Programs

You can find many programs in the "Applications" menu of the Gnome desktop. Try poking around a bit. Try out some of games, in the "Games" sub-menu of the "Applocations." menu. "Quadrapassel" is a version of Tetris. "AisleRiot Solitaire" offers a wide selection of solitaire card games. There is a nice 3D game, the downhill skiing game known as Extreme Tux Racer, with a penguin instead of a person on skis. Note that this 3D game cannot be used remotely (such as with VNC).

More seriously, the Gimp is an image processing program in almost the same class as the commercial Photoshop. (To see most of its menus, right-click an image-editing window.) Inkscape is a less-well-developed program for vector graphic drawing. Eclipse is a sophisticated Java programing environment.

Of couse, there are programs for browsing the web. There is a version of Firefox for Linux. Google's Chrome browser is also installed. You will find both of these in the "Internet" submenu of the "Applications" menu.

And there is a full set of "office" applications in the "Office" submenu, including the word-processing program LibreOffice Writer, which is similar in power to the word processor in Microsoft Office and can open documents created with that program. And LibreOffice Calc is a spreadsheet program similar to Microsoft Excel, and it can open Excel documents.

Note: In previous years, OpenOffice was installed instead of LibreOffice. LibreOffice is really the same program under a different name.