Essential applications on a new Xubuntu install

Xubuntu is a pretty bare boned system, which makes it fast and lightweight. It's also easy to customize and really make your own. Following are a few things I did to customize my Thinkpad to my work flow.

Power Management
For advance  power management I installed tlp. See site for details.

Office Suite
Xubuntu ships with Abiword  for word processing and Gnumeric for manipulating spreadsheets. These programs are lightweight and easy to use, but not powerful enough for my needs. The obvious choice is LibreOffice, but I decided to go with Kingsoft Office. Kingsoft has been around for a while but only recently ported their office suite to linux. Although, it's still in alpha testing the applications are powerful, the UI is familiar and they are completely compatible with Microsoft Office generated files. Download here.

Presentation Application

Spreadsheet Application

Word Processor

Design and graphics
For editing images, creating illustrations and page layouts, I use Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus, respectively. These are all available from the application center.

Gimp

Inkscape

Scribus

Internet
I use Firefox browser, which ships with Xubuntu. I added the Adblock Plus and Youtube HTML5 extension. I uninstalled Thunderbird and installed Geary mail client.

Python development
I use the Geany IDE for working with Python.

Geany

More to come later...