Conkeror - If you’re big on Emacs, this will make using Firefox much less painful. It basically makes each Firefox tab act like an Emacs buffer; you can switch between them with C-x b, scroll around with C-n/p, and all the useful stuff you expect from Emacs.

MozRepl - Firebug is half-decent, but the console is pretty simplistic. MozRepl allows you to interact with the guts of Firefox with a REPL like IRB. It even integrates with Emacs and acts a lot like SLIME does for Common Lisp.

MPD - For playing music, the Music Player Daemon is really handy. It has a unique client/server approach to music so you can have one machine act as a server and you can use clients for practically any OS or GUI. GNOME, CLI, Mac OS X, and even native Emacs Lisp clients exist.

Sawfish - It’s a window manager. It’s scriptable in Lisp. That about sums up the awesomeness. I use it in conjunction with other GNOME components (panel and nautilus, mostly) as a simple replacement for Metacity, but it can also be used on its own.

My whole setup is optimized to minimize mouse usage, and I’ve found it does wonders to reduce RSI.

I checked, I am a gentoo user since 2002, which is also around the time when windows left my hardware for good. I am really at home with gentoo, too, however, my stack looks a bit different.

I am pretty much indifferent about the kernel, as long as I get reasonable support for my hardware.

As a window manager, I use wmii, heavily customizeable with your scripting language of choice. It features a menu bar similar to the quicksilver extension for osx, with really fast incremental search in all binaries in your $PATH. hit Alt+P, type “fic” and there you go, openoffice starts up (first match for “fic”) ;-). of course, you can redefine your keyboard commands and stuff. another feature is, that you don’t get to see the background of your desktop (unless you have transparency of course). any application window is scaled to fullscreen, which gets divided, once another application is started. you get as many virtual desktops as you like, each one accessible via it’s own “tag”, which you define on the fly and via keystroke put application windows there. it is rather difficult to describe, but immensely useful and increased my productivity greatly, compared to window managers, where you have to click around all the time. and i forgot, startup time is 2 seconds, no kidding. you might want to have a look at eigenclass.org/hiki.rb?wmii+ruby

for listening to music, i exclusively use amarok. there is no mp3 player out there, which does such a great job on managing huge amount of music. features incremental search, scripting, remote access, skins, access to streams, smart playlists, automatically looks up artists in wikipedia (to be shown in the player window), downloads lyrics from various sources, and downloads cover art from amazon. amarok.kde.org

for email, i use google mail, as i often change machines… also for documents, i mostly use google documents.

i almost exclusively program in python, although i have expertise in java and prolog.

of course, emacs is my favourite editor, but when I’m lazy, i fire up eclipse.

greetings from germany