12 Apps That Let You Make The Most Of Ubuntu!

The Ubuntu paltform is like a make your own meal buffet at a restaurant. You can choose what software you will run in order to unleash its true power. The control over your own system is a lot more and you quite literally have the power. Here are some apps that will make your Ubuntu experience a rather enjoyable one.

1) Firefox

The Firefox web browser by Mozilla is one of the open source world's most prized possessions. The non-profit organisation (Mozilla) has developed a fast, easy-to-use browser, which is the chosen one for development purposes.

2) Parcelite

Parcellite is a lightweight GTK+ clipboard manager. It is a stripped down, basic-features-only clipboard manager with a small memory footprint for those who like simplicity.

3) Bittorrent Sync

This is arguably the best syncing app that is available today. It's graphical user interface makes it extremely easy to use and you can transfer files without having to constantly sync them with the cloud.

4) System Monitor

GNOME's System Monitor presents a graphical user interface solution for the Top utility in Linux. In addition, it provides a solution for many of Top's limitations and provides a real-time perspective of the user's CPU through graphs. It is also easy-to-use.

5) PulseAudioControl

PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol) is a simple GTK based volume control tool ("mixer") for the PulseAudio sound server. In contrast to classic mixer tools this one allows you to control both the volume of hardware devices and of each playback stream separately.

6) Skype

You can use Skype for Linux as long as you have version 4.2 of Linux and a webcam. The features it offers are,

- Free Skype to Skype calls.
- Low cost calls and text messages to mobiles and landlines.
- Video call your contacts.
- Free instant messages to your friends, family and colleagues.

7) Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies. The software is completely free, as defined by the GNU foundation.

8) OpenShot

OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source video editor for Linux licensed under the GPL version 3.0. It's features include trimming and arranging videos, adjusting audio levels, transitions between videos, compositing multiple layers of video, chroma-key/green screen effect, and support for most formats and codecs.

9) SpiderOak

SpiderOak makes it possible for you to privately store, sync, share & access your data from everywhere. It provides the ability to utilise cloud technologies while retaining that precious right we call privacy. It has a 'zero-knowledge' privacy environment ensures that only you can see your data.

10) Dropbox

One of the best known and most trusted cloud storage and sharing options that are available today, Dropbox has a huge user base and is used all over the world.

11) Writer

Writer has all the features you need from a modern, full-featured word processing and desktop publishing tool. It's simple enough for a quick memo, but powerful enough to create complete books with contents, diagrams, indexes, and more. You're free to concentrate on your message, while Writer will make it look great.

12) SimpleScreenRecorder

SimpleScreenRecorder is a Linux program that was created to record programs and games. Its features include,

- Graphical user interface (Qt-based).
- Faster than VLC and ffmpeg/avconv.
- Records the entire screen or part of it, or records OpenGL applications directly (similar to Fraps on Windows).
- Synchronises audio and video properly (a common issue with VLC and ffmpeg/avconv).
- Reduces the video frame rate if your computer is too slow (rather than using up all your RAM like VLC does).
- Fully multithreaded: small delays in any of the components will never block the other components, resulting is smoother video and better performance on computers with multiple processors.
- Pause and resume recording at any time (either by clicking a button or by pressing a hotkey).
- Shows statistics during recording (file size, bit rate, total recording time, actual frame rate)
- Can show a preview during recording, so you don't waste time recording something only to figure out afterwards that some setting was wrong.
- Uses libav/ffmpeg libraries for encoding, so it supports many different codecs and file formats (adding more is trivial).
- Can also do live streaming (experimental).
- Sensible default settings: no need to change anything if you don't want to.
- Tooltips for almost everything: no need to read the documentation to find out what something does.