• Clonezilla: Saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk and increases the close efficiency. The version of Clonezilla Live is suitable for single machine backup and restore.
• G4U (“Ghosting for Unix”): “Not only can it clone disk to disk (any size) and copy disk partitions, it can also create and restore image files both locally and from an FTP site, if the workstation is connected to a wired network with a DCHP service.”

File Manager

• Dolphin: A file manager for KDE (by default) and good for other desktop environments such as GNOME as well, focusing on usability with navigation bar, view properties, split of views, dockable panels and many other useful features.

Folder Synchronization Utility

• FreeFileSync: “Very clear and informative interface, file collisions and deletions are readily recognizable. If you require a sync program that can copy files that are in use or locked, it has you covered there too!”

File Archiver / Zip Utilities

• PeaZip: “Easy to use and very versatile, capable of creating 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, PAQ/ZPAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, ZIP files and extracting from 98 archive types.”
• File Roller and Ark, both archive managers designed respectively for GNOME and KDE desktop environments to create archives, view or extract files from archives, work as front-ends to command-line archivers supporting various file formats.

Partition Manager

• GParted: “a GNOME partition editor for resizing (enlarging or shrinking), creating or deleting, moving or copying partitions on a hard disk, creating a partition table, enabling or disabling partition flags such as boot and hidden.”
• Parted Magic: “Employs core programs of GParted and GNU Parted to handle partitioning tasks and can be run from a live CD, DVD or USB flash drive.”
• TestDisk: “A console application designed for data recovery. It can be used to fix partition table, recover deleted partitions or copy files from deleted partitions.”

Secure Erase Utility

• Darik’s Boot and Nuke: “Constructs a floppy disk or CD that will automatically wipe the hard drives of any PC that’s booted from the disk, great for bulk disk cleaning and emergency.”

File Encryption Utility

• TrueCrypt: “Powerful, flexible and highly-effective encryption program to encrypt files, folders or entire drives. Use this seasoned, widely-used encryption program when you want an encrypted container that mounts as a virtual drive.”

CD Recovery Utility

• Dvdisaster: “A preventive program to create an error correction file from a good CD or DVD for data recovery.”

Online Backup Sites

• Dropbox: “Provides 2 GB free space for backing up and sharing your files, works similar to any other folder of your computer—after installation, simply drag and drop files/folders to Dropbox you want to backup, share or sync with other computer.”

File Copy Utility

• Unstoppable Copier: “Excellent for copying information from scratched CD’s, DVD’s and corrupted files from the hard drives.”

• Shutter: “Captures desktop, window, child window, rectangular area with many plugins for resize and special effects, delay capture, activate/deactivate window border and cursor, inbuilt drawing tools, linked to external editor and auto save.”

Desktop Search Utility

• Google Desktop Search: “Google sidebar and gadgets. Just type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly. Indexes and searches multiple email programs.”

Screen Session Recorder

• Wink: “Ease of use, great flexibility and powerful annotation features, allows audio to be embedded in the presentation, etc.”
• recordMyDesktop: an easy-to-use and effective recorder to make screen recordings into free Ogg video format. It also offers the ability to record audio through ALSA mixer or other options. The frontend program gtk-recordMyDesktop and the ALSA mixer can be downloaded from some depositories including Ubuntu Software Center.

Wallpaper Changer

• Wally: “Many settings for wallpaper positions, time intervals, selects images from the folders or from online resources, displays images’ EXIF data in system-tray tooltip, run-time folder change detection.”

Color Picker

• gcolor2: “Quick and easy to pick a color, supports HSV, RGB and HTML codes with an opacity slider, color grabber, allows for naming and saving picked colors.”

Windows API

• Wine: Lets you run Windows applications on Linux and other operating systems, but without a copy of Windows. It’s still under active development and not every program works yet.

