Libre Office for word processing, spreadsheets, etc: Easy, but I couldn't nap through it. The command is simple enough (pacman -S libreoffice), but first it asks what members of the package group I want to install - default is all 11 of them. Yup, all of them is fine. Then it asks what language pack I want to use - default is Afrikaans! Um, no, I want US-English... that's #22 with the cryptic name "libreoffice-en-US". A little piece of trivia is that Libre Office is a fork of Open Office, which suddenly is owned by Oracle; the "Libre" part of the name is Latin for free, as in freedom.
Chromium for web-browsing. Start with the install (pacman -S chromium), but it isn't quite done there. Chromium is what Google Chrome is based on, and comprises just about all the features with none of the privacy-violating hijinks. The only thing it doesn't have that I want is a Flash Player, and that's easy to get, too: pacman -S flashplugin.
The Gimp for photo editing (pacman -S gimp).
Audacity for sound editing (pacman -S audacity).
OpenShot for video editing (pacman -S openshot).
Wine for running Windows programs under Linux (pacman -S wine).
Skype for VOIP: Hooray, there's a package for it in the repository (pacman -S skype)! If this were a real machine, I would put in my account details and configure my headset mic. But I've done that before in Linux, and I'm confident I can do it again. No need to fight with USB support in VirtualBox, which can be pretty touchy.
Netbeans for programming: At the office, I code pretty exclusively in C++, so I have the C++-only version of Netbeans. But here at home I don't want that limitation, so I downloaded the "everything" version, which includes Java and PHP support. Then I just had to run the installer and I was all set.
I use Pidgin under Ubuntu for an IM client, but Kopete comes pre-installed with KDE, so I decided to give that a try. If I decide to go back to Pidgin, it's in the Arch repository, so I don't expect an issue with it. After entering my account details and digging through the settings to get Kopete just the way I want it, IM was taken care of. Kopete doesn't support Facebook chat, but neither does Pidgin lately, so no big deal.
I really like Clementine under Ubuntu as a music player, but Amarok is the best-known music player for KDE, and Clementine actually says "inspired by Amarok" on its website. So I gave Amarok a two-song try, and I'm impressed. It can definitely do what I need it to do, and it has a lot of cool features that Clementine doesn't. To install Amarok, I needed a single command: pacman -S amarok
That's about it for the easy ones. Note that I probably could have installed most of them at once, with this command (all one line):
pacman -S libreoffice chromium flashplugin gimp audacity openshot wine skype amarok
After installing all of these apps, I'm left with the tougher ones:
- PasswordSafe for secure password management
- Moneydance for personal finance
- ThinkOrSwim for option trading
- Minecraft - thought this would be easy, but it crashed on my first attempt
- Dropbox for cloud storage
- Kontact for e-mail, contacts, and calendar
- Choqok for micro-blogging (following and posting to Twitter)
- NixNote for notes/personal organization
- Bless hex editor
- Bacula for automated backups
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