Most people go for the big apps when switching to Linux, and for good reason: they are easy to find, usually very polished, often updated, and there's a lot of online documentation for them. What if you're not looking for the most popular, but instead the best app for you?

MoonOS is an Ubuntu based distribution that uses the Enlightenment (or LXDE) desktop environment, rather than GNOME’s standard. It also has some custom artwork. It caught my eye this week due to a new release, and the fact that I wanted to try out the Enlightenment desktop.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 was released earlier this year, but unlike in years past and contrary to their original six month release cycle, there will not be another OpenSolaris distribution release in 2009. Instead, the next slated release is OpenSolaris 2010.02. We have screenshots.

All your friends and business partners run Microsoft Office and you cannot afford to have any blunders when reading their documents. Likewise, you don't want to have your presentations all garbled up when you import them from Impress to PowerPoint. What about Office 2007? What about macros in your Excel sheets?

There are basically two types of desktop email software users. Type one uses one huge folder for all emails while type 2 neatly sorts emails into subfolders for better manageability.

It's no secret that one of the biggest things that Linux in general is lacking of is a good, simple video editor. There's a lot of video editors available yet none are exactly any good except for, in my opinion, PiTiVi.

Easy Peasy 1.5 is released. This is a custom Linux distribution (Ubuntu based), optimized for netbooks.

There is now a script called Gnome Gmail that comes as .deb for Ubuntu and .rpm for Fedora and Red Hat which adds support for Gmail to the Linux Gnome Desktop. Unlike the solution above, Gnome Gmail supports "To:", "Subject:", "body", "CC:", and "BCC: fields.