So my desktop PC's fan went out... It served me well for four years now. I'm buying a replacement off a friend for a few bucks tomorrow so that should be back in action soon. In the meanwhile, I've spent a lot of time researching a lot of great Ubuntu customizations. Here's a list of my favorite apps:
1) Internet Browser: Google's Chrome. I've used it since its inception and have been excited to see it grow. It pioneered minimalism in browsers (I'm sure some other obscure browser did it first, but Chrome does it best). Moreover, it was built for speed, blowing even Firefox out of the water (Firefox wasn't the standard for fast when Chrome debuted, but it offered the best balance between functionality and speed). Pretty much everything it did, it did the best and it has yet to receive any serious competition except from maybe the emerging IE9; however, Chrome rolls out many frequent builds rather than multi-annually, like IE.
2) Dock: Docky. It's not the most customizable dock yet, but it's got a solid, stable feel. What it does, it does well. It comes with a few "docklets" which are effectively dock items that don't just launch applications; however, I have yet to find a docklet store for third-party docklets, which is too bad. It has a lot of strengths and it's popularity is rapidly increasing. I personally love it.
3) IDE: Geany. I love Geany for programming. It's fairly lightweight and it allows me to do everything I need to do. There is a little room for improvement, but it's been a pleasure to use so far.
4) Image manipulator: GIMP. I'm rapidly learning to love this Photoshop alternative. It's lacking in many areas (it's UI is a nightmare) but it's improving with each build.
5) Quick search/launcher: Launchy. I pretty much made up this category just for Launchy. I'm not a particularly big fan of the more popular Gnome Do, and have yet to try many of the other varieties of quick-launchers, but I love ctrl+space and then typing the program name to launch it. I hate going back and forth between keyboard and mouse and this is a tool that irons out the wrinkles in UI design. I'd love to see something like this become integrated into Ubuntu.
The rest of the categories are pretty much the default Ubuntu products. Rhythmbox for music, OpenOffice.org for office, Empathy for IM.
The other big exciting customization I recently made has been the Elementary Theme plus the new Elementary icons. I love the theme. Evidently, there is also a Chrome theme and scrollbars for Chrome to match; however, neither worked for me. There's also Nautilus Elementary which is supposed to improve (I daresay fix) a lot of the Nautilus UI; however, installing that also hasn't worked for me. I don't know what the deal is, but I can't make either of them work, which is really too bad because Nautilus Elementary looked freaking stellar.
Finally, a couple of sites I've thoroughly enjoyed this week: Web UpD8 and OMG! Ubuntu!.
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