A Linux distribution is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and often a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one of the Linux distributions, which are available for a wide variety of systems ranging from embedded devices and personal computers to powerful supercomputers.
YaST is a Linux operating system setup and configuration tool.
IceWM is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, originally written by Marko Maček. It was written from scratch in C++ and is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License. It is customizable, relatively lightweight in terms of memory and CPU usage, and comes with themes that allow it to imitate the GUI of Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 7, OS/2, Motif, and other graphical user interfaces.
GNOME Evolution is the official personal information manager for GNOME. It has been an official part of GNOME since Evolution 2.0 was included with the GNOME 2.8 release in September 2004. It combines e-mail, address book, calendar, task list and note-taking features. Its user interface and functionality is similar to Microsoft Outlook. Evolution is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
GNU GRUB is a boot loader package from the GNU Project. GRUB is the reference implementation of the Free Software Foundation's Multiboot Specification, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular operating system's partitions.
In Unix computing, Ion is a tiling and tabbing window manager for the X Window System. It is designed such that it is possible to manage windows using only a keyboard, without needing a mouse. It is the successor of PWM and is written by the same author, Tuomo Valkonen. Since the first release of Ion in the summer 2000, similar alternative window management ideas have begun to show in other new window managers: Larswm, ratpoison, StumpWM, wmii, xmonad and dwm.
Technical variations of Linux distributions include support for different hardware devices and systems or software package configurations. Organizational differences may be motivated by historical reasons. Other criteria include security, including how quickly security upgrades are available; ease of package management; and number of packages available.
JOE or Joe's Own Editor is an ncurses-based text editor for Unix systems, available under the GPL. It is designed to be easy to use.
Compiz is a compositing window manager for the X Window System, using 3D graphics hardware to create fast compositing desktop effects for window management. Effects, such as a minimization animation or a cube workspace, are implemented as loadable plugins. Because it conforms to the ICCCM conventions, Compiz can be used as a substitute for the default Mutter or Metacity, when using GNOME Panel, or KWin in KDE Plasma Workspaces. Internally Compiz uses the OpenGL library as the interface to the graphics hardware.
RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a free and open-source package management system. The name RPM refers to the .rpm file format and the package manager program itself. RPM was intended primarily for Linux distributions; the file format is the baseline package format of the Linux Standard Base.
awesome is a dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed in the C and Lua programming languages. Lua is also used for configuring and extending the window manager. Its development began as a fork of dwm, though has differed considerably since. It aims to be extremely small and fast, yet extensively customizable. It makes it possible for the user to manage windows with the use of keyboard.
KVIrc is a graphical IRC client for Linux, Unix, Mac OS and Windows. The name is an acronym of K Visual IRC in which the K stands for a dependency to KDE, which became optional from version 2.0.0. The software is based on the Qt framework and its code is released under a modified GNU General Public License.
A delta update is a software update that requires the user to download only those parts of the software's code that are new, or have been changed from their previous state, in contrast to having to download the entire program. The use of delta updates can save significant amounts of time and computing bandwidth. The name "delta" derives from the mathematical science use of the Greek letter delta, Δ or δ to denote change.
Leafpad is a free and open-source graphical text editor for Linux, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), and Maemo that is similar to the Microsoft Windows program Notepad. Created with the focus of being a lightweight text editor with minimal dependencies, it is designed to be simple-to-use and easy-to-compile.
Zim is a graphical text editor designed to maintain a collection of locally stored wiki-pages, a personal wiki. It works as a personal knowledge base and note-taking software application that operates on text files using markdown. Each wiki-page can contain things like text with simple formatting, links to other pages, attachments, and images. Additional plugins, such as an equation editor and spell-checker, are also available. The wiki-pages are stored in a folder structure in plain text files with wiki formatting. Zim can be used with the Getting Things Done method.
Ansible is a suite of software tools that enables infrastructure as code. It is open-source and the suite includes software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment functionality.
Zathura is a free, plugin-based document viewer. Plugins are available for PDF, PostScript and DjVu. It was written to be lightweight and controlled with vi-like keybindings. Zathura's customizability makes it well-liked by many Linux users.
firewalld is a firewall management tool for Linux operating systems. It provides firewall features by acting as a front-end for the Linux kernel's netfilter framework. firewalld's current default backend is nftables. Prior to v0.6.0, iptables was the default backend. Through its abstractions, firewalld acts as an alternative to nft and iptables command line programs. The name firewalld adheres to the Unix convention of naming system daemons by appending the letter "d".
GNOME Terminator is a free and open-source terminal emulator for Linux programmed in Python, licensed under GPL-2.0-only. The goal of the project is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals. It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, QuadKonsole, etc. In that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids. Terminator packages exist for Arch, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Snap, FreeBSD, OpenBSD. In 2017 took second place in voting at opensource.com, after Gnome Terminal.
