Time to talk about the stuff you bought your computer for in the first place. Most of us don't get into computers because we want to experience the joys of system administration; we want to use the computer as a tool, or better yet, as a toy! Most people get a computer so they can use application software.
Clear Definitions
I want to make sure we're clear on what exactly an application is. You have two kinds of software on your computer; applications and utilities. A utility is a program for managing hardware and OS features. A network manager is a utility. So's a disc partitioning tool. The Windows control panel and pretty much every program in it is a utility.
An application, on the other hand, is a program that is useful for some external purpose. It's the kind of program you buy a computer for in the first place. Your web browser is an application, as is your word processor, your music player, and your photo editor. In this tutorial I'm going to talk about applications.
Keep in Mind...
I'm only going to be scratching the surface here. There are more apps for any given purpose than I can possibly cover, so I'm mostly going to talk about the stuff I use and point you towards some of the more popular alternatives to try out. I'm only going to do an overview of the each app's most important features; in no way should this be considered a detailed manual for any of them. I'm going to be using Debian Squeeze for this, so be aware that some of the apps in Lenny will be older versions and a few of them (Amarok comes to mind) have gone through some pretty significant changes. It shouldn't cause too much of a problem, but it is something to be aware of.
The App Pages
There's too much content here for one page, so I split it up into categories. Here are the links to the application pages. I realize that there are more app categories than I've covered, but I'm just sticking to the basics here. There probably should be a Games category, but I'm not a gamer and don't know anything about the available gaming apps. Never mind, there should be enough here to keep you busy for awhile. Have fun!
