Appnr is a web-based directory of applications for Ubuntu Linux. You can also launch Ubuntu's package manager to install any application on the site with a click of a button.

Nothing to write home about there. You can get a list of apps for Ubuntu by firing up the Synaptic package manager from your desktop. But Appnr differentiates itself in at least two ways:

1. You can sort applications alphabetically or by how popular the downloads are.
2. The software description pages are much more informative than the brief, text-only descriptions you'll find in the Synaptic package manger.

The popularity rankings are nice. But it's the fleshed out details page that are really useful. Each page includes related image, video, web, and blog search results. That makes it easy to find screenshots of the application in question, an official product page (or Wikipedia or other page), and recent posts from blogs that have written about applications.

[via MakeUseOf]

There are plenty of things to love about a modern desktop Linux distribution like Ubuntu 8.04. It's got nifty desktop effects, comes with an office suite, web browser, media player, and pretty much anything else you need for day to day computer user. And there's a huge list of applications you can install with the click of a mouse.

But there's one thing I absolutely hate. And that's the fact that while package managers like Synaptic and apt-get make it incredibly easy to install all sorts of applications, uninstalling is another matter.

I wanted to see if I could get some audio editing tools up and running on my Eee PC 1000H today. I could have just tried installing Jack and Ardour, but I decided to go all out and install Ubuntu Studio's audio packages. I opened a terminal, typed in "sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-audio," and after downloading 300MB of files and unpacking them to take up 600MB on my desktop I was all set. Dozens of utilities has been installed, most of which I didn't have any intention of using. After playing around a bit, I couldn't figure out how to playback audio in Ardour, the one app I really wanted to use. And Ardour crashed about 70% of the time I tried to launch it.

So I decided to uninstall using the same method. I opened a terminal, typed "sudo apt-get remove ubuntustudio-audio" and received a message saying I could free up 49.2KB. Only two packages would be uninstalled, and almost all of the audio applications I didn't need would stick around, eating up hard disk space.

Apt-get makes it incredibly easy to install software. It's not so easy to remove it. It looks like my best bet is to go through and remove the applications I don't need one by one. I'm amazed how often I run into this program.

If you don't tend to install a lot of programs that you later wind up uninstalling, Ubuntu's a great operating system. If you enjoy testing out new software, and value both your hard drive space and your free time, Ubuntu may not be for you.

I haven't played with Fedora, SUSE, or PCLinuxOS lately. Anyone know if any of them have a package manager that makes it easier to remove applications?

Update: Thanks to mcdope, I managed to find a solution. But it was so non-intuitive that I'm going to stand by my headline. Uninstalling applications needs to be much simpler in Linux.

Basically, apt-get autoclean, apt-get autoremove, and apt-get --purge remove did nothing for me. What helped was installing the debfoster package and then running it. This shows a list of all packages that were installed along with ubuntustudio-audio (or any other package). If you select "y," you can keep a package. Selecting "n" removes it -- but not the other packages that rely on it, as I figured out the hard way.

So I had to reinstall ubuntustudio-audio, run through the whole process again, and this time select "p" for purge." That finally removed most of the apps that had been installed as part of the package and cleaned up 519MB of disc space. Finally, I ran apt-get autoremove which seemed to cleanup a few more loose ends.

Thanks for all your suggestions!

I'm a Windows user, and it has served me well. That being said, I play with a lot of Linux distributions and there are some applications that are just so much better than anything Windows can offer that I find myself wondering how long it'll be until I make the switch.

For starters, there's the APT and the Synaptic Package Manager. Microsoft has been promising updates and installs without reboots for years, yet Windows Vista still can't seem to deliver the goods. The Linux Mint beta I installed on my laptop recently, however, located well over a hundred updates to various packages upon completion and quietly downloaded and installed them while I finished tweaking Firefox and tooled around on some websites.

And unlike Windows' Automatic Updates, APT actually handles all the software on your machine, not just updates to the OS. What I wouldn't give for a Windows app that did this - and I know there are various apps that try, like Sumo, but none of them really work all that well. Rebooting to complete updates is crap. Get that trash off my PC.

Your shiny new Linux system has it all -- except that one program you really needed it to install. You get online, you find the program's website, and click 'download'. Except there's not just a link to the program there.

There are four, or five, or more links to the program. Each has a slightly different format, ending with .rpm, .deb, .tgz, or possibly even .ebuild.

Some include x86 in the name, while others say ppc or amd64. What's the difference? What's actually included in these packages?

Packages are pre-compiled programs for your system (the exception being Gentoo's .ebuild). You've got to know a bit about your system to install them.

So you're an early adopter and you've run out to buy yourself Asus's $400 Eee PC because it seemed like a great price for a fully functional 2 pound computer that's about the size of a typical hardcover book (and far smaller than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows).

But the innovative easy to use interface might get old pretty quickly if you want to do more than surf the web and create letters, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint style presentations for your friends telling them how cool you are because you have an Eee PC while they don't.

Asus includes instructions for loading Windows XP onto the Eee PC, but it requires an external DVD drive, some drive compression, and you know, a copy of Windows XP. Curiously, Asus does not include any instructions for unlocking the built-in potential of Xandros Linux, the operating system that ships with the Eee PC. But as we mentioned in this week's Squadcast, it just takes a little bit of work to unlock this machine's potential.

If you've got a bit of Linux experience under your belt, it's pretty simple to add some programs, enable an advanced desktop, and tweak the Eee PC to your heart's content. But it turns out that even if you're a Linux noob, the learning curve isn't that steep. Here are some of the most useful Eee hacks/tweaks we've discovered in our first half week of playing with it. Thanks to the Eee User community for helping inspire our hacking.