OK, so let's look at the detail here.

The first thing I'm doing is killing some applications.

I don't like Evolution mail system because it critically doesn't have a filter action to forward mails. My e-mail system is running 24/7 and checks for new mail every 10 minutes. If it spots mail from key people then it will forward them to my mobile phone, but only if it has the ability to forward, in the rules. That's why I install Kmail instead; true, it is part of the KDE build, but it works perfectly happily on Ubuntu.

I also remove the, "transmission," torrent client. I have no need of it. Instead I use ktorrent; I prefer its way of working.

F-Spot gets the heave ho as I control my picture library with Digikam instead. I back that up with Gwenview as an ad-hock picture browser.

Kaddressbook does get nobbled as well. For some reason, I'm not actually handling my contacts on the PC. Still haven't found a good system of keeping an address book on the PC. I did use my Palm T3 for a while, but that got to be a real pain. Most of my contacts live in the phone, at the end of the day.

The important stuff for me are Kmail for e-mail and Firefox for browsing. Open Office or Libre Office then provide all the standard word processing, spreadsheet and presentation functions; you can get the mathematical and drawing parts of the suite if you want to add them yourself. These are the basics.

Financial dealings are handled by Gnucash. This is the equivalent of Money or Quicken. Nice tool which I've been using since 2003 to keep track of my accounts.

Celtx can also be downloaded from their web site and I use this for my script writing. Don't forget to get the English British dictionary! It is mostly a case of unpacking the compressed file to your home directory and then running it from there.

If you unpack Celtx (and some others like it) in your home directory, and you transfer your home directory from one installation to the other, then the odds on that Celtx won't need to be installed again; it should just work.

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For imaging, Digikam controls my library and Gimp with the uFraw plug in handle the editing. As I mentioned, Gwenview comes in as a nice little picture browser for folders which are outside my main libraries. You can learn how to use The Gimp at Meet The Gimp

Inkscape handles the vector drawing side of things that Gimp isn't too good at handling. I use this for my primary web design work.

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Video work is something I've been doing a bit of lately and Cinelerra ended up being the choice. The fork called Cinecutie was better for me, but it seems to have dropped off the net. I also ran KDEnlive for a while, but it turned out to be buggy, especially with my twin screens.

Translating video from my camera, to a standard DV format needs the command line and "ffmpeg" - running with the -sameq options, it can go as follows... ffmpeg -sameq -i MOV001.MOV MOV001.DV ... and that would translate a video from MOV format to DV format while retaining the same quality. The -i defines the input file.

When it comes to Cinelerra output, I either output in DV format for uploading to You Tube, or if I want to go wide screen, I'll output in Ogg format. I posted basic tutorial videos here. Before translating the DV to YouTube, however, I translate the DV file to Mpeg ...

ffmpeg -i fulltitle.dv -b 1600000 -ac 2 -ar 44100 fulltitle.mpg

... again the -i for the input file. The -b is the bit rate which I find to be a nice balance between file size and quality. -ac specifies 2 audio channels with -ar being the audio bit rate of 44100. Finally, the output mpeg file name. Once that is complete, the video can be uploaded. It is a shame that ffmpeg is so powerful and has so many options, that writing a GUI for it is not that simple.

Blender is something I only use rarely. It is the 3D animation engine and you can see more of the output from Blender right here. This is no lightweight system. Learn to use it at Blender Underground.

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Internet programs consist of Empathy for chatting on multi-systems at once. It handles my MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, and more, all in teh one client. It is also integrated in to Ubuntu itself.

Filezilla is great at handling file transfer. I use it for my SFTP transfering.

Clipgrab is the tool for downloading videos from services like YouTube. It manages to get the really good quality downloads.

Skype is also available, but I think I got this via an Ubuntu/Debian package from Skype's own web site.

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Maintenance is done via the BlueFish program for editing web pages. It lacks some of the more powerful search and replace functions that I used in HomeSite, but it does a great job.

As most of my databases are MySQL, I use the MySQL Workbench which takes a little getting used to, and I still pine for SQLYog on Windows, but they wouldn't port Yog, so Workbench it has to be these days.

