This page covers some of the applications that I feel are essential to produce a good desktop system. Debian, sadly, doesn't have a very good default desktop system. There is no doubt that what gets installed works but there are numerous applications that are best of breed that are not isntalled by default. Installing the applications listed below will give you some of the best desktop software available. The list is somewhat skewed in the favour of development software as that is what I do but all these applications are of a high quality.

Before I really get going though I would like to have a quick rant about the software that does get installed with a standard Debian desktop install. Why, oh why, do so many applications that I will never use in a million years get installed. I'm a KDE user and I have a quick look in the menu and I see a games heading and an edutainment heading. Why? I'm not against games on a desktop machine, I think they are a nice diversion now and then, but why are about 50 games that I will never touch installed. I, and the vast majority of people, will never touch Potato Guy. My problem with these default installs is that most of them are poor examples of OSS. Why not install just half a dozen decent games? This is the case for most menus and these applications generally can't be removed because of dependency problems (I believe this is now being fixed).

AmaroK

Easily the best music player around for Linux at the moment. Unlike most media players this one is backed by a real database so searches are very fast. In my set up I use the Postgres backend but MySQL and SQLite are also supported. The applicaiton is skinnable but there are few skins available and the default skin is good enough - after all you are listening to music not watching the player.

Synaptic

If you are running a desktop on a machine you might as well use a grapical package manager. Synaptic is the best graphical package manager around at the moment.

PgAdmin3

Postgres is a great OSS database but like all databases it needs a management console if you are to interact with it easily. PgAdmin3 is just such a console. It's not the best piece of software around, it has a bit of a tendancy to crash and editing cells is quirky sometimes, but it is coming on in leaps and bounds and all the basic functionality is working.