Best of...

Apparently it is "Best of" season over at InfoWorld. I'd be interested in what they think is the best but their lists are basically unnavigable - I hope they didn't use any of the Best open source developer tools to design that catastrophe of a presentation. It is way too much work to see their results, but if you have patience and the minimum 25" display necessary to watch the content among the sea of adds:

• Best of Open Source Software Awards 2009
• Best of open source enterprise software
• Best open source developer tools
• Best open source networking software
• Best open source platforms and middleware

At the recent BarcampGR 2009 someone asked why I would choose to develop applications on LINUX? The answer is pretty simple: GNOME is an excellent desktop. My question: Why would someone choose to use something else, especially a platform as spartan as Microsoft Windows? Out-of-the-box a GNOME desktop provides an full-suite of top-notch applications:

• Manage your music and media with Banshee.
• Manage your photos with F-Spot.
• Keep notes, and have a Wiki for free, with Tomboy.
• For e-mail, calendaring, contact management, and all that use Evolution. Except no substitutes here, certainly not that miserable runt of a mail client from the Mozilla project. No Open Source mail client, and no proprietary one, can rival Evolution. Evolution supports CalDAV, GroupDAV, Groupwise, and even Exchange.
• Open Office. What more needs to be said? Open Office rises to the challenge.
• Beagle will index all your data allowing you to do comprehensive searches. Once you start using this feature being without it feels like such a waste of time.
• This one may seem a bit esoteric, but you know the truth: you should be more diligent about encryting important files and signing e-mails, etc... But it is such a pain. I admit I was pretty lacadazical about such things. But with Seahorse installed it becomes more natural. Now I can encrypt and decrypt files in Nautilus with a right-click as well as decrypt and encrypt on-the-fly in gedit. Seahorse also provide a very nice UI for managing all those @&^$&@@) keys. You can even remove password entries that you have stored in the GNOME keyring.

So, seriously, why use something else? All the day-to-day needs are covered with high quality applications. And we haven't even talked about the awesome development tools like MonoDevelop.