Peter's Box o' Soap

In short: Most likely. I’ll get right to the point and list some application alternatives (to what you find on the two major commercial alternatives to Linux; Apple’s Mac OS X and Microsoft’s Windows) I either use myself, or recommend to those who need such functionality.

Task – App on Mac or Windows – App on Linux

Communication

Web browsing – Safari, Internet Explorer – Firefox, Galeon, Konqueror

eMail - (Apple) Mail, Windows Mail – Thunderbird, Evolution

File Transfer via FTP – Transmit, Fetch – gFTP

Bittorrent File Transfers – Transmission, uTorrent -Transmission, Deluge

P2P downloading and sharing – Shareaza – aMule

IRC chat – Snak, mIRC – Xchat

Instant messenging (IM) – iChat, Adium - Pidgin, Empathy (or Skype, which is availabel for all)

Remote Desktop (VNC) – Apple Remote Desktop – vino, vinagre

Office and Productivity

Calendaring – iCal – Evolution, Sunbird, Orage

Office Apps – Pages, Numbers, Microsoft Office - OpenOffice

Anti-Virus (if needed) – too many to mention - Xclam

Other productivity apps

Graphics Editing – Photoshop (professional) – Gimp

Vector Graphics – Illustrator (professional), Corel draw - Inkscape

3D rendering – AutoDesk 3DS Max, Lightwave – Blender

Music composing – Garageband – Rosegarden

Advanced Text Editing & Programming - TextMate, UltraEdit - Geany, XeMacs, Vim (and really, really many others)

IDE / Programming Environment – erm, various – Eclipse, NetBeans

Utility functions and Media

Editing Text files – Textedit, Notepad, WordPad – gedit

Graphics viewer – Preview – GnomeViewer

Video editing – iMovie, Windows Movie Maker - Cinelerra

Video playback – Quicktime Player, Windows Media Player – VLC, Totem

Photo Cataloguing  – iPhoto – F-spot

Music Cataloguing and playback – iTunes – Rhytmbox (and yes, it does work with your iPod)

Other

Virtual Environments for software – Parallels, VMWare - Virtualbox OSE

.NET programmign environment - Mono

For running largely *any* Windows app, you have Wine, The Windows Environment.

For any kind of web (apache), data (ftpd) or database hosting (mysql), Linux or other UNIX derivatives like it are basically the best solution for getting the job done; Unix machiens have been the backbone of the internet since its childhood. If stuff like this is what you need to do, you should look to a Server edition (fx. Ubuntu Server) of whatever Linux flavor you’re reading up on.

This is a cursory list of the things people do with their PC’s today. Obviously I can’t cover all tasks and jobs you need for your computer for, and if it’s not on this list, it does not mean that Linux can’t do what you’re looking for, merely that I’ve either not thought about that particular app, or that I’m too lazy to type it in. After two years with Linux as my OS of choice, I’ll say as much that I’m of the opinion that if there somethign you can’t do on Linux, it’s probably not worth bothering with. (Games? Get a console, PC’s are for serious business. Yes.)

When getting to grips with Linux, you’ll find that you sometimes need to invoke odd kinds of three-finger-salutes, either when things don’t work (which hopefully rarely should be the case, provided that you don’t do amateur surgery on your installation on a regular basis), or when you want to make your box do stuff out of the ordinary. Let’s have a look.

ctrl + alt + F1 : Switches you to a fullscreen TTY (text terminal – shorthand for the command line interface. Useful if your display manager freezes up or oterwise misbehaves).

ctrl + alt + F7 : Switches you from a TTY back to a graphical environment such as Xorg (if you have one such running; sometimes you have to press F9 instead though).

ctrl + F2 : When using a graphical environment, this calls up a launcher where you can instantly execute a command line app (fx. to kill off rampant processes (ex. “sudo killall Xorg”) without opening the process list)

ctrl + alt + del : Probably what you remember most fondly from Windows, this particular three finger salute doesnt do quote the same in Linux; when booted into Ubuntu’s graphical environment, it calls up the reboot/shutdown menu where you can choose to restart, hibernate or switch off your computer. If you are in a terminal environment, it reboots your computer (if you want to shutdown instead, you’ll want the command “sudo halt”).

For a lot of different and usually very handly “linux cheat sheets” for terminal hints and help, have a look here: http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/115/linux-unix-cheat-sheets—the-ultimate-collection/