As more and more people are moving over to Linux.

All of the programs are 100% free.

Most of them are also cross-platform, meaning that they’ll work under Windows and Linux.


Office programs
OpenOffice

Text editors
gedit
vi
nano
emacs

Graphical
GIMP
Krita

Media players
VLC

Audio editors
Audacity

FTP clients
filezilla

Web browsers
Firefox
Google Chrome

Messenger
kmess
emesene
aMSN

IRC clients
xchat

Port scanners
nmap

Network tools
Wireshark
ettercap
PackETH – ethernet packet generator for security audits

Virtualisation
VMware Player
Virtualbox

Emulators
Wine

Development
Eclipse – IDE which is very good for Java and Android dev

File readers
xChm – Reads chm files which natively most distributions don’t do (I have a lot of old ebooks and manuals in this format)

File converters
chm2pdf

Tune up programs
Bleachbit – Deletes obsolete files, languages, removes broken links, temp files, writes over unused space so you actually DELETE everything you deleted etc.

DVD rippers
HandBrake – Versatile DVD Ripper and video transcoder
k9copy

DVD burners
DVD styler

Remote desktop / access
Teamviewer
Remote desktop viewer (server)

Anonymity
Tor
Vidalia (Needed for Tor to work)

File sharing / syncing
Dropbox

Wireless managers
Wicd Network manager