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Audacity is the Open Source version of... you know, I haven't used the Windows package for so long now that I've forgotten what it was called. Goldwave. That was it.

There are also MIDI programs that I use in place of Cakewalk; Rosegarden something or other, but I havne't done Midi now for a while.

Ubuntu usually comes with Brasero as a CD/DVD burner. I suplement that with QDVD Author and DVD Styler if I want to make a playable DVD.

Handbrake is my loyal program for ripping my DVD's to quality M4V files. My tips, use a 12000 bit rate, change the audio DRC to 3, save that to your presets and make it your default. Those are my go-to setings.

Rythmbox comes with Ubuntu and behind this is not only a local audio file cataloguing system, but it can handle your pod casts and radio channels as well. Not only that, but once you've signed up for a free Ubuntu One account, you can use the shop to buy and download your audio files.

Ubuntu One, by the way, also has a synchronising area so you can synchronise files between computers and also access the files from any machine on the web as well. Cool. All built in and all for free.

VLC is my default DVD player. I can use it to see which track and chapter are playing along with any subtitle tracks being used. That is useful input for Handbrake.

Xine is my default media player for everything else. Adding the command, "xine -p" to the application launch types really makes things easy.

EasyTag enables me to handle the media tags of my MP3 and OGG audio files so I can ensure they come up properly in the media libraries.

Juice Audio CD extractor enables me to rip my audio CD's to OGG files as well (I prefer Ogg to MP3, but not many commercial players want to handle OGG. Their loss.)

This is backed up with Avidemux and DVD Encoder.

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Added to this is Virtual Box. Part of Sun Microsystems kit, now rebadged to Oracle. It allows me to run Windows in a virtual environment on my machine.

Among the things that I do is use the "Menu Editor" to add an option to my System Tools. I select, "Application In Terminal" and call it, "Admin Browser". The command is, "sudo nautilus" and when selected, it will ask me for my admin password, before starting up a file browser with administration privs. This is useful for moving files around between media where permissions are an issue.

Other useful things to watch out for are GTK Disk Free, usually found in the system tools, it will give a graphical report on your media usage. Also, there is "Disk Usage Analyser" in the Accessories; simply point it at a folder and it will give you the sub-directory usage just like TreeSize Pro used to on Windows.

If the menus are getting too cluttered for you, then go in to the menu editor and simply remove the tick from the applications you don't want to see. You can also, if you want, introduce a new folder and move some items to a lower level.

By right clicking on the desktop and going for the background change, you'll notice a tab called "Visual Effects," and the high version of this is responsible for all the springy window effects. Note that if you use VLC, then it might have problems with Visual Effects set to high. This is a long standing bug; simply take VLC to full screen and back down again, and it will show the video properly.

The other thing I load up is the Compiz Config Settings Manager. As well as being responsible for the cool desktop cube effect, there is also a handy Enhanced Desktop Zoom in here. I bind it to the "Start Button" which is known in Linux world as the "Super" button. Pressing the supper button while using my mouse scroll wheel, allows me to dynamically zoom in on any area of the screen should it be too small.

There are a lot of options here, though, and they can take some time to work through.

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At the end of the day, everything is command based. The menu editor is simply editing the launching commands. You can launch a program manually by pressing ALT and F2. When the box comes up you could type in the command "dolphin" to launch the dolphin file browser for example.

The shear weight and number of the customisable options can really seem confusing at first. You can almost change around anything you want to in the "panel" bars at the top and bottom of the screen. They're not fixed!

Also, if you're at the command line and are looking for options, go to a browser and look for "man " and that should bring up the manual options for the command you're looking for.

Some of the equivalent commands are...

ls = dir
ls -lat brings out more detail in the directory listing.
cd = cd - change directory. This is also the same with md and rmdir. Here the .. works as well, but remember that under Linux, the slash is forward "/" as used in the Internet naming convensions and not the Microsoft backslash "\".
mv - move files.
rm - remove files.
Putting sudo in front of commands will tell the system, "execute this command as if I was the root user." It will ask you to confirm your password. Also note, privileges to do this are only automatically assigned to the user that created the system; to allow anyone else to do the "sudo" trick, make them members of the admin group.