Other System Tools

• PySDM, a Storage Device Manager allowing for full customization of hard disk mountpoints and creation of rules for dynamic configuration of storage devices. (See also: Auto Mount Drives at System Startup)
• CCSM (CompizConfig Settings Manager), a useful tool to configure the many plugins included in Compiz and Compiz Fusion for advanced desktop effects settings.

• VLC Media Player: “Supports playback of most video files and DVD discs without the need to download external codec packs, including flv filescan, reads DVD’s from all regions, takes screenshots of your video during playback.”
• SMPlayer: “Intends to be a complete front-end for MPlayer, from basic features like playing videos, DVDs, and VCDs to more advanced features like support for MPlayer filters, remember the settings of all files you play and more.”

Music Player and Organizer

• Banshee: Imports, organizes, plays, and shares music using a simple yet powerful interface. Other features include rip CDs, create playlists, burn audio and mp3 CDs, support for podcasting and music recommendations.
• Amarok: A powerful music player for multi platforms with an intuitive interface, supports for collection management, bookmarking, dynamic playlists, file tracking, integrated web services and more.

Audio / Video Format Conversion

• SoundConverter: Aims to be simple to use and fast for conversion from most audio files to wav, flac, mp3, aac and ogg files, supports for extraction of the audio from videos too. (Note: Install GStreamer MP3 Encoding to enable conversion to mp3.)
• Arista Transcoder: An easy-to-use converter to convert multimedia files from one format to another for playback on various devices. Supported output formats include m4v (Ipod), avi (Nokia, PDA or DVD player), mkv (computer) and mp4 (various Sony devices), depending on the device you choose.
• OggConvert: A small and easy-to-use utility to convert most audio and video files to the patent-free Ogg format, and support for encoding to the Matroska container format (mkv, mka), with adjustable settings on audio and video quality for conversion.

MP3 Tag Editor

• Kid3: “Edit all tags, generate tags from files or vice versa, import tags from databases, browse cover arts and lyrics from online resources, drag and drop cover art to a file, export tags, etc.”
• MusicBrainz Picard: “Identify track info by matching digital thumbprint with MusicBrainz database, show up existing tags with add and delete functions.”

CD / DVD Burning Software

• Brasero: Designed for ease of use to create a traditional audio CD, data CD/DVD, video DVD or a SVCD, burn an existing CD/DVD image to disc, copy a CD/DVD to a new disc or write to an image file in ISO and other formats.
• ImgBurn: “Most powerful burning application with advanced features, support for every modern optical disc from CD to Blu-Ray, more than 10 image formats, authoring rewritable discs, etc.” Runs on Linux with Wine (x86 only).

CD / DVD Emulation Software

• Furius ISO Mount: “Select or drag-and-drop an image file to mount, one-click unmount, supports for burning ISO and IMG files, generate MD5 and SHA1 checksums, saving history and retrieving previously unmounted images.”

DVD Ripper

• HandBrake: “Good quality in transcoded video, small file size, integrates the latest improvements to the H.264 encoding library with enhanced picture quality, speed optimizations and supports better control over multiple audio tracks.”

Audio Editing / Audio Splitter

• Audacity: “Interface is easy to use, easily applies noise profiles, capable of saving in multiple compressed formats.”
• mp3splt-gtk: “Splits mp3 and ogg files without re-encoding, able to identify split points between tracks via online database services (CDDB or FreeDB).”

Video Editor

• Avidemux: “Supports many file types including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF. It’s simple and easy to use, with well documented tutorials.”

• XnView: “Fast, lots of features, very manageable, many plug-ins, supports nearly any OS.”

Digital Image Editor

• GIMP: “It has lots of advanced features and can do almost everything the Photoshop can do.”

High Dynamic Range (HDR) Software

• Qtpfsgui: “Great tone-mapping and aligning facilities, allows 8, 16 and 32 bit channels and two means of manually manipulating the image.”

