DukeXC

To offer a counter to Ubiquity taking the *content-gathering* half of this idea to its logical extreme, I recommend Vimperator for doing the same with *navigation.* Pretty much every action from sorting tabs to downloading links is simplified to one or two keystrokes.

The two actually integrate fairly well, although I've found Ubiquity mostly redundant for my own purposes.

yaourt - Think apt-get, but for Arch Linux's pacman package manager, and with access to community-made packages.
Firefox - Eh, it's Firefox. It works, and well. Midori has been catching my interest as an alternative lately, but it's still in early development.
mocp - Media player with a command-line interface. Quick, powerful, and browses by file directory which makes it easy to keep things neat.
Deluge - One of the better bittorrent programs for Linux. Interface a lot like utorrent for Windows.
mplayer - Video player on par with VLC for codec support, but with a more native interface and *much* better filtering and video quality customization.
Comix - Excellent file viewer for archived comics or even just .rar files full of images.
xterm - Light, fast and clean. I've tried various more "powerful" terminal emulators and nothing beats the one that comes baked into X.
dmenu - A more lightweight Gnome-Do-esque application launcher. Doesn't have the same plugin support, but it's much lighter and snappier.
XChat - Powerful, fast IRC client. I used to use Pidgin, but I use IRC far more than any instant messaging clients, and XChat handles the job much better.
locate - Not so much an "app" as a command that comes standard with bash, this pulls filename search results from my whole hard drive in a matter of seconds. Sure, no in-file indexing, but it's got a memory footprint to match.

Ubuntu sucks, therefore Linux is garbage?

No, Ubuntu sucks, therefore Ubuntu sucks. Canonical is the company committing bad code to staggered releases and sticking their hands in the guts of the kernel to mess around with things to make them more "user-friendly."

Ubuntu was a great OS in 2007 and a decent OS in 2008. 9.04 was awful.

Maybe he should try developing an Arch-based Eee OS?

Uh, is this particularly different from just bookmarking a site, going to preferences and checking "open in sidebar?"

IRC friends. Easy.

The price, the fact that it's a product compoed of public domain books, none of those are the problem.

The problem is just that the DS isn't designed for ebooks.

I've tried the moonbooks reader on my CycloDS before, the screen quality is absolutely abysmal. The pixel count is fine for gaming, or reading short bursts of dialogue in large font, but when you squeeze down the font size enough that it's at all *useful* as an ebook reader, the font is unpleasantly aliased. This is *why* devices like the Kindle and the Sony Reader have a market - their screens are designed to emulate the look of paper, most specifically in its *readability.*

and a toaster while theyre at it

Well, I voted for a Mac desktop application, seeing as there wasn't an option for Linux. (linux user that likes the Zune? whaaat?)

I don't see a touch screen improving the player very much... though the idea someone mentioned of a mail/feed reader would be extremely useful.