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Best Free Screen Capture

• Shutter
  "Shutter is like a swiss army knife for all screen capture tasks in Linux. It works better than Gnome-screenshot and KDE's KSnapshot.
  You can use this program to capture desktop, window, child window and 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." (Review)
  

Best Free Program Launcher

• Launchy: "a top product in the keyword search class, easy to understand, use, configure and extend. It has a really small memory footprint." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free Screen Session Recorder

• Wink: "Ease of use, great flexibility and powerful annotation features, allows audio to be embedded in the presentation, etc." (Review)
• 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.

Best Free Wallpaper Changer

• Wally
  "A good wallpaper changer allows for wallpaper positions to set to centered, tiled, center tiled, centered maxpert, tiled maxpert, scaled, center auto fit or scale and crop.
  The program supports features such as time intervals, selecting images from local folders or online resources, displaying images' EXIF data in system tray tool-tip, saving downloaded photos and run-time folder change detection." (Review)
  

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free 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.

Best Free Cleanup and Tuning

• 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.

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.

Best Free Media Player

• VLC Media Player
  "Supports playback of most video files and DVD discs without the need to download external codec packs, including flv filescan. There are 5 different DVD region codes and VLC plays them all.
  VLC also has the ability to take screenshots of your video, even while during DVD playback, a real attractive feature." (Review)
  
• 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."

Best Free 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.

Best Free Media Center

• XBMC
  "It is truly outstanding in this category and earns the Gizmo's Top Pick title rightfully in my eyes. It played all media files I fed it with and turned out to be the most reliable product for me.
  XBMC offers convincing media library features and is highly configurable with custom skins and backdrops. You will find a vast amount of plugins, skins and other goodies for it as the community around XBMC is large." (Review)
  

Best Free 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.

Best Free 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." Kid3 uses KDE libraries, while another package Kid3-qt is also available for installation without KDE dependacies." (Review)
  
• MusicBrainz Picard: "Identify track info by matching digital thumbprint with MusicBrainz database, show up existing tags with add and delete functions." (Review)

Best Free 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). (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free Audio Editing / Audio Splitter

• Audacity
  "It does all the recording and editing I need, and is much simpler and faster to use than a lot of paid products. The interface is easy to use, allowing you to select and apply a noise profile just as easily as removing it.
  The program also can record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings, edit various sound files, cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together and change the speed or pitch of a recording." (Review)
  
• mp3splt-gtk: "Splits mp3 and ogg files without re-encoding, able to identify split points between tracks via online database services (CDDB or FreeDB)." (Review)

Best Free Video Editor

• Avidemux
  "It is designed for multi-purpose video editing and processing and is my personal favorite because of its simplicity yet wide range of tools.
  The software supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. It lets you do just about everything under the sun, with well documented tutorials." (Review)
  
• OpenShot Video Editor: an open-source and non-linear video editor which is stable and friendly to use with support for many video, audio and image formats based on FFmpeg together with lots of other useful features.

Best Free Music Creator

• LMMS (Linux Multimedia Studio)
  "As a stand alone application, one would be hard pressed to find a more comprehensively full featured and versatile free music creator than this, with so many instruments and effects to choose from.
  The onboard Beat/Bassline editor removes the need for a separate drum sequencer and is a very nice touch: LMMS really is a one stop shop" (Review).
  

Best Free Digital Image Viewer

• XnView: "Fast, lots of features, very manageable, many plug-ins, supports nearly any OS." (Review)

Best Free Digital Image Editor

• GIMP: "It has lots of advanced features and can do almost everything the Photoshop can do." (Review)

Best Free High Dynamic Range (HDR) Software

• Luminance HDR
  Luminance HDR (previously known as Qtpfsgui) is an open source graphical user interface program and a high quality application to provide a workflow for high dynamic range imaging.
  It has great tone-mapping and aligning facilities, allowing for 8, 16 and 32 bit channels and two means of manually manipulating the image.
  

Best Free Digital Photo Organizer

• Picasa 3: "Simply sensational editing features that provide you with every function amateur photographers need." (Review)
• 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.

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free Office Suite

• 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." (Review)
  

Best Free 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.

Best Free 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. (Review)

Best Free PDF Tools

• PDF-Shuffler
  "Re-arranging pages in a pdf document, or merging and splitting pdf files, would be much easier with PDF Shuffler.
  After importing one or more pdf files to PDF Shuffer, you are presented with pages 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." (Review)
  
• Sun PDF Import Extension: "Allows you to import and modify PDF documents in OpenOffice from a PDF/ODF hybrid file with 100% layout accuracy." (Review)

Best Free Personal Finance

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

Best Free 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." (Review)
• 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." (Review)

Best Free Notes Organizer

• KeepNote: "Stores notes in a simple notebook hierarchy with rich-text formatting and images, full-text search." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free Web Browser

• Mozilla Firefox
  "Firefox is safer and browses a tad faster than Internet Explorer (for Windows), very stable and more standards compliant, rich in features such as Private browsing, tabbed browsing and over 2000 free extensions (add-ons) that allow you to customize your experience. It provides the most flexibility, expandability, and features of any browser to date." (Review)
  
• 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." (Review)
• 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." (Review)

Best Free Email Client

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

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)
• Tixati: "Performs excellently, easy on system resources, has an appealing and useful interface and has no ads or toolbar on install." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)
• 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." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free HTML Editor

• KompoZer: "Full-featured WYSIWYG editor, integrated file management, tabbed editing, supports for forms, tables and templates." (Review)
• Aptana Studio: "Full featured HTML text editor based on the well-known, open-source Eclipse IDE and many plugins." (Review)
• 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.

Best Free 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.
  Its user interface is complete with toolbars, dialogs and user-customized menus to facilitate insertion of markups and codes. Options are available for writing websites, scripts and programming codes in many programming and markup languages, with many other useful features." (Review)
  
• Kate: "Advanced and easy-to-use editor supporting scriptable syntax highlighting, indentation and code folding for many source files, loads fast and runs stably." (Review)

Best Free NFO Viewer

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

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free 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.

Best Free Computer Chess

• PyChess
  "With this program, you can play against the GNU Chess engine or lots of other chess engines, such as the Crafty engine. You can also play Internet chess by connecting to the FICS servers.
  It allows for saving games in the PGN, EPD and FEN chess file formats so that you can always return to continue with the games or analyze them. It also offers opening books and other useful features including undo moves, hint and spy modes, sound and animation effects." (Review)
  

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." (Review)
• 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." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free 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." (Review)

Best Free Computer Go

• PANDA-glGo: "2D and 3D boards, adjustable board size and engine strength, play online or offline, etc." (Review)

Best Free Hearts Game

• Gnome Hearts: "Various rule sets including Spot Hearts, Omnibus Hearts with configurable play rules, backgrounds and card styles." (Review)

Best Free Sudoku Puzzle, Generator and Solver

• KSudoku: "Configurable toolbars and themes, 5-levels of difficulty, support 9x9 and many other shapes, generator and solver, hints, redo/undo, saving and loading." (Review)

Best Free Reversi

• KReversi: "7-level of difficulty, clean and helpful interface, show legal moves and last move, undo moves, hints, animation, etc." (Review)