quote:
High Quality MP3 encoder
Lame is available.
Do you know Ogg Vorbis? It's an audio compression format that sounds better than mp3 and the files are smaller. You should check it, it's available for Windows too.
quote:
Photoshop like image editor
Run Photoshop on wine or use The Gimp if your images are not for print.
quote:
Media Player (Would LOVE and all in one player)
MPlayer
quote:
HTML/Web page designer
You would do better without a WYSIWYG HTML editor (in my opinion)... But if you must... Mozilla Composer. Dreamweaver on wine.
quote:
Word Processor
OpenOffice.org Writer.
quote:
Need a good calculator program
KCalc.
Octave and Python if you want a super calculator. Octave is similar to Mathlab and Python is a very high level programming language.
quote:
AN IM Chat program for AIM and Yahoo (an all in one like Trillian would be nice)
Kopete and Gaim.
quote:
CD/DVD Burning program capable of doing:
- regular burning of files
- burning Audio CDs
- testing & verifying after burning
- burning/creating ISOs
K3b.
quote:
Virus/Spyware/Trojan Checkers
There are very few virii for Linux and the probability you get infected is almost nil. Open source applications don't come with spyware. There are tools that check for invasion but I just use a good firewall.
quote:
Something P2P like Kazaa
Lmule (Edonkey), PySoulSeek (Soulseek), giFT (several protocols including Kazaa).
quote:
Something like Daemon Tools to mount ISOs as virtual drives
ISOs are natively supported. I don't know anything about virtual drives.
quote:
And finally something that read/writes BOTH .zip and .rar files
Ark (GUI for lots of command line apps). Zip, rar, tar, bzip2, gzip...
quote:
However I want my primary OS to do everything I want in it.
I think you should be less ambitious and use both OSes while you get acquainted with Linux apps. No one can't make sure you'll find everything you need.