These are a few of my favourite things...

All Linux and Ubuntu related, of course. And all free, of course.

Gnome Do: Miraculous quick app starter, a la QuickSilver. Alternatively, you can call it an Intelligent Launcher Tool.

PureData: This is the bomb for creating your own audio and visual applications. It rocks more than Stonehenge!

Inkscape: Classy drawing program, fantastic for logos and posters.

The Gimp: Photoshop® for the masses (as in a few hundred quid cheaper ie Free). All new version 2.6 now comes with more Window™-esque windows, so easier for newbies.

Scribus: I haven't done much in the way of print of late, but if I do, this is the program I use. The functinality is equivalent to Quark 3.11, if not actually better! Runs on Windows as well.

Filezilla: My GUI FTP client of choice, still not magnificent but it does the job on the tin.

Transmission: Slick, cross-platform Bittorrent client

Pidgin: Do you have any friends? Online? If so, chat to them in Pidgin! Supports most chat protocols such as MSN, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber (Google) etc.

Freemind: Very easy to use brain-storming tool which I use for creating and exporting site maps. Also is cross-platform.

Geany: It's what I use for writing all my text in. Based on the venerable Scintilla text engine, the same one that the free Windows text editor Notepad++ uses.

Thunderbird: My email client of choice, cross-platform, supports off-line IMAP. Which is cool Honestly.

Firefox + extensions: We love Firefox! And all it's extensions.

Grsync: Do you need to sync and backup files? Then use this!

KeePassX: Do you want to keep your passwords secure and in one place? KeePassX does the job!

Audacity: Audio wave editor, simple, multi-channel, free. Magnificent.

gparted: Sorts out partitioning and formatting of disks.

USB Imagewriter: Writes a disk image to a USB flash drive. I've used it for installing Ubuntu onto my Acer Aspire One.

Hamster: An applet time tracker, both easy to use and useful.