My Picks:

Operating System: Ubuntu 9.04 (very user friendly. Don't need to be a geek to use it).

Office Applications: Open Office 3

Web Browser: Mozilla Firefox

Mail Client: Thunderbird

FTP: Filezilla

Image Manipulator: GIMP 2.6

Bulletin Board: MyBB

Blogs: Wordpress

^^That's my list so far. Feel free to add to it or give your opinions.

But can you use MSN Plus! with this?

lol pretty much the same for me... i actually have the entire cs4 suite and i still prefer gimp to ps... even when im writing something in flash and ps is more compatible with it than gimp, i still use gimp to create all my images lol

Does anyone here have the same opinion about the Forum script? I have used MyBB, phpBB and even SMF in the past and I prefer MyBB hands down. phpBB haven't heard of the word ''quick reply'' yet

It beats me why Louis uses phpBB3 here. Mods are a pain to install unless you have actually coding experience... Chances are he does though.

Actually we had a quick reply box up untill the adding of the "Dragon" Usergroup...

Well if there is a quick reply box for phpBB3 it is only added by a mod. It does not come with the default installation pack. People tend to have the mistaken belief that quick replies = spam... I use quick reply on nearly all my replies on other forums, and a good 90% aren't spam.

lol true, but if you look at SF now, you could almost start a contest to see who got a notification like that first and there wouldn't be a winner for weeks lol

My bet is that it is only an add-on that you got for it. This would be the one. Actually, looking at the phpBB3 home page, it seems that they are including a quick reply box on the next update, however it will be turned off at default The developers are steadfastly against it for some reason.

Now if any of you are thinking about setting up a forum. Here is where you should look, forum-software.org. It gives a breakdown on all of the forum scripts. It does have a little blind spot where IPB is concerned (in my humble opinion the best script ((albeit an expensive one)) on the market), but most scripts are included. You can even get a demo of them to check them out

True, I have my own prejudices where phpBB3 are concerned

Now on topic: I discovered this amazing site (a year or two ago as it happens) where you can get portable apps for your favourite open source software,[LINK], portableapps.com. I found this site amazing because it allowed me to store Mozilla Thunderbird (I'll add that to the list above) and Firefox on my USB key. This was great because my school computers don't allow installations and I was utterly sick of using IE 7. The content control blocked GMail for some reason so I used Thunderbird to access it.

It's got portable versions of GIMP too, so Wolverien that is how you can use it at college and Pidgin as someone mentioned above.