I hear that Gentoo's portage cvan be installed on other distros - if so I HIGHLY recommend it. I don't know what kind of configuration it would require but whatever it is it would be well worth it.
One thing I forgot to mention was my favorite IRC client, XChat (
www.xchat.org) The cool thing about Linux though is that most great downloads don't even need to be downloaded for most distros! Of course, with distros like LFS (Linux From Scratch), Gentoo, Slackware, etc, they're ALL downloads!
