Datasheet
Chapter 1: What is Ubuntu?
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All of the panel features are similar to what you would find in Microsoft Windows.
Besides the desktop features, the KDE project has produced a wide assortment of applica-
tions that run in the KDE environment. These applications are shown in Table 1-4.
Table 1-4: KDE Applications
Application Description
amaroK Audio file player
digiKam Digital camera software
K3b CD-burning software
Kaffeine Video player
Kmail Email client
Koffice Office applications suite
Konqueror File and web browser
Kontact Personal information manager
Kopete Instant messaging client
You may notice the trend of using a capital K in KDE application names. This is only
a partial list of applications produced by the KDE project. Many more applications are
part of the KDE project. Similar to the GNOME environment, Kubuntu doesn’t include
all of the KDE project software by default, but you can easily install anything using the
software repository.
Other Desktops
The downside to a fancy graphical desktop environment is that it requires a fair amount
of system resources to operate properly. In the early days of Linux, a hallmark and sell-
ing feature of Linux was its ability to operate on older, less powerful PCs that the newer
Microsoft desktop products couldn’t run on. However, with the popularity of KDE and
GNOME desktops, this hallmark has changed, and it can take almost as much memory to
run a KDE or GNOME desktop as the latest Microsoft desktop environment (the minimum
requirements for Ubuntu is 384 MB of memory).
If you have an older PC, don’t be discouraged. The Linux developers have banded together
to take Linux back to its roots. They’ve created several low-memory-oriented graphical
desktop applications that provide basic features that run perfectly fine on older PCs.
Although those graphical desktops don’t have a plethora of applications designed around
them, they still run many basic graphical applications that support features such as word
processing, spreadsheets, databases, drawing, and, of course, multimedia applications.
Table 1-5 shows some of the smaller Linux graphical desktop environments that can be
used on lower-powered PCs and laptops.
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