Other Apps and Utilities

In lieu of Photoshop, use The GIMP or Krita. The GIMP has long been both praised and reviled. It's a powerful image editor with features that rival Adobe Photoshop's, but it's also a little harder to learn. If you're used to Photoshop, you can smooth your transition to The GIMP by using GIMPshop, a version of The GIMP modified to mimic Photoshop's interface (as we went to press, a version based on the latest edition of Photoshop was not yet available).

A bevy of free GIMP plug-ins add key missing features, including RAW image support. If you're just starting out with image editing under Linux, however, you may want to try Krita's collection of tools, which are geared to beginners and pros alike.

Replace Partition Magic with GParted. Moving, resizing, adding, and deleting disk partitions can be stressful. Windows doesn't even provide the necessary tools for most of the operations, forcing you to buy an expensive utility such as Partition Magic. Your Linux distribution, on the other hand, offers a powerful, free partition editor called GParted that shows a graphical display of partition locations and sizes and provides drag-and-drop editing tools. You'll find GParted built into several major distros, and you can learn more at the GParted Web site.