Digital Photo Organizer

• Picasa 3: “Simply sensational editing features that provide you with every function amateur photographers need.”
• digiKam, a digital photo management program designed to import, organize, enhance, search and export image files. With this you can add comments and tags to ablums, view and edit items, create slideshows and calendars, and share your creations.

Vector Graphics Editor

• Inkscape: “A top product enhanced by an excellent user interface and the impressive set of tutorials, helps wean the user away from the world of digital images to the nodes, lines, curves and shapes that form the basis of vector editing.”

• OpenOffice 3: “Covers the basics of office document creation: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, a desktop database. It allows you to save your documents in many choices of file formats so you’ll have no problem exchanging documents with MS Office.”

PDF Writer

• CUPS-PDF: Creates a virtual PDF printer to convert a file printed in queue to PDF and save it in a user directory. (See also: Adding a PDF Printer for Ubuntu)

PDF Reader

• Okular: More than a viewer for pdf and other document formats including postscript, djvu, tiff, chm, dvi, xps, odf and so on. It can be used on both KDE and GNOME desktop environments, with features for annotations, highlighting, drawing lines and shapes, adding textboxes and stamps, selecting and saving a part of documents as text or in an image format.
• Evince: A document viewer for pdf and other document formats including postscript, djvu, tiff and dvi, aiming to replace the multiple document viewers that exist on the GNOME Desktop with a single simple application.
• Foxit Reader: Small size, user-customized toolbar, fast launch speed, full screen capabilities, snapshot, zoom, thumbnails and other features.

PDF Tools

• PDF-Shuffler: “Presents you with the pages of files in thumbnails so that you can easily merge, re-order or delete the pages, or right-click a thumbnail to rotate or crop a page before exporting to a new pdf file.”
• Sun PDF Import Extension: “Allows you to import and modify PDF documents in OpenOffice from a PDF/ODF hybrid file with 100% layout accuracy.” (See Review)

Personal Finance

• GnuCash: “Double entry accounting, keep tabs of budgets, create various accounts in each category, full suite of standard and customizable reports.”

Personal Information Management

• Calgoo: “Works very well as a stand-alone program, and it can also synchronize your data across computers. In addition to Calgoo’s native calender you can synchronize Google, Outlook, 30 Boxes and generic (*.ics format) calendars.”
• Chandler: “Excellent task management, with “triage” (presents tasks and events in “now”, “later” and “done” categories). Imports external SMTP email accounts, Google calendars and Highrise tasks. Exports calendars and tasks. Email messages can be edited, added to, and sent directly from Chandler.”

Notes Organizer

• KeepNote: “Stores notes in a simple notebook hierarchy with rich-text formatting and images, full-text search.”

Electronic Book Reader

• Calibre: “Includes an e-book viewer, library management, format conversion, news feeds, ebook conversion and sync features. A complete solution to all your e-book needs.”

• Mozilla Firefox: “It browses a tad faster than IE, is very stable and more standards compliant. It has thousands of Add-Ons to enhance the program and is very secure.”
• Google Chrome: “Extremely fast, simple and intuitive interface, Incognito Mode won’t leave traces of browser history, capable of creating Application Shortcuts to specific pages on the web.”
• Opera: “In addition to being a top rate web browser, it also has a great email client, RSS reader, newsgroup reader, and IRC Chat client.”

Email Client

• Mozilla Thunderbird: “Customizable and expandable through add-ons, intuitive user interface.”
• Evolution: Provides integrated mail, address book and calendar, matches most other email programs in features and functionality.

Download Manager

• MultiGet: “Multi-task with multi-thread on multi-server to speed up downloads, clipboard monitoring with a good GUI interface, optional auto MD5 check, etc.”

BitTorrent Client

• Vuze (formerly Azureus): “Cross platform, informative interface, wide variety of plugins, excellent support and the Vuze platform of legal content that downloads at high speeds.”
• Tixati: “Performs excellently, easy on system resources, has an appealing and useful interface and has no ads or toolbar on install.”

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Client

• FireFTP: “A cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox, easy to use, small, fast, feature packed, frequent updates and new features.”
• FileZilla: “If you use a browser other than Firefox or require advanced functionality not found in FireFTP, then this is one of great standalone applications, easy to use, feature rich, includes site manager functions.”

Instant Messaging Client

• Pidgin: “Supports AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr IM networks, available for multiple platforms, simple user interface, functional and lack of popups.”

• KompoZer: “Full-featured WYSIWYG editor, integrated file management, tabbed editing, supports for forms, tables and templates.”
• Aptana Studio: “Full featured HTML text editor based on the well-known, open-source Eclipse IDE and many plugins.”
• SCREEM: “, (Site CReation and Editing EnvironMent), is a light weight tag-based HTML/XML editor to create Web pages and provide useful site maintenance facilities, including automatic link updating and site upload facilities. Other features include page preview, tree/link view, spell-check, Tidy plugin, etc.

Programming Editor

• Bluefish: “A lightweight yet powerful editor designed for experienced programmers and web designers, and works as a general purpose editor as well with the IDE.”
• Kate: “Advanced and easy-to-use editor supporting scriptable syntax highlighting, indentation and code folding for many source files, loads fast and runs stably.”

NFO Viewer

• NFO Viewer: A simple viewer for NFO files with preset font, encoding settings, automatic window size and clickable hyperlinks.

• GtkOrphan: An orphaned libraries remover to analyse the status of your installations, looks for orphaned libraries and adds package-removal capability. A GUI front-end to Deborphan for Debian systems.
• SUM: A Startup Manager to change settings for your preferred default operating system to boot up, manage Usplash themes, adjust bootloader menu resolution or set timeout in seconds. (See also: Change Default Boot Options)

Internet Safety Check

• WOT: “Fastest ratings, uses green/yellow/red ratings and ‘people’ reliability icons, multiple rating categories to help you evaluate websites, fantastic warning screen to empower users to avoid potentially bad websites before interacting with them.”

Antivirus

• Clam AntiVirus: “You may not need it. Some Linux users like to scan files prior to sending them to users of other operating systems, though.”

Firewall

• Firestarter: A complete firewall tool for Linux, allows for users to create a firewall with a wizard, open and close ports with a few clicks, completes with a real-time hit monitor.

• PyChess: “Advanced chess client with the default chess engine or third-party chess engines, supports Internet chess, saving games, opening books, hint and spy modes, etc.”
  

250 Best Free Online PC Games In One Place

• Friv: “Be greeted with a full-screen of tiny screen shots for more than 250 free online PC games, all kinds of popular games and they are of various genres.”
• Netpotion Gamez: “A good alternative game site with minimum advertisements, features 36 tiny screen shots in each page from a library of more than 800 free online games. A click on each tiny screen shot brings you to the game selected.”

Match-3 Puzzle

• Frozen Bubble: “Shoot a bubble up to match and clear three or more same color bubbles from the playing field in this popular puzzle game, designed with colorful 3D rendered penguin animations and 15 stereo sound effects.”

Jigsaw Puzzle

• Picpuz: “Create and solve puzzles, save and open puzzle files, set tile sizes, solving a puzzle by swapping pieces or with a helpful solver.”

Computer Go

• PANDA-glGo: “2D and 3D boards, adjustable board size and engine strength, play online or offline, etc.”

Hearts Game

• Gnome Hearts: “Various rule sets including Spot Hearts, Omnibus Hearts with configurable play rules, backgrounds and card styles.”

Sudoku Puzzle, Generator and Solver

• KSudoku: “Configurable toolbars and themes, 5-levels of difficulty, support 9×9 and many other shapes, generator and solver, hints, redo/undo, saving and loading.”

Reversi

• KReversi: “7-level of difficulty, clean and helpful interface, show legal moves and last move, undo moves, hints, animation, etc.”