5 Open Source Tools in Ubuntu Linux that Make Life Easier
Here's a breakdown of five open source tools or features that are easily available in Ubuntu (OK, most of them are equally available in any other Linux distribution) and save me lots of time and frustration.
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One cool thing I learned about Linux early on (and I learned it the hard way) is that if you configure a separate partition for the /home directory when you install your system, you can easily install a newer version of Linux later without losing your personal data. All of your personal files and configuration settings remain in place and are automatically migrated to the new system.
In Windows, of course, wiping out the OS and reinstalling a different version requires tedious migration of all of your personal files.
Not having to run antivirus software may not exactly count as a "feature." But it's certainly a benefit.
In my life as a Windows user, I wasted huge amounts of time (not to mention electricity and system resources) waiting for bloated antivirus software to scan the system. In Ubuntu, I don't have to sacrifice productivity because of the overhead of an antivirus program.
Yes, maybe things would be different if desktop Linux were a more popular platform and people actually wrote malware for it. But they don't, and that makes it much more efficient.
I'm no elite hacker. I don't use the command line for most of my work. But one CLI tool that does come in handy for me all of the time is grep.
Grep makes it easy to find certain words or phrases within a body of text. Yes, you could do that using the "find" function in any word processor. But that's a poor tool for the job if you need to search through multiple files, or if you want to match regular expressions as well as exact words or phrases (well, you could do regexes in Word or LibreOffice, but they're not exactly user-friendly). It also doesn't help if you want to find all lines of text that do not contain a certain expression.
I use grep all the time for tasks like creating invoices, for example, by pulling information from Web pages and extracting the titles of articles I have written. It also came in handy the last time I needed to prepare an index for a book and wanted to make a list of all proper nouns within circa 250 pages of text.
Virtual desktops are one of the things that you probably never even imagine until you're introduced to them. But once you begin using them, you could never live without them again.
Virtual desktops save you from cluttering your screen with more windows than you can reasonably handle. They also make it easy to, say, have an email open in one virtual screen and a word processor in another one while you're working on a task that involves both files. That way, you can switch between the two rapidly without having to change window focus.
You could achieve the same side-by-side effect by buying multiple monitors and a fancy graphics card to support them, of course. Or you could save lots of money (and the environment) by using virtual desktops to increase the efficiency of a single monitor by a magnitude.
Pdftk is a handy open source tool for creating and manipulating PDF files from the command line. It has made my life better in all sorts of ways by allowing me to merge or modify PDFs quickly.
There is nothing pdftk can do that you couldn't also do in Adobe Acrobat Professional. But pdftk is free, whereas the commercial version of Acrobat costs what I believe to be unreasonable amounts of money. Plus, manipulating a series of PDF files in Acrobat requires lots of repetitive pointing-and-clicking and dragging-and-dropping. With pdftk, I can write a single command to do everything I need. And I can easily repeat that command with a single keystroke as many times as I want.
Combine pdftk with LibreOffice's –headless feature (which, alas, is poorly documented, but works wonders once you familiarize yourself with it), which lets you turn word processor files into PDFs from the command line, and you're a true master of all things PDF.
Pdftk is a handy open source tool for creating and manipulating PDF files from the command line. It has made my life better in all sorts of ways by allowing me to merge or modify PDFs quickly.
There is nothing pdftk can do that you couldn't also do in Adobe Acrobat Professional. But pdftk is free, whereas the commercial version of Acrobat costs what I believe to be unreasonable amounts of money. Plus, manipulating a series of PDF files in Acrobat requires lots of repetitive pointing-and-clicking and dragging-and-dropping. With pdftk, I can write a single command to do everything I need. And I can easily repeat that command with a single keystroke as many times as I want.
Combine pdftk with LibreOffice's –headless feature (which, alas, is poorly documented, but works wonders once you familiarize yourself with it), which lets you turn word processor files into PDFs from the command line, and you're a true master of all things PDF.
Ubuntu Linux isn't perfect (no operating system is), but it does make my workflow easier and more efficient on a daily basis. In fact, it makes things so easy that I sometimes take it for granted.
So, in order to remind myself how Ubuntu simplifies my life, here's a breakdown of five open source tools or features that are easily available in Ubuntu (OK, most of them would work in any other Linux distribution, too) and save me lots of time and frustration.
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