IT Suggestions

[Bluemage]

About a decade ago, my uncle introduced me to Linux.  He gave me a Knoppix live-cd, which I promptly played around with.  It was slow, and a lot of things didn't work, but the concept of a free OS that wasn't Windows that could run off of a CD got my attention.  Ever since then, I've been trying, on and off, to build some real skills, in one distro or another... and I've been failing.
In college, I set it up on some older laptops.  When I got a new laptop, I ended up shelving them.
More recently, I set up a dual-boot on my desktop.  I kept forgetting to boot to it.
The Raspberry Pi got shelved, mostly because using it in my current setup is a major pain.
Then I tried setting up a VM on my current laptop.  Turned it off because of battery draw and lack of need.
I figured out that what I needed was a convenient, Linux-only machine- something with no VMs to start or special boot options to choose.  So I got a Chromebook, upgraded the SSD, and loaded up Chrubuntu.  It works remarkably well... except I've nothing (aside from Firefox and LibreOffice) on it to do.  Can anybody recommend useful/entertaining Linux apps I can throw on this thing?  Nothing that uses heavy 3D graphics, please.
Thanks in advance!

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My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Atom Bomb of Courteous Debate. Get yours.

I've been writing a bit.

[Ankhani]

Steam has a Ubuntu-native version, and all the source games and a fair number of indie games support Ubuntu.

I've used R and Perl a good deal on Linux, but they're not really 'apps'. I don't particularly know what else to suggest. A lot of my linux experience has been in the course of normal use going "I need to do X. I wonder what I'll need to make it work..."
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The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."

>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI

[CattyNebulart]

KSVN is usefull so usefull I want to throw it on the mac work gave me to use for now :/ I feel the same about lots of development tools, so many useful ones on linux it is hard using anything else... Also a lot of humble bundles have tripple platfrom support, so I picked up a lot of those.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Foxboy]

There's a lot of content creation suites that try, for one.

GIMP for Photoshop
Inkscape for Illustrator
Scribus for Acrobat
Blender for Maya/3DMax, etc
I'm trying to set up the audio stuff as well, since Windows 8.1 hates USB Midi controllers for some stupid reason and forget trying to get tech support from them.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll