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Linux makes an excellent choice for desktop machines, for a number of sensible reasons:
There are two dominant GUI environments for Linux: The K Desktop Environment (KDE) and GNOME. They are not so terribly different and both come with extensive preference controls as well as adjustable desktop themes. Each has their devotees and each has an active development community. Historically, RedHat have been more interested in promoting GNOME whilst Suse/Novell have tried hard to promote KDE. On the other hand, most systems can switch between either desktop environment and even run programs from both at the same time. You really have to try them both and see which one feels comfortable.
At the other end of the scale, for a completely clean, uncluttered desktop that offers speed and precision for the power user, consider the ratpoison window manager. Ratpoison is entirely hotkey driven, very fast, wastes no screen space and supports scripting so you can create your own hotkeys and define your own desktop behaviour.
The obvious application to mention is Open Office (which is closely related to Star Office) and provides the core suite: word processing, spreadsheet and presentation. One of the nice things about Open Office is the ability to export directly to PDF which is very handy when you are putting material together for wide distribution and don't know what system your readers might be running.
But there's more than just Open Office... a more serious spreadsheet user might be happier with gnumeric which is a stand-alone program (not part of an office suite) designed primarily to work with GNOME.
A lighter, faster office productivity suite is K Office (as you might suspect it is designed to go with KDE).
Abiword is a smaller, lighter and faster word processor with just the useful tools and none of the cruft. It is quite clever at being able to import and export documents from a range of compatible formats.
Firefox is probably the newest, best and most powerful browser for a range of operating systems. It runs natively on Linux although it does take a lot of memory, you would need a minimum of 256M of RAM to consider running firefox. Firefox is easy to use and clever because it gives the end-user excellent control over their browsing experience. You can block pop-ups. You can select a minimum font size if you don't like small print. Firefox has nice bookmark management tools including a bookmark toolbar where you get quick access to the sites you most commonly visit. You can get plug-in extensions to the menus that provide all sorts of interesting additional options as well.
There are smaller, more efficient web browsers if you don't need the full features of firefox. A light-weight offering is dillo which is good for low memory systems and almost always runs faster than firefox. Dillo does not support javascript (yet) and also does not support java applets so dillo is not suited to many applications. Dillo can make a good interface to intranet web-based applications and since it runs on very limited hardware, you can use linux with dillo to set up extremely low-cost data entry terminals on budget hardware.
Right at the other end of the scale is lynx which is pure text, extremely fast, and keyboard driven. Good for expert users who just want to get in there and read the info that they need without slowing down to look at the pretty pictures (or waiting for the pictures to load up). Lynx is unbreakable when it comes to dodgy, untrusted websites that do tricky, sneaky things to other browsers. Sometimes lynx may not be able to view the web page, but in all situations the web page will never be able to disrupt your browser security. Of course there is always a compromise between iron-clad security as against comfortable features but there are enough choices out there to give you options to think about.
One solid recommendation is thunderbird,
especially if you like firefox and want to keep a consistent look and feel
.
Another candidate is mutt which is more powerful than thunderbird but has a somewhat old style interface that takes a while to learn (once you learn it, you will find how fast and efficient it really is).
Also consider the popular evolution which is more than just a mail reader, it's sort of a groupware sort of an everything application, you will have to look for yourself... Here's the Novell page explaining evolution and here's the GNOME project page.
An ordinary web browser can also provide email access for desktop machines by using a "webmail" application. One example is TWIG, another is the Atmail webmail system. A webmail application runs on the server and makes it easy for people to browse and read their email. This has the advantage that email can be accessed from any desktop machine and (optionally) from outside the office