This is a list of the tools I use and recommend. All are supported by all OS, except when noted.

Browsing

This is currently the most important tool for 99% of tech workers. Am I right? And Firefox 2 is better than Internet Explorer 7 for a big number of reasons.

Office Suite

Unless somebody else is paying for it, why would you use an expensive alternative? You can have a great office suite for free:

Communications

Even though there are some things I do not like about Skype, I use it for chatting, VoIP, very sporadic Video Chats, and remote Desktop handling through Unyte.

I make all my long distance calls using Skype. Its rates are unbeatable.

For e-mail, I find myself using gmail most of the time. But having a desktop application still has some benefits. So, on any desktop I use regularly, I install Thunderbird.

Operating System

This is not a very important piece of software… But I prefer this two Linux distros:

I just haven’t used the others distros as a PC System much, but I bet Fedora is as good as the other two.

If you want to dig deeper into the Linux distro’s world, take a look at DistroWatch.com.