Jason's Favorite Software
Read about the past present and future of free software community: http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarchism.html
All this stuff is free software and runs on at least GNU/Linux. You can use it for free. You can read, edit and distribute the source code.
For most of these I have tried several programs before finding the one below.
- ion (a "tabbed" window manager that doesn't require the mouse, and rarely requires resizing anything.
- the gimp (an excellent image editor.)
- irssi (irc client)
- bitlbee (irc->IM gateway. allows you to do instant messaging (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo) in your favorite irc client (e.g. irssi)) http://www.bitlbee.org/
- rsync (sync local file tree with a remote file tree. Great for uploading website changes among other things) http://rsync.samba.org/
- svn (version control system. "A compelling replacement to CVS")
- git (a distributed version control system.)
- gqview (image viewer. Congrats on being the only graphical program (aside from games) that I particularly like.) http://gqview.sourceforge.net/
- w3m (text-mode web browser) http://w3m.sourceforge.net/
- vim (text editor. Invaluable once you get good at it.) http://www.vim.org/
- html tidy (cleanup, and pretty-print html code. Very handy if you can give it a keyboard shortcut in your editor.) http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
- ogg vorbis (Codec for compressing music. About twice as good compression as mp3.) http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/index.html
- ogg speex (Codec for compressing speech. Amazing compression. Sounds pretty good at 5MB/hour.) http://www.speex.org/
- spamassassin (Spam filter. Not sure this is the best thing out there, but I've been quite happy with it.) http://spamassassin.org/
Games
Jason's favorite free software games get their own page :)
See Also:
gnu (More information about free software)