Popular, useful and important programs that run in X-Window

At this point you've chosen your window manager and/or desktop environment. Regardless of the "look" you've chosen, you have to have programs to run. You need applications to surf the Internet, write email, manage your files, write letters and a thousand other things you want to do. The rumors you hear about Linux lacking applications or not being able to "make it on the desktop" are false. There is no major application that a computer user needs that Linux lacks.

Internet/WWW Browsers

Firefox

Firefox is the most popular open source browser. It is available not only for Linux, but for the other major OS platforms. It is based on Mozilla, which is an open source re-write of the famous Netscape Navigator.

Opera

Billed as the "fastest browser", Opera Software of Norway released their first version of Opera for Linux in March of 2000. These early versions were not stable but the company kept working and slowly added features to their Linux versions. Though the Linux version doesn't offer all of the features of their Windows version, it offers most of them. Though an ad-supported version is available free of charge, Opera is a proprietary product and its source code is not freely available.

Konqueror

Konqueror, part of the KDE project, is a file manager and Internet browser wrapped up into one. You can surf the net and manage your files at the same time. With each subsequent version, new, powerful features are added. Since it forms part of KDE, you need to the desktop environment installed to run Konqueror.

Now, let's look at some popular email clients available for Linux

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