This weekend I found a great program when I upgraded to the latest stable version of Debian, Inkscape. It is a vector based drawing program similar to Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator. It is available for both Linux and Windows. I'm planning on using it next year instead of Corel Draw 9 and our Beginner and Advanced Computer Applications class is planning on teaching Gimp. It's beginning to look like the open source community is becoming a truly viable option. I've always supported it but look at the alternatives.

• Adobe Photoshop $$$$$$$$ -> Gimp (Free) You may not get all of the features but you can definitely find most of the features and even some that aren't supported in Photoshop
• Corel Draw $$$$ -> Inkscape (Free)
• MS Office -> Open Office 2.0 take a look the new version is very easy to transition into and it has presentation, spreadsheet, database (access) features.
• Internet Explorer -> Firefox
• Outlook -> Thunderbird or Evolution

Other great programs:

• Audacity - Audio editing.
• NVu - Web page creation from the makers for Firefox.
• Scribus - A desktop publishing program that is coming along quite nicely.