Wednesday Apr 26, 2006

Category: Internet Clients (desktop)

Posted at 04:49:23 pm by hari under Software and Technology (122 views)

After a while, I have returned to my top 50 Linux apps list. Here I'll try and cover a few internet clients for the Linux desktop.

Since there are a huge list of apps in this category, I'll skip some of the more famous ones like Mozilla and Firefox and concentrate on clients other than web browsers.

Gaim
I'm not into online chatting, but Gaim seems to be one of the most popular instant messenger for Linux since it supports a variety of protocols including AIM, Yahoo!, Jabber and ICQ as well. The other IM client I would like to mention here is kopete, but since I don't want to flood this category with Instant Messengers, I'll let you choose between the two!

Konqueror
Konqueror is a desktop file manager, a fairly feature-rich web browser, an intuitive FTP client and a universal viewer for KDE capable of embedding almost any file type. It's one of my favourite apps on the KDE desktop. Konqueror also provides some of the core functionality in the KDE API and so it's really an app that no KDE user can ignore.

XChat
XChat is a popular, multiplatform IRC client. I'm not really into IRC myself, but this looks to be a fairly common client and being multiplatform also makes it suitable for a variety of IRC users.

akregator
akregator is my desktop RSS/Atom feed reader of choice. Integrates nicely with KDE and can be iconized in the KDE system tray. It also provides notification by displaying the number of new articles in blue. Fairly feature rich and has a built-in KHTML view which allows you to view the original articles without opening a browser window. Highly recommended.

Thunderbird
I wanted to include both a mail client and a newsgroup reader in this category. Thunderbird servers both purposes. Part of the Mozilla Family of products, I would recommend this to anybody who needs a Linux mail client and newsgroup reader rolled into one. There are plenty of choices in this particular category, so take your pick.

Note that I've tried my best to cover as many areas as possible. That's why I had to miss out some very good apps under this category. Internet clients is a very broad category and it was a challenge to compile such a small list. Feel free to add your own recommendations. In particular, I've left out P2P and Bittorent from this list. Any apps under those categories are also welcome.

8 comments

Comment from: J_K9 [Visitor] · http://linux.wolphination.com

Nice round-up!

As a BitTorrent client: Azureus, hands down!
My choice of P2P client is LimeWire, but there are so many other good ones out there that it's down to personal choice in the end

I remember when I used to use IRC - it was the first thing I was introduced to on the internet (by my second cousin, when I was quite young). I used to talk to her on it and also a bunch of other people I didn't know but (supposedly) from my country - luckily my parents fell for the 'they're all my school friends' trick

Wednesday Apr 26, 2006 @ 19:02

Comment from: hari [Member] · http://literaryforums.org

Yeah, there are so many apps out there. I didn't know where to start. Gnutella is another P2P client that I considered.

Too many to choose from for a list of just 5. Let's hope the critics are kind to me

Wednesday Apr 26, 2006 @ 19:15