I have been using Google Chrome as my primary browser for a few months. Its a low footprint UI and its blazingly fast. I won’t primarily use a non free software browser so Google Chrome fits my needs in that capacity as well. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you need to. Compared to IE or Firefox 3.0, Chrome is a rocket. Add flashblock to the mix and it crashes less than any browser ive ever used. This runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is a music player ive used for years. It just keeps getting better and better. It can awesomely manage my 24 days and 12 hours of music. I use iTunes on my Mac and Rhythmbox on Linux. iTunes is a extremely bloated player and I have less music on my mac. I have a few gripes with it but largely it works really well. Ive tried Songbird but it just isn’t as good as Rhythmbox and I am still on the version that shipped with Hardy. To my knowledge this only runs on Linux.

PiTiVi

This project I have been avidly watching and hoping could release something awesome in a stable Linux distro I use for quite sometime. It looks like the next Ubuntu stable will see something great I can use and I excited. I don’t make as many movies as I could because the only tool I have for that is on a Mac in my living room. When I sit down in the living room I want to watch a video or play a game not edit video. The above demo video shows that its come quite a long way and I hope by next Ubuntu stable release it has titles and some transitions. Thats pretty much all I need for the basics and my videos dont do more than that.

Handbrake

I buy movies. I buy movies because I love watching movies. I rip my movies into a variety of formats at times to watch them on a mobile device or laptop. Think of it like ripping a CD. I rip the music I own as well. DVD’s come with copy protection to limit your legitimate use of them in this way but it doesn’t stop enterprising people from figuring out how to get around that. Handbrake is one such program. I mostly use it to rip movies to watch on my iPhone. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

LAME

I rip my MP3′s using LAME. It creates the best quality 320k MP3′s ive heard. I use grip to ensure I don’t have to write a script to rip a CD. grip is old school but the MP3 files it creates sound great and are tagged properly. Runs on practically everything.

VirtualBox

If you want a completely free replacement for VirtualPC or VMWare I recommend VirtualBox. Its come quite a long way in the past year and it works perfectly on my Mac and Ubuntu for virtualizing Windows or any other OS id care to. Did I mention its free? Runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and more.