This is in response to "10 must have linux applications"
http://www.intranetjournal.com/artic...03_30_09a.html

Some fallacies I don't like that I encountered:
1. An application's appearance makes it "must-have". *Not hardly. Looks are important, but being able to get work done is the first priority. If appearance was the number one priority, you could go use a Barbie computer.

2. Assuming that everyone uses a computer the way he does. *This causes him to say several things that are downright falsehood (although I'm sure this is an unintended consequence to his assumptions).

3. Assuming that applications suck unless they are polished. *Not necessarily. New and experimental software should get the benefit of the doubt in this regard. I'm not talking about crashes, however. Stability is an important factor to consider.

4. The amount of add-ons an application has does not justify why this application is "must-have", but is an important consideration.

5. Assuming that everyone else must be having the same problems they are.

- "Having the right kind of clipboard manager makes or breaks the user's ability to copy and paste content from one test source to another." I've never needed one, so maybe this should be qualified with "for some users...", etc.

- "Not everyone needs their PIM client to resemble their file manager." Why the under-handed comments? I don't think Kontact looks anything like a file manager. But even if it did, why does that have anything to do with it being worse than Outlook or Evolution?

- "those who still walk a death march to Adobe's Photoshop." *This is not a nice under-handed comment. To say such a thing is the tip of a large iceberg named ignorance. I'll gloss over this comment for now, but you need to talk to a professional in the field of art and graphic design before you make such a comment. I'm talking about someone who uses Adobe Photoshop at work for most of their work, not someone who happens to have it installed on their work or home computer and uses it once in a while. I used to regurgitate the same OSFUD about Adobe Photoshop until I saw my wife use it. Adobe Photoshop (CS etc) has features that The GIMP does not. Don't think of Adobe as an
"evil" company when they have flash for Linux on their website, and have open standards for their PDF format.

- "Every release of Firefox on Ubuntu has been terrible." *Really? Firefox has been just fine for me on Slackware since its adoption, and even every patch and update that comes out for Slackware works fine with all my add-ons. No issues here. Maybe you should check your distribution. You can't base Swiftfox must-have status on a problem that doesn't apply to everyone.

- The comment on Swiftfox stability when it builds on Firefox are sort of silly in the first place. Couple this with claiming that releases are "willy-nilly" when this hinges on problems he is encountering with his distribution (and ignorance of the problems that are being fixed with the releases), and then saying indirectly that you cannot rely on Firefox (when, again, it works fine with Slackware over here) make this comment totally absurd. I've never had problems with Firefox even on Mandriva where you get at least two "light" browsers that build on some of Firefox's libraries.

- "Unlike other IM clients, Pidgin is ... open source ...." *That's stupid. There are other open source clients, such as kopete.

- "The code is very stable to use." *How are you using the code? Last I checked, code gets compiled into executable binaries: you use those, not the code itself. When I eat bread I do not claim to be eating yeast. You use the result of the compiling of the code into binaries, and you eat bread. You don't eat yeast and eggs and baking soda: you eat the result of the process, which is bread.

- "Kdenlive, which spends more time crashing than working...." *Seeing as this user is having issues that may be caused by their OS, installation, computer, distribution, or themselves with an application that works fine for others, we can't trust their comments about kdenlive.

I take "must-have" to mean applications that I use on a daily basis and that without them things would be more difficult, but not impossible, there are always alternatives.

All the ones I listed are apps that I use pretty much every single day. There are other apps that are also 'must-have' because they are indispensable for performing certain tasks, it's just that I more rarely engage in such tasks.

Yes. That is the way I interpreted the thread. I listed 10 applications that I use on a regular basis for my day-to-day work.

Agreed!

Yes, that's also the way I see it.
If anybody is looking for a global set of "must have applications" then you have to go low level, to the stuff you really need to keep your system alive.
But asking for this doesn't make sense I think, so everybody posts the application they consider "must have" for themselves. Maybe "must have" isn't actually the right term at all, maybe it should be more like "10 favorite applications".

But of course I understand the arguments you bring up, where people generalize their problems onto the rest of the community, like the Firefox-example you mentioned.

Well, as said, I think it's a personal set of favorites, not really a set of application everybody must have in order to be able to do anything. I'd say most users don't even know which applications that would be, because they have no direct contact with them.

So, seeing those "must have" applications more like a "personal top ten" I think it is quite understandable that opinions differ, depending on personal preference and on how the computer is used by the user.

Well, now that I've typed up all this I finally clicked the link, actually thinking it would lead back to the topic we had here on the forum recently. Well, it doesn't. But since others obviously also refer to it, and since I wrote up all this crap, I'm not going to back out silently and in shame, but just post the whole post anyway.