Chapter 4. Default Applications

By default, Xubuntu displays a number of commonly used applications in the Favorites category of the Applications Menu. These applications include the software manager, word processor, and help documentation, as well as the default web browser and file manager. To add or remove entries from the Favorites category, right-click on an application entry and select the Add to Favorites or Remove from Favorites entry in the context menu.

Catfish is a file search utility that is able to locate files by name, text content and more. It provides external search capability to the Thunar file manager.

Links: Website, Documentation, Donate

Alternatives: MATE Search (mate-utils), FSearch, ANGRYsearch, Recoll

Engrampa is an archive manager which provides the ability to create, view, modify, and extract data from archive files such as .zip and .gz files.

Alternatives: File Roller (file-roller), Xarchiver (xarchiver)

MATE Calculator is designed to resemble a hand-held calculator and has basic, advanced, financial, and programming modes.

Alternatives: Galculator (galculator), GNOME Calculator (gnome-calculator), Speedcrunch (speedcrunch)

Mousepad is a simple text editor with features for displaying line numbers and white space, word wrapping, source code syntax highlighting, etc.

Links: Website, Documentation

Alternatives: Pluma (pluma), GEdit (gedit), Geany (geany), Visual Studio Code

Screenshot is a screen capture utility that lets you capture the entire screen, an active application window, or a region of the screen.

Links: Website, Documentation

Mines is a single-player puzzle game where you locate mines floating in an ocean with the help of clues about the number of neighboring mines in the area. Clicking on a square reveals what is under it: either empty ocean or a mine. If you click on a mine, the game is over.

SGT Puzzles Collection is a set of over 30 unique single-player puzzle games. The games are designed to be played in a few short minutes, while taking a break or looking to pass the time.

Links: Website, Donate

Sudoku is a Japanese logic-based puzzle game. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with the numbers 1 to 9 so that each column, row, and each of the 3×3 subgrids contain all of the digits from 1 to 9. Each game starts with a partially completed grid, with many games having only a single solution.

Document Scanner, also known as Simple Scan, is a utility to scan text or images/photographs and save them to an image or PDF file.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an image editing application for enhancing and retouching photos, free-from drawing, as well as image format conversion.

Links: Website, Documentation, Donate

Alternatives: Krita (krita), MyPaint (mypaint), Adobe Photoshop

Ristretto is an image viewer with basic editing features, slideshow capabilities, and the ability to set an image as the desktop wallpaper.

Links: Website, Documentation

Alternatives: Eye of MATE (eom), gThumb (gthumb), Gpicview (gpicview), nomacs (nomacs)

Firefox is a mature and stable web browser which can be extended with a wide variety of add-ons.

Links: Website, Documentation, Donate

Alternatives: Chromium (chromium-browser), Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave

Pidgin is a multi-platform instant messaging client capable of connecting with XMPP, Google Talk, IRC, ICQ and more.

Links: Website, Documentation, Donate

Alternatives: Telegram (telegram-desktop), Empathy (empathy), Skype, Zoom

Thunderbird is a versatile mail client which can handle multiple email accounts and different identities simultaneously. Like Firefox, it can also be enhanced with add-ons to extend its functionality.

Links: Website, Documentation, Donate

Alternatives: Geary (geary), Claws Mail (claws-mail), Evolution (evolution), Sylpheed (sylpheed)

Transmission is a simple BitTorrent client for downloading and sharing files which also provides a web interface.

Alternatives: qBittorrent (qbittorrent), Deluge (deluge), Tixati, Fragments

Parole is a simple media player that can play video and audio files.

Links: Website, Documentation, Donate

Alternatives: VLC (vlc), SMPlayer (smplayer), Celluloid (celluloid).

Xfburn is a program for creating audio discs and writing ISO files to CDs and DVDs.

Alternatives: Brasero (brasero), K3b (k3b)

Atril is a document reader that is capable of opening multiple-page document files, such as PDF, XPS, ePub, and Comic Books.

Alternatives: Evince (evince), Okular (okular), Zathura (zathura)

LibreOffice is an office suite which has programs for word processing (Writer), spreadsheets (Calc), presentations (Impress), diagrams (Draw), mathematical formulae (Math) and databases. It is a continuation of Open Office.

Alternatives: Microsoft Office, WPS Office, Free Office, OnlyOffice, GOffice (Abiword, Gnumeric)

Applications listed in this category are also present and organized in Settings Manager and include applications to adjust hardware preferences, manage software, change the look and feel of the UI (User Interface), and configure login settings.

Gigolo is an easy way to connect to local and remote file systems, such as FTP or SFTP (SSH) connections and SMB (windows shares).

GParted is a partition manager that allows you to create, resize, format and delete partitions.

Alternatives: GNOME Disks (gnome-disk-utility), KDE Partition Manager (partitionmanager)

Task Manager provides a graphical overview of the running applications and shows the percentage of CPU and RAM that is currently being utilized.

Alternatives: GNOME System Monitor (gnome-system-monitor), MATE System Monitor (mate-system-monitor), LXTask (lxtask).

Thunar is a file manager that allows you to browse the filesystem.

Alternatives: Caja (caja), Nemo (nemo), PCManFM (pcmanfm), Nautilus (nautilus)