right, but where was that? Like where did I suggest it?

One bashful mrbiotech quietly acknowledges that it wasn't actually Haxer that brought up Opera...

 

Sorry for the confusion I generated there.

Now, before I put foot in mouth again, who was it that really liked Total Commander? 

I was talking to a friend who used opera, so the name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it and wasn't sure if I had said something. I'm glad you like it though.

OS : Dual boot of Ubuntu 6.06 Server (with the desktop stuff built on top.) and Windows XP SP2. My secondary computer (a celeron 566) runs Ubuntu Server with a desktop added with a mind towards fastness.

Skinnables : erm... not much, really; open/blackbox window manager (s consider that a 'shell') and themes for the two major window widget sets that roughly all match up. (There's a GTK+ theme which does all the GNOME apps, and a QT theme which does all the KDE apps.)

FLOSS software : lol!

Productivity tools :
- Firefox (1.5 because 2.0 is messy to get working from backports),
- Thunderbird w/ enigmail for mailing people about my plans for world domination.
- xterms by the dozen (i have an entire virtual desktop of just terminal windows.) In linux, the best ways to get things done often nvolve terminal windows (wget -r for the win!)
- Quanta Plus for PHP/XHTML web development, with the gubed PHP debugger.
- zim, which I cannot live without, for jotting down to-do lists, ideas, and brainstorming.
- KATE and tea for my text-editing needs - KATE for heavy lifting, tea for quick hacking. Both are leagues above most windows software and KATE is roughly analogous to OSX BBEdit. (that's high praise!)
- Inkscape for vector illustration, still trying to get a hang of the interface,
- Abiword for word processing, because OpenOffice.org sucks.
- LyX for TeX-based semantic document editing with inline math formulae (Rich problably understands why semantic > presentational - analogous to why stylesheets > font tags)
- Thunar file manager, which is a nice, clean explorer,exe like file browser (which of course doesn't suck as much.)
- maxima - a symbolic maths package which is a very good way to cheat on your maths homework, as well as solving differential equations and simultaneous systems on the side.

Non Productivity
- Amarok for music playing when I'm feeling indulgent, Rhythmbox/XMMS for when i don't have 300mb of ram to spare. (amarok is really really heavy handed on system resources, but the features are full justification.)
- gaim for MSN/Jabber, xterm+irssi+screen for IRC that never ever dies, even if you close the window.
- The Battle For Wesnoth, truly the most awesome open source strategy game ever. (comes for all platforms, go get it at wesnoth.org.)
- angband : a text-based hack-and-slash game that draws on Lord of The Rings - has many variants and had me truly addicted for a few weeks. (addicted to a *ascii display* game? It's very definitely possible.)


On my iBook (inherited ) I use some of the same apps, but mostly I get by with what OSX comes with plus what my brother lifted from the mac labs at JCU (isn't the OSX concept of programs as single files great? ) For text editing I often find myself using nano in a terminal, or TextWrangler (the free version of BBEdit, which is the single best reason to use a Mac ever.) I'm not really using it at the moment, but once i get back to university i'll probably stock it up with apps as my mobile needs see fit.

On windows, I use Dreamweaver 8 (only slightly better than Quanta really) and Photoshop CS2, the single best example of why open-source software has some catching up to do. I also use xplorer2, which is a very nice file browser. In the way of games, all I was playing was Neverwinter Nights (best RPG evarr) and Warcraft 3, by which I really mean DotA.

Angband rules!  Rouge, and all it's many forms are quite addictive.  I've never been so scared of a capital "V" in all my life!

L36 Dunadan Warrior, dlvl 47, owned by Smaug the Golden. I propose that 'D' is more threatening than 'V'

I had to give it up because I wasn't getting any sleep, but L36 is truly an accomplishment!

lol, you guys sound like a bunch of gamers! I like it. (I googled this and am thinking about trying it out.)

I used opera sometimes, it let me do a lot of things that IE do not do!!

Nerio : Opera has always been my favourite non-firefox browser. Something about it just feels very *fast* and snappy, like it has a telepathic interface into my brain and it's started doing things before I even tell it to. Just a lot of little touches that really add up in the UI department that make it *look* responsive, but it's a real pleasure to use nonetheless. Oh, and the inbuilt adblocker ('content blocker') works rather well once you give it a list of IP's to ignore - pgl.yoyo.org/ads .

Haxer : The easiest roguelikes to get into are Angband and Oangband - you can learn the ropes fairly quickly, and unlike ADOM or Nethack survival is actually humanly possible. Angband gameplay tends to be much of a sameness after a while, though - Oangband is my current pet, but Nethack is truly the mother of all RPGs for detail. In nethack it's possible to do anything - it has rules for things like 'hitting anything with a cockatrice turns it to stone - including if you fall on one', or 'eggs not laid by you have a 50% chance of hatching in your pack'.

My original goal was actually to write a roguelike of my own, but then I realised that a plain text rectangular grid wouldn't give me the space to do all the cool stuff I wanted to, so at current I'm going for something a little more graphical (sprite-based most likely, and problably on hexagonal tiles.)

Rich : Try out LyX for a document editor, provided you can download a few hundred megs of Ubuntu packages. It produces LaTeX and .pdf output, both of which are (traditionally) acceptable document formats for university papers and what not - Before .doc was TeX :p There's something very much 'cleaner' about a document rendered in TeX that you don't get with Word - kinda like the difference between vector and raster graphics.

LyX - I've seen it in the repositories but never tried it.  None of the journals I'd submit to accept LaTeX, but PDF is definitely the preferred method.

NetHack - the original, the favored.  Tricky controls, but for those that grew up playing any D&D, it's a must-have!

littleweseth: Thanks for the info I'll probably play around with this stuff too much and get myself into trouble though. While we are suggesting addicting games to each other, Let me suggest 2:
http://foon.co.uk/blackshift/ (you have to download this one, doesn't like macs too much though. Sorry guys.)
http://foon.co.uk/farcade/ssb/

the 'ssb' page looks blank - just links at the top and empty HTML source :|

Linux version of Blackshift appears to be compiled for x86-64, no go I'll try it out when i get into windows next.

what i hate in firefox, is the plugs you have to dld and install to let the navigator working with Java Sites?!!!!

Ah... Java.  Getting the proper run-time installed on any computer can be a pain.  In Windows it ain't so bad, but getting it all configured under Ubuntu was more difficult than it should be.  All of that, just to run my favorite programming text-editor (jEdit).