Other software I've come across
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Check out OpenOffice. Its a free MS Office replacement.

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Linux
Tired of using Windows and supporting Microsoft? Don't like the high price or restrictive licensing of Windows?
Check out these free operating systems.

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 Mandriva is a fairly user friendly Linux distribution. One of its strong points seems to be hardware support. I've installed it to dual boot with XP on my HP Pavillion ze2000 laptop. It recognized all the hardware except the wireless network card. Not bad for Linux, really. I am also running it on a slightly older Compaq laptop. All of the hardware was recognized nicely. So far I've only tried Mandriva One, a single CD version. There is a version that comes on a DVD that I'd like to try next. It might have more of the libraries and other files that always seem to be missing whenever I try to install anything. Check it out here.
I haven't tried this distro since 2006.

My rating: 6 out of 10
 
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Ubuntu is yet another Linux distribution. It installs easily, detects most hardware, and is actually very easy to use. This is the only distribution I've tried that actually had the settings for my laptop touchpad right in the mouse control panel settings. All other distros forced me to do a bunch of command line stuff to get the touchpad set up the way I liked. My wireless card wasn't recognized (it's a Broadcom) but the drivers for it installed easily enough and my wireless card actually connected right up to my network. Very impressive, considering all the others required a full 5 to 15 minutes of tweaking and fiddling every time I switched to a different network.
Definitely one of the best distros to date.
Check it out on Ubuntu.com.

My rating: 9 out of 10

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Kubuntu is a version of Ubuntu which uses the KDE desktop instead of Gnome (the default for Ubuntu). I wouldn't recommend this distro as highly. It seems to be a bit buggy and the themed KDE 4 is too loaded with eye candy and a bit hard to use. Their website is kubuntu.org.

My rating: 5 out of 10

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Debian linux is the distro upon which Ubuntu, among others, is based. I tried the KDE version and would recommend it over some of the other distros using KDE (except maybe Freespire). Much cleaner interface and less eye candy by default.
Debian did not seem nearly as polished and user friendly as most other distros. Had more trouble getting hardware to work, etc. More info here.

My rating: 6 out of 10

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Freespire is based on Debian/Ubuntu so it's quite stable and well designed. It combines the best that free, open source software has to offer (community involved, freely distributed, open source code, etc.), but also provides users the choice of including proprietary codecs, drivers and applications as they see fit. Want to install Adobe Reader or Flash? No sweat. Also included are proprietary drivers and codecs (for mp3, wma, etc). No more being stuck with half-baked open source solutions only. Here's their website.

My rating: 8 out of 10

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Visual Basic 6 like programming languages for Linux
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  Gambas
Gambas is a Basic compiler and IDE for Linux. I've been tinkering with it for some time now. In recent years, it has made great strides in useability and reliability. It also includes a setup creator that makes an installer package for the distro of your choice, that can be directly installed on a users computer without the user needing to manually compile it first, etc. All software developed with Gambas is royalty free, i.e. you may do what ever you want with it, including sell copies of your software, provided you use the GTK+ graphical interface and not Qt in your proprietary works. This is due to Qt licensing restrictions, not Gambas itself.
I highly recommend this if you have used VB6 in the past and are trying to switch to Linux.

For more info, check it out here.

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KBasic
KBasic is a powerful programming language for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, which is simply intuitive and easy to learn. It is a new programming language, a further BASIC dialect and is related to Visual Basic 6 and Java. It combines the best features of VB6 and Java and comes with built-in backward support for VB6 and QBasic as it is 100% Syntax compatible to VB6.

Personally I haven't tried this one lately. The last time I did, it still had a number of bugs and was less user friendly that Gambas. Also, if you are using the free version, all your software must be released under the GPL as free and open source software. 

Check it out here.

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