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The Most Popular Linux Desktop Programs (zdnet.com)
The most recent Linux Questions poll results are in. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ZDNet: LinuxQuestions, one of the largest internet Linux groups with 550,000 members, has just posted the results from its latest survey of desktop Linux users. In the always hotly-contested Linux desktop environment survey, the winner was the KDE Plasma Desktop. It was followed by the popular lightweight Xfce, Cinnamon, and GNOME. If you want to buy a computer with pre-installed Linux, the Linux Questions crew's favorite vendor by far was System76. Numerous other computer companies offer Linux on their PCs. These include both big names like Dell and dedicated small Linux shops such as ZaReason, Penguin Computing, and Emperor Linux. Many first choices weren't too surprising. For example, Linux users have long stayed loyal to the Firefox web browser, and they're still big fans. Firefox beat out Google Chrome by a five-to-one margin. And, as always, the VLC media player is far more popular than any other Linux media player. For email clients, Mozilla Thunderbird remains on top. That's a bit surprising given how Thunderbird's development has been stuck in neutral for some time now. When it comes to text editors, I was pleased to see vim -- my personal favorite -- win out over its perpetual rival, Emacs. In fact, nano and Kate both came ahead of Emacs.
Simple as this, "Popular" doesnt mean something is "Better", it just means it is more widely used and marketed. Marketing isn't just for selling products, it is also a way to influence others to be in agreeable with you on a particular idea. In this case, it is the marketing of "use my free software because..." and whoever has the loudest, furthest reaching voice generally wins.
For one huge example, the list has text editors. Emacs? Vim? Nano? And we're talking about desktop distributions? Hands down, none of those compare to the quality of Sublime Text as a text editor.
As others have pointed out in this post already, there isn't any "killer apps" for Linux out there. So the software being ran is all console software with a prettified multi-tasking window manager to organize all of those console windows. This seems to be the current mindset of all Linux is really used for in the desktop space.
Back in the early '80s, I learned ed because that was the one editor guaranteed to be on EVERY F***ING UNIX BOX, even if it was one of the oddball x86 clones.
Similarly for DOS, I learned EDLIN (this was pre DOS 5 and EDIT) for the same reason.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Why did you link to ZDnet, instead of linking to the source at LinuxQuestions?
I use vlc a lot. But mplayer let's you skip ahead or backwards from the keyboard. The side arrows are short skips, the up and down arrows are bigger skips, and page up and page down are even bigger skips. When I'm searching for something, or skipping over commercials, that's really nice.
VLC is the best implementation overall though. Changing aspect ratio, reading subtitles, all those kinds of things work best in vlc.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
...Linux is sorely lacking in decent, productivity oriented multimedia editing software.
I use Kdenlive+Blender for this purpose.