Web Browser: Firefox
Platforms: Linux, Windows and OSX
I know Chrome/Chromium have gained a lot of popularity in the past year, but I still like Firefox most as my primary web browser. My two pmain reasons for this are the fact that it generally renders text "nicer" than most webkit-based browsers and the fact that it integrates with most Linux desktops more fully than Chromium does.
IRC Client: Xchat
Platforms: Linux and Windows
Xchat is a fairly straight forward GTK IRC client. It supports a variety of features, but also is clean enough to simply let me get right into the chat room I want without much configuration.
Instant Messenger: Pidgin
Platform: Linux, Windows and OSX
When it was first created it was known as "gaim", but today many know the popular GTK instant messenger client as "Pidgin". Supporting a number of messenger types including AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN and many others - Pidgin is a very versatile messaging client.
Torrent Client: Transmission
Platforms: Linux and OSX
Transmission is fairly light bit torrent client that has both GTK and QT interfaces. It is stable and fairly feature rich while staying out of the user's way. It supports many commonly used torrent features such as setting download/upload speed limits and prioritising downloads.
FTP Client: Filezilla
Platforms: Linux, Windows and OSX
The swiss army knife of FTP clients Filezilla supports many common transfer protocols including FTP, SFTP, FTPS, and FTPES.
PDF Viewer: ePDFViewer
Platform: Linux
ePDFViewer is a very simple and light weight PDF viewer that utilises the GTK and poppler libraries.
Office Suite: Libre Office
Platforms: Linux, Windows and OSX
Libre Office is a full featured office suite that provides a word processor, spreadsheet editor, presentation creator and much more. It is written in C++/Java and was forked from OpenOffice.org a little over a year ago.
Video Editor: Openshot
Platform: Linux
Easily one of the best open source projects to be started in the last couple of years. Openshot is a non-linear video editor that is written in mostly in python and GTK. The interface is clean and generally makes finding whatever function you are looking for fairly easy.
Video Ripping: Handbrake
Platforms: Linux, Windows and OSX
Ever have a video DVD you purchased and wanted to backup in case you lose or scratch the disc? Handbrake is the perfect tool for this task. It will simultaneously rip and encode a variety of media formats to a variety of other different media formats.
Disc Burning: XFBurn
Platform: Linux
Part of the XFCE software collection XFBurn is a to the point disc burning software based on libburnia. In case you hadn't noticed by now I am a fan of "simple and clean" software and XFBurn is no exception to this rule.
Media Player: VLC
Platforms: Linux, Windows and OSX
VLC is a multi-media player that is written in QT. It's most valuable asset is the fact that all of it's many multi-media codecs are self contained - meaning it can play nearly any media format right after installation without the need for installing system wide codecs packages.
Now, take note that I mention these are my favorite applications - not that they are always the best application for every possible task. Odds are there are others that are just as good (or better) in some situations than the ones I listed. One of the best things about FOSS is the ability to choose what you want to use. So try lots of different software and find which applications work best for you.
~Jeff Hoogland
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