Popular, useful and important programs that run in X-Window
At this point you've chosen your window manager and/or desktop environment. Regardless of the "look" you've chosen, you have to have programs to run. You need applications to surf the Internet, write email, manage your files, write letters and a thousand other things you want to do. The rumors you hear about Linux lacking applications or not being able to "make it on the desktop" are false. There is no major application that a computer user needs that Linux lacks.
Internet/WWW Browsers
The heavyweight of all browsers was one of the first to release a version for Linux. Includes an HTML authoring tool and full-featured email program. Comes with the standard plug-ins to view Flash animation and listen and see Real Audio/Video content. At the time of this writing, version 6.2 is available for Linux.
Billed as the "fastest browser", Opera Software of Norway released their first version of Opera for Linux in March of 2000. These early versions were not stable but the company kept working and released a finished Opera 5 for Linux. At this time, the company has released a beta version Opera 6 which offers plug-in support for Flash and Real Audio/Video. Their browser for Linux still doesn't have the same features as their flagship MS Windows version (like an email client), but it's fast and extremely stable and reliable.
Mozilla is the open-source version of Netscape. It is almost identical but the people in the Mozilla project have added some extras to it that give it a bit of an advantage over its "brother", Netscape, like being able to open new tabs (like Opera) instead of only having the open to open new windows. If you don't like cluttering up your desktop, this is a welcome feature. It also comes with all the support for plug-ins, Java and JavaScript that Netscape has plus the same email client and HTML authoring tools. It also adds an easy to use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client to its extras.
Konqueror, part of the KDE project, is a file manager and Internet browser wrapped up into one. You can surf the net and manage your files at the same time. If you're migrating from Windows, you should find it very similar to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Includes plug-in support as well as enabling for Java and JavaScript. You need to have KDE installed to run this.
Galeon is the browser associated with the GNOME project. It is based on the Gekko HTML rendering engine that also runs Mozilla (this converts HTML into content you can read). This browser is essentially Mozilla (you actually need Mozilla to run it) modified somewhat to fit into the GNOME scheme of things. With the use of 'themes', the look is much more configurable than Mozilla itself.
Now, let's look at some popular email clients available for Linux
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