supports all the account I can use to IM, even it has a plugin for twitter and was the first client i think that added support for facebook chat even before facebook enabled XMPP

the main advantage for it over empathy is that it has soo many plugins that does cool and even crazy things

Evolution

I’ve been using mail clients rather than the web interfaces for many years now, Evolution is very nice, it just needs some improvements in its interface and to support Microsoft exchange server 2007, coz I need it in my work and OWA sucks an enormous deal :D

but as a functionality it is superb!

VirtualBox

for me it’s enough..

it can load the images it produce and VMware images, its seamless mode is good, where I can see the Windows windows as if they are run on my host machine,

yeah, I admit I needed windows to compile some old projects I created in .NET

of course disk images not pics :D

RDesktop

well, having my job to be working on a windows machine, -a remote one Thanx Allah :D – so I needed a client to make me able to connect to it, so rdesktop was the first I’ve found and later -after a year of using it :D – I’ve found a very nice feature in it which is a seamless integration with the remote machine to have something like this

so as you can see, I can open any single application from my remote machine seamlessly on my local one, it just needs a small exe to be put on the remote windows machine.

A small problem is that something wrong happens when I remote connect on another session of somebody logged on the remote machine where his local machine is Windows 7, he is always kicked out of his session -COOL :D – and the same happens when he remote control mine also -of course here also he is the one who is kicked out, I’m Ubuntu, I’m stable :P -

Gnome-Do

I just adore this application!

I use it to do a lot of things

change my status in pidgin (in all my accounts there)

run applications

convert URLs to tiny ones

start a conversation on pidgin

open files from the machine

and more, I just get lazy to get used to other features, ah and there is a plugin where I can tweet also from it, just I have to press the quick-lunch button and write whatever I want even my messenger PM!!

Minbar

this app notifies me with the prayer times with the Ubuntu notification system, so it looks cool rather than having each application has its own notification.

RedShift

Although I couldn’t get convinced with that application in the first place, but after that I respected it, this application changes the color of the computer screen according to the time of the day, to not have the screen very bright when the lights are low to not hurt you eyes

And of course you can toggle it whenever you want with a couple of clicks..

Ubuntu Tweak

this application does so many things I get lazy to know about them, but it just rocks

BleachBit

This application frees used disk space with unwanted apps and temp files and so, and it frees in terms of GBs

BTW, I am still working on an Ubuntu install for may be a year and a half without formating my root volume which is 19GB where right now I have 4GB free space

without freeing anything and chrome is set to directly download to it..

Glippy Clipboard Manager

As you can read its name is a clipboard manager, a very useful tool for a developer to keep the history of his clipboard to not keep copying and pasting the same item more than a time, click the upper link for more info.

I think those are the most frequent tools I use daily on my Ubuntu machine that keeps me happy with it :)