Experienced Windows and MacOS X users are normally accustomed to certain functions and/or concepts that are obviously treated differently in GNU/Linux.
This concept remains more or less the same, except it's now called the main menu: using KDE a large “K” will sit on the bottom left of your screen. However if you are using GNOME you will see a big pod representing the letter “G”.
For MacOS X users may be accustomed to something a little different. The Apple menu (located at the far left of the menu bar) does not contain applications, but offers different services. Typically your applications are located in the Applications folder in the “Finder”.
The wide variety of applications is one large differentiator between GNU/Linux and Windows. Mandrake Linux installs many more applications onto your system, and clicking on the main menu will give you a wide range of choices depending on what you would like to do. There are many fully-fledged applications available to accomplish many common tasks such as word processing, e-mail handling, web browsing, etc.
For MacOS X users, a number of applications are similar between MacOS X and GNU/Linux. Because MacOS X is based on BSD, a large number of applications are similar, and other applications designed for the desktop have been ported or are available under the X11 implementation available for MacOS X, so a number of applications that are used will be the same on GNU/Linux as it is in MacOS X.
You may also install a large number of applications through the RpmDrake utility (please refer to the Chapter 21, RpmDrake: Package Management).
The Control Panel in Windows and the System Preferences utility in MacOS X are replaced by the Mandrake Control Center under Mandrake Linux. It can be found on the main menu, in -> . Through this interface, you will have the ability to modify most of your system's settings with graphical tools.
GNU/Linux is still very fond of its shell environments. Unlike Windows the popularity of the shell is not fading away as is evident by the availability of the shell in MacOS X. By default, Mandrake Linux installs bash, a truly powerful shell environment. You can access it by opening the main menu and choosing -> .
GNU/Linux uses TCP/IP by default, not SMB (the Windows network protocol), so there is nothing like a network neighborhood icon to give you a view of the network you are in. However, you may use the LinNeighborhood application to give you similar functionality.
Konqueror or Nautilus can also accomplish the same task. In the location bar, just type: lan:/, and all the shared Windows resources on the network will appear. Please remember that for this to work, the samba-client package must be installed.
See the section called “File Sharing” for more information.
The “lettered drive” is a concept exclusive to Windows. On UNIX systems, the drive notion (C:, D:, ..., Z:) is replaced by “mount points”. From a user perspective, you are always accessing directories. Your system will use configuration files to instruct the file system how to “load” all relevant disks, disk partitions and remote systems, and then assign them to a specified directory, generally under the /mnt/ directory. While this concept is similar to that found in MacOS X, it is slightly different. What is mounted under /mnt with GNU/Linux is mounted under /Volumes in MacOS X but is made available as a “root filesystem” in the Finder.
These settings are what allow GNU/Linux to be able to read any other file system you have configured, even a Windows directory.
The same concept as for C: applies here. CD-ROMs are “mounted” in /mnt/cdrom/. To access the CD-ROM, just click on the desktop icon. If you have Konqueror running, the CD-ROM will appear in a new window.
Unfortunately this does not work for an audio CD yet. However you can still access your music. Please see the section called “Audio Applications”.
Like CD-ROMs and disk partitions, floppy disks are mounted and will appear on /mnt/floppy/. This feature directly supports reading Windows diskettes.
Under Mandrake Linux every user has a directory called Documents/ located in their home directory.
The “home directory” concept is equivalent to the \winnt\Profiles\user_name\ or \Documents and Settings\user_name\ directories in Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and is explained in Chapter 7, Using KDE.
Under MacOS X this is very similar. The “home directory” is located as /Users/user_name and it also contains a directory called Documents.
You may also have many files in proprietary formats such as Excel or Word documents. These are usually not a problem to convert. OpenOffice.org is just one application which can import many popular formats for office applications.
We are specifically mentioning office documents because office applications are important. Due to space constraints we cannot enumerate every single Windows application and its GNU/Linux equivalent. However, there is a high probability that you will find GNU/Linux equivalents for all the programs you use under Windows or MacOS X. To get an idea of GNU/Linux equivalents of Windows applications, you can consult this table of equivalents.