Hari's Corner

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Category: Internet Clients (desktop)

Filed under: Software and Technology by Hari
Posted on Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 16:49 IST (last updated: Thu, May 7, 2009 @ 21:16 IST)

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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.

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8 comment(s)

  1. 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 :D

    Comment by J_K9 (visitor) on Wed, Apr 26, 2006 @ 19:02 IST #
  2. 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 ;)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Apr 26, 2006 @ 19:15 IST #
  3. I prefer RSSOWL to read feeds. Some tools are so good you don't even want to try any alternative:)--Shashank

    Comment by linuxlala (visitor) on Wed, Apr 26, 2006 @ 23:23 IST #
  4. Yeah, there are really *so* many choices out there. Mine is a list of what I think are some good choices. ;) Thanks for the recommendation.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Apr 27, 2006 @ 08:28 IST #
  5. I pretty much agree with your choice Hari. I've used or am using (probably not grammatical ;)) each of them. I would have included, or at least given honourable mention to, XChat.

    Comment by ray (visitor) on Thu, Apr 27, 2006 @ 23:28 IST #
  6. Ray, I've mentioned XChat... ;)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Fri, Apr 28, 2006 @ 07:18 IST #
  7. What about Firefox?

    Comment by Nikesh (visitor) on Mon, Jul 31, 2006 @ 18:20 IST #
  8. I deliberately left out Firefox and Mozilla as I mentioned in the blog post because they are common and everybody knows about them.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Aug 2, 2006 @ 20:31 IST #

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