Software

• Notepad++ - amazing alternative to your poor default MS Notepad.
• PuTTY - a cross platform terminal emulator application gives you access to SSH, Telnet, rlogin protocols and even to RS-232 Serial port
• WinSCP - very good FTP, SFTP and SCP client for Microsoft Windows
• Total Commander - powerful two panels (Norton Commander style) file commander. It contains many additional features like FTP client, multi rename tool etc.
• OpenOffice - cross platform office applications suite, in the most cases very good alternative to MS Office
• Subversion (SVN) - wide used version control system, successor to the CVS.
• Eclipse - cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE), suitable for Java development and many other programming languages as well. For web development was prepared Eclipse PDT package.
• KeePass - cross platform password manager. It can help you keep your passwords safe and have access to it on your desktop and PDA/Smartphone
• VirtualBox - virtualization software package with support of many host and guest operational systems. Emulation speed is nearly native system so this is ideal solution for development and even for work.

Web Browsers

• Opera - fast, powerful and web standards compliant web browser. Everything what you need to internet explore in one.
• Mozilla Firefox - the most popular alternative to MS Internet Explorer. Highly customizable by over 5000 available plug ins. Many development tools and good web standards support makes Firefox the first browser for web developers.

Operational Systems

• Debian - one of the most popular version of Linux. Because of stability, very good documentation and over 15 years history of development Debian is very popular as operational system for servers and i386/ARM embedded devices.
• Ubuntu - Debian based version of Linux, very easy to install and use especially as desktop system.
• Kubuntu - version of Ubuntu Linux with KDE Windows Manager. If you prefer user interface more similar to MS Windows than MacOS this version is the most suitable for you.