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My list:
-Vim (usually I'll go for a motif build of gvim).
-Links2 for a lightweight browser that works with many websites in text, framebuffer, and X11.
-Iceweasel (preferred) or Firefox for a full browser.
Chrom{e,ium} and Midori don't cut it; I liked a number of the features of Opera, but not everything. QtWeb is nice when it works but doesn't have enough security updates (WebKit has fixed several vulnerabilities since the last release).
-xli and fbi/ida for image viewers. (Yes, I use three: one for framebuffer, one for a quick view in X, and one for going through photos and making small adjustments).
-xpdf for a PDF viewer, preferably with a certain small patch.
It's fairly light, doesn't waste much screen, and has rectangular selection. Ever tried copy-pasting from a 2-column pdf that was output wrong?
-ksh (OpenBSD pdksh, ksh93, or mksh. NOT oksh.)
Floating point shell math as in ksh93 is nice.
-Ted for a word processor. Yes, it's almost forgotten, and it only edits RTF. But it displays RTF right, and writes RTFs that show up the same anywhere else. When you could end up using any version of Microshaft Office, Wordpad, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Textmate, or even vde, that's nice.
-mpg123 is great for audio...
-ffplay or vlc for video
-Xiphos and libsword
-gcc, python, dc, groff/nroff and man.

50% right.
The one true editor is vi (including alternate implementations such as nvi, vim, and busybox vi).
But bbcode? WRONG.
Troff is the right solution for multiformat documents. Including ones that need to be readable in word processors.

Half joking, half serious. I wrote my papers for Philosophy and Intro to UnixÂin troff. For Philosophy I converted them to RTF before submitting-which worked fairly well.
For Intro to Unix, I used -thtml and -tps. Again, it worked pretty well.

I can use Markdown, and have written a couple manpages.
(My favorite is for "segfault", a quick hack I threw together because someone was asking about example programs for a debugging presentation.)

By now you're probably thinking "Neckbeard!"...nope, I majored in agriculture; and those papers were for GE courses in the last couple years.
I used Ted for editing my longer papers, and found it to be generally satisfactory. Files are guaranteed to be readable on just about any computer, being RTF written properly. And the document actually ends up displaying the same in Word.
Ted runs quite happily on an 800-MHz processor, like the old PIII I used for a month or two after losing my laptop.

Hmmm...the lowest end machine I have right now is one of those ancient Gateway Handbooks. It's a tiny little subnotebook, circa 1993, with a 486 SX25 processor and 20 megs of Ram. Firefox is a pipe dream on this machine (FF runs slowly even over the network via X). Dillo is barely usable; it takes about three seconds to redraw the screen (such as when scrolling up or down). I can't get older versions of Netscape or even the Ted word processor to run on this machine. The last major release of FreeCIV does run, albeit slowly, if I use the XAW client.

I might be able to get a Small spreadsheet to run on this antique.

I can't believe that you are running Firefox on a system with only 32 megs of RAM. The Firefox I'm running right now is using over 100 megs of ram, judging by its VSZ size. I know there is an embedded port of Firefox for PDAs, not to mention an embedded version of Konqueror.

Last time I had 24 megs of ram, I used Netscape Navigator 4.x until I could get a system with more memory; it was just not possible to run Mozilla on that machine.

Some thoughts: I don't know of an open-source browser lighter than the Gecko or KHTML browsers that is usable with the modern internet (My definition of usable: Able to log in to both Yahoo and Hotmail for reading and writing email. Yes, graphical Links will all read-only access to Yahoo, but can't access Hotmail. Dillo can access either).

Abiword 1.x doesn't compile under GCC 3.4.2 without some rather serious patching. Check out Ted for a nice lightweight word processor (it uses the Motif toolkit, but works fine under Lesstif).

OpenOffice 2.0 beta (and every single other version of OpenOffice I have used) has a nasty show stopper bug in it.

The bug is this: If I want to make a document use any font besides their (IMHO, ugly) default "Nimbus Roman No9 L" font, the font will revert back to the Nimbus roman font if I hit the right arrow at the end of the document. Because of how I write, I frequently do this, resulting in what I type being in the wrong font.

I can't find any way to work around this issue (besides having to constantly look at what I am typing and changing the font when this bug pops up).

AbiWord (both 2.0 and 2.2) have a serious issue with being very slow. In particular, when I hit the up and down arrows at the ends of the vertical scrollbar, AbiWord freezes for one or two seconds while slowly scrolling. AbiWord also does this when I need to change pages while typing. AbiWord 1.0, which didn't have this problem doesn't compile without great effort (thanks, GCC developers, for breaking code that compiled just fine only three years ago), and doesn't run when compiled.

SIAG is very unstable and frequently crashes on me (using both the Xaw and the Xaw32 toolkits.).

I finally settled on Ted, an excellent light word processor which compiles and runs fine. Naturally, this word processor is also not bug free on my system; it has a problem with finding font, requiring some serious hacking in the file appFont.c before I could use this program to write a paper.

I am using Fedora Core Three and wasn't able to find a word processor without serious bugs in it. I finally had to do some source code hacking to get a word processor that I could use.

OK, I know this is completely unrelated to the ebay phish problem, but I have been having problems with Pathetic Writer in Fedora Core Three. My problems are:

* PW doesn't seem to see a porpotional font. This causes any non-courier font to look ugly in the PW window.

* There are problems with PW hanging or crashing.

I've tried both the Xaw and the Xaw3d toolkits; same problem in both versions.

Right now, there just isn't a usable Microsoft Wordpad replacement for Linux without at least one incredibly frustrating bug that makes the software nay-to-unusable for me. AbiWord 2.x has problems with extremely slow scrolling times; AbiWord 1.x (which, while having ugly fonts, didn't have this problem) barely compiles after much fiddling and doesn't run at all on FC3; OpenOffice (both 1.1.x and the 2.0 beta) has problems with changing the font to this ugly default font if I hit the right arrow or down arrow key at the end of the document; PW has problems as described above.

Maybe Ted won't have all these problems.

... is that Abiword is slow on my machine, which is reasonably powered (Pentium III 800MHz, 384MB of RAM).

I spend most of my days writing for a living, and I need something that is fast . One of the reasons WordPerfect 5.1 is still one of my favourite program of all time is its sheer speed.

Up until then, I used Ted, which is a very nice little program, but I am more and more annoyed by its shortcomings (no 'undo'? I mean, come on!).

Anyway... I recently upgraded my machine to Slackware 10, and I'll give Abiword another try.

Which is actually a good 'Ask Slashdot' question: what do you use for word processing and desktop publishing? Again, I need something fast and stable, with a reasonable feature set. Cute GUI and eye candy and even anti-aliased fonts are optional.

True. Last weekend I have been in a crowd of approx. 2500 (HAL 2001), most of which took their own computer so it should give an answer to who is using what OS, and why. This question remains unanswered. It didn't really matter, everybody had its own reason to use what he or she liked. A micro-cosmos of that could be seen in our tent (I was visiting the event together with folks from the Dutch Linux user group NLLGG). Of course, everybody took their own Linux box with them, installed with his or her favorite distro. There is some tendency to Mandrake for beginners and Debian for experienced users, but there are several exceptions to the rule.

At the end of the weekend, a 15-year old kid dropped in our tent who became interested in Linux. The kid had some clue (at least he was familiar with the "man" command :-)), was programming VB in Windows and knew how Internet protocols work. After some discussion, we sent him off with a URL of the nearest Red Hat mirror (he has a cable modem and CD burner at home), because that was the easiest way to go. Support in our user group is plentiful for any popular distro, however, Red Hat is easiest to get.

Brinkie

See my HAL 2001 Photo Gallery

No offense, but the odds of you finding one thousand computer users willing to keep Linux on their desktop for everyday use is also next to ZERO.

Gee, it would probably take me so long to look up a few Linux Users Group pages and ask who uses Linux for a desktop. There can't be any of them out there ...

I seem to remember that MS developed RTF as a way to exchanging documents between Macs & PCs. As the original poster stated, MS has changed RTF quite a bit over the years, usually to follow the changes that they've made to Word. But at least the changes have been documented and are available on the web. A quick search with google will turn up several of the RTF specs. Most word processors that I know of will support RTF and there is at least one open source word processor (Ted) that uses RTF exclusively. I've used it and it's pretty good.

I also struggled with TeraTerm.

why don't you check out 'PuTTY' it's a telnet/ssh/raw client:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.u k/~sgtatham/putty/

it works great !

(plus it has basic xterm mouse-handling !!! so you can just cut'n'paste between Windows and the terminal with your mouse-buttons !!!)

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Dutch Linux Users Group

hm...
at my work (CWI) we used to use (and still have) NTrigue from Insignia.
We use it to have people on SGI's and SUN's log in to our NTrigue server, where they are able to run NT 3.5 apps...
MicroSoft stopped the development by Insignia, so unfortunately there is no NT4 version :(

When you run NTtrigue you get your own dedicated NT display, unlike VNC...

--
Dutch Linux Users Group