With Evolution and Gnomemeeting, your email, newsreading, personal information management, and business communications are plentiful.

Evolution, from Novell, is the world's most popular personal and workgroup information management solution for Linux and UNIX systems. The software seamlessly integrates email, calendaring, contact management, and task lists, in one easy-to-use application.

GnomeMeeting is a videoconferencing and VOIP/IP-Telephony application that allows you to make audio and video calls to remote users with software or hardware such as Microsoft Netmeeting. It supports, plus much more, registering to an ILS directory, gatekeeper support, making multi-user conference calls using an external MCU, using modern Quicknet telephony cards, and making PC-To-Phone calls.

Web browsing could never be more efficient with Web browsers like Firefox and Konqueror.

Mozilla Firefox is an award winning browser featuring pop up blocking, tabbed browsing, smart search, and much more in one of the fastest, most functional browsers around.

Konqueror is the browser of KDE, which also acts as a file manager and a universal file viewer.

Instant messaging is of ever growing popularity. Gaim and Xchat are perfect clients for all your IM needs. There are specialized applications for certain IM protocols like Xchat for IRC, or there are larger multi-protocol programs that do it all.

Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging client that is compatible with AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks. Gaim users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.

You can never have enough eye candy. Have your own personal image displayed while Linux is booting up and be greeted with a graphical login screen with GDM.

GDM is the Gnome Display Manager, a graphical login greeter with many features like the ability to login remotely, easy to use and customize, and much more.

Replace Adobe Photoshop and do all your image editing with the GIMP, an advanced, feature rich image editor.

The GNU Image Manipulation Program is for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. Add plug-ins to make it the most useful imaging program around.

Rip, mix, and burn your favorite music with Grip and K3B.

Grip is a CD ripper and player. It provides an automated front end for MP3 (and other audio format) encoders, letting you take a disc and transform it easily straight into MP3s. Internet disc lookups are supported for retrieving track information from disc database servers.

K3B is a feature-rich and easy to handle CD/DVD burning application which can create data, audio, video, mixed-mode, and backup disks. Of course, this is just the beginning, it can do a lot more.

Connect all of your devices like cameras, audio players, PDAs and printers and manage them with gRio and JPilot.

Gnome-Rio allows you to manage your Rio MP3 player as you're used to. Use Jpilot to connect and synchronize your palm pilot, and the various other graphical tools for other peripheral devices.

Linux makes for a great multimedia desktop with programs like the X MultiMedia System for music and MPlayer for all kinds of video formats.

XMMS was modeled after the popular WinAmp for Windows, and it can even use its themes. XMMS can play file formats such as MP3, MOD, WAV, and many others.

MPlayer plays MPEG, VOB, AVI, OGG/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, FLI, RM, NuppelVideo, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies, too.

Everybody has to get some work done writing papers and creating spreadsheets, that's what OpenOffice is good for.

OpenOffice is productivity suit consisting of writer, spreadsheet, presentation, and draw programs. It is compatible with all major suits like Microsoft Office and Word Perfect. Read and write Microsoft Power Point, Excel and Word documents seamlessly with OpenOffice; you can do anything from write a quick memo to complete book with contents, diagrams, indexes, etc.

File sharing has become very popular in recent years, and Linux was not left behind with Qtella and Apollon.

Qtella is a fast, lightweight Gnutella network client with all the features you'd expect.

Apollon is a multi-network file sharing application supporting the FastTrack Kazaa network, Gnutella network and OpenFT

Networking and security are very important, and Linux covers these parts very well.

SMB4K allows you to browse and manage Windows shares easier than ever. It supports scanning, mapping network drives, search, printer support and much more.

Firestarter is a graphical front end to the famously secure Linux firewall. Firestarter allows you to configure, manage and monitor your network's security with little effort.

View and manage images with Showimg and JCDSee.

Showimg is a feature-rich image viewer including an image management system. It is highly configurable and supports numerous image formats and features things such as slide shows, filters, previews, and so on.

JCDSee is an ACDSee clone which supports popular file format such as JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG, PCX, PNM, TIFF and XPM, and can even play movie and sound files, too. Other features include previewing, thumbnail viewing and slide shows.

Of course, gaming is important to anyone. There are too many games which run natively to list. (all pictures to the left are of natively ran games)

When there isn't a native version, it is probably able to run in Wine, see below for more details on Wine. Everything from first person shooters to role playing games to real time strategies to simulators are available for the masses.

Occasionally there is that one program which doesn't have a counterpart in Linux. This is where Wine comes in.

Wine is an implementation of the Windows API for Linux. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available.

Want to lesson the load of a full migration to Linux or BSD? Accommodate yourself with specific open source applications in Windows before you make the plunge into Linux. TheOpenCD (download & homepage at theopencd.org) (purchase here) gives you a compilation of the highest quality open source software available for Windows. With this disk, you can find out first hand if the quality of software is up to par with your standards.