digikam is an excellend photo and photo album manager. The simplicity of use and included tagging nad features have made it very easy to catalog and share many years worth of pictures.

This is one application that has left both windows and mac users in awe and wishing that they to could be using this software.

I highly recommend for anyone with digital photo collections to try this application.

Amarok is a very robust audio player with many options, plug-ins and features that make it the open-source audio player to beat. The various auto-retrieved elements from the web such as lyrics and artist information have been extremely useful for finding related songs to build my perfect playlist.

Amarok is a heavy-weight player that uses quite a bit or resources compared to xmms or audacious, but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

Konqueror is a good browser which supports most web browsing. The real power in konqueror is in the system integration and help documentation browsing, my primary use for this application is to view manual pages in a graphical format that allows simplified searching and references.

although I would not recommend Konqueror as a web browser, I recommend for it to be installed in all system to assist in reviewing documentation.

KVM is proven to be far faster and smoother at running virtual machines than any other virtualization platform I have tried.

The only drawbacks are the complexity of setting up virtual machines and the necessity to use other applications to accomplish tasks like networking.

Dia has proven itself to be very robust and simple solution for development of flow charts and database structures for my various projects. In comparison to other products it is far above the similar commercial software that I have tried.

I highly recommend this dia to users in need of diagram based documentation.

The only feature additional feature I would like it the ability to save the diagrams in other formats so they can be shared and exported to other applications.

I have been using my nexus one for nearly a year now and have had a chance to compare it to several other phones based upon android and other mobiles operating systems. When compared to other phones (even ones with more hardware resources) it always outperforms the other phones in both response time and clarity.

The pure android OS also helps by not having the worthless apps that cell phone carriers usually build into their phones. If you can find a nexus one for sale I highly recommend for you to get it.

I use Xchat often to visit IRC channels to help others with issues. This IRC client is very well put together with automatic highlighting, color-coding and many features to increase your productivity in IRC channel chat sessions.

I have used Picasa on multiple OSs, but it seems too intrusive by automatically detecting and indexing all documents, it has found and indexed application based images which I don't want visible in my collection, the only feature I like is the ease of uploading to the web, but that is also restricted to a single site.

If you want a good photo management solution that is non-intrusive and easier to manage I recommend digikam, it has feature that I wish were in Picasa.

Cups is one of the services that really makes Linux-based systems useful. The simplicity of printer installation, the ability to print to pdf documents and the server pool technology make it as great solution for enterprise networks.

As an example of the footprint, I recently bought a new HP printer, a windows XP installation would have taken 600 MB, a windows Vista or windows 7 installation would have taken 1.2Gb, but I am using Linux so everything that was needed was on my system, it only needed a 6k driver file.

Stellarioum allows you to view the organization of the stars and other objects in the sky based on any time, or location you wish, including views from other planets. With the optional libraries installed it becomes ever more impressive because of the plethora of object that you can view. I often recommend this is a "wow factor" program to introduce open source software to others.

I have been using VirtualBox for some time now and have found a lot of use for it for running desktop based virtual systems and headless server systems. It is highly functional, but the drawbacks are that specific functions are only available with the binary version that are not included in the open source version.

If you run it checkout the notes about the command line options, you will be pleasantly surprised.

The Canonical Team (Ubuntu's Developers) have worked very hard to make this easy to use distribution that appeals to general computer users. The Graphical configuration options, smart network monitor, simple application installation and default security functions make this very user friendly.
Additionally with the release of Ubuntu 9.04 I found that it is very easy to setup EVDO, or mobile broadband cards to work, once you plug them in they are detected, you only need to select to use that network connection.

I have been working on Linux based operating systems for many years now and have grown used to fine tooth control via text files, so the GUI configuration annoys me a little. But for users that are converting to or trying Linux is is very friendly because of the Graphical configuration options.

If you are a seasoned user then this distribution may not fit your needs, but if you are new or a casual computer user then Ubuntu may be your calling.

This Office suite is a quality product with good functionality. It is compatible with many known competitor formats such as MS Office documents, which makes it a viable application for many consumer and corporate installations.

The drawbacks I have found are the functionality in their Draw program and the visual appearance. Their draw program has limited functionality and needs improvements to compete with applications such as MS Visio. I have had some difficulty converting users to this application suite because they feel that it looks like it belongs on MS Windows 95, if the developers spend some time working on the visual appearance of the application suite it would help to increase interest in the product and will result in greater adaptation.