Since I spent a fair amount of time yesterday configuring a Gateway T-6330U that became worthless inside an hour of use, and I’ll be looking for the same application set on whatever computer I buy today to replace it, here are the “killer apps” that I use every day.

-> Firefox (duh). Yes, I regularly try Opera, Safari, and IE, but the plugins always bring me back.
-> Adobe Flash Player. Too many websites use it for me not to have this installed.
-> Java Runtime Environment. Anyone say AJAX? Web 2.0?
-> Greasemonkey

• mostly for iGoogle Sidebar Collapse, but indispensable.
  -> Adblock (duh), and Filterset.G Updater.
  -> Download Statusbar, to stop the stupid downloads window from popping up.
  -> Tiny Menu, to save screen space.
  -> autoHideStatusbar, also to save screen space.
  -> FireGPG, so that I can encrypt emails from GMail’s web interface.
  -> Moonlight, so that Silverlight-based web pages work.

-> Thunderbird. Cross-platform, IMAP to GMail, email client. What more do you want?
-> Lightning. I want a calendar, duh, and Provider for Google Calendar.
-> Enigmail. I want encryption. Enigmail uses GnuPG.

-> Pidgin, or Adium (if I decide to buy a Mac).
-> Pidgin-Otr, to encrypt conversations.

-> MPD, with mpc and Sonata, for playing music.

-> aterm (Linux), because it’s the best terminal emulator around.

-> Gimp, because Photoshop is no better and I’m cheap.

-> OpenOffice.org, because Microsoft Office is no better and I’m cheap.
-> Hooray Google Docs!

-> Adobe Reader, since everyone uses .pdf.
-> doPDF (Windows only), since everyone uses .pdf (Linux and OS X can print to .pdf).

-> Transmission (Linux/OS X) or uTorrent (Windows), to download stuff.

-> Google Desktop, since Google already knows everything about me anyway.

-> TrueCrypt, for protecting USB drives.

If you can think of anything I’ve missed, let me know!