7iDigital

Most laptop users are familiar with the operating system and applications that come from the Microsoft stable. Linux has lagged behind due to various reasons, notably - device support and compatibility between Windows and Linux applications. This situation has improved significantly in the last couple of years and several users have reported success with different models of laptops using some distribution of Linux.

Let us look at the applications under a few major software categories currently on offer in the Linux world:

Operating system: Support for all the peripheral devices that come with the laptop is one of the major concerns when talking about operating systems.

Microsoft has a lead in this area but some Linux distributions have made long strides as far as device support is concerned. Canonical’s Ubuntu which is based on Debian, is currently the Linux operating system of choice in this regard. It contains out of box support for a multitude of devices and has a very robust update methodology.

Debian, Fedora, Suse and Mandriva are a few other choices that users have while choosing a Linux operating systems for their laptops and each distribution has its own set of features that users may need to consider.

Office Productivity Suite: OpenOffice.org is the leading office productivity suite application on Linux. It works quite well with all the documents created using MS Office applications.

Being from the FOSS world, it provides integrated support for many other formats, such as ODF, which are not provided by MS Office natively yet. Also, OpenOffice.org provides native support for saving documents in PDF format.

Internet Browser: Firefox and Opera are the two main internet browsers available on Linux. These are also available on Windows so users won’t feel any difficulty in switching between Windows and Linux.

Instant Messaging Clients: There are several instant messaging clients available on Linux that allow users to chat with people using MSN (amsn, kopete), Yahoo (kopete) or Google Talk (pidgin).

There are a few integrated messaging clients as well, viz. kopete and pidgin, that enable users to chat with their counterparts on different clients using the same application.

There is also a relatively old version of Skype available on Linux so users won’t feel completely left out with regard to their PC-PC calls / telephony needs.

Media Players: Once again, there are many options for users when selecting a media player on Linux.

In our experience, VLC provides reliable functionality when working with media of different formats. This is also available for Windows so users have the flexibility to use the same application on both platforms.