When I used Windows I had a host of small, unobtrusive utilities that made my life easier. I’m sorry to say that in most cases I haven’t found Linux replacements which work as well. But they might work for you, so here they are:
Time tracking
Even if you don’t bill by the hour, if you are selling your services you need to keep track of billable hours to make sure you are estimating/charging appropriately. I like to use a stopwatch-style time tracker that simply runs in the background. On Windows, I used an excellent little utility called Allnetic Time Tracker. It sat discreetly in the system tray and with a right-click I could quickly start, stop, and switch tasks. The program has configurable idle-time detection, so if you forget to stop it and go away, you’ll be greeted on your return with a dialog box asking whether you want to discard the idle time or log it (the latter being useful if the reason you went away was to go to a meeting or do some non-computer-based task that still needs logging).
You can set up projects with tasks and sub-tasks, and everything is displayed in a neat three-paned window, making it easy to get an overview of total time at project and task level. Each logged time period can have a note attached to it, useful for detailing what you did. Allnetic also has very comprehensive reporting options — you could theoretically generate invoices directly, although I never did this.
Well, there’s nothing like this for Linux as far as I can tell. I tried a few applications and ended up with the default KDE tool, KArm. It does basically the same thing as Allnetic Time Tracker, but in a less sophisticated way; all projects are displayed in a single long list, which makes it rather unwieldy if you have a lot of tasks. It too sits in the system tray, but to start, stop or switch tasks you need to restore the window rather than being able to do everything with a right-click. It only keeps totals of hours for each day, not the actual times that you worked, and reporting is very limited; all you can do is copy either the totals or history between two dates to the clipboard, in text format (which is not suitable for loading into a spreadsheet for further manipulation). Still, it does the basic job that I need.
To-Do list
I don’t like bloated Personal Information Manager software — all I want is something that will let me keep an easily-accessible list of to-dos (including recurring ones), with due dates, priorities, and configurable reminders, and Quick To-Do Pro did it for me. I think it’s expensive for what it does (I see it’s now $39.95) but it fitted my needs so perfectly that I grudgingly paid up. Again I couldn’t find anything that worked that well for Linux — so I ended up using KDE’s Personal Information Manager. It’s full of other stuff I don’t want, and the To-Do list is basic, but it’s better than nothing.
Clipboard enhancement
Who can live with a clipboard that only stores the last item you copied? I can’t, and a lot of people obviously feel the same, because there are loads of clipboard enhancers for Windows, most of them suffering from feature bloat. I used a small, free utility called CLCL. The usual cut/copy/paste shortcuts work as expected, but a simple Alt-C in any application pops up a menu of all the items on the clipboard (not just text, but images and objects as well), so you can select the one you want, and you can also set up permanent entries for frequently-used text.
There isn’t so much choice on Linux, but KDE comes with its own utility, Klipper, so that’s what I ended up with. It works, but the clipboard doesn’t always contain what I expect, and there’s no facility for permanent items.
Accented characters
Not essential for everyone, but I do enough typing in French on an English keyboard for it to be an issue for me — there’s no way I want to type some convoluted code or use Windows’ character map every time I want to type a word with an accent in it. At last, this is something that Linux does better than Windows: you can configure a trigger key that works the way the Compose key on old DEC terminals did — press the selected key (e.g. Alt), then type a two-key mnemonic, e.g. typing , and c will give you รง. It’s simple to guess what the mnemonic will be, even for rarely used characters.
Windows doesn’t have anything like this built in, but we have used the free utility Allchars for years — it implements the Compose key functionality, but it also supports macros so you can set up mnemonics for longer pieces of text or key sequences (if you’re not already using CLCL for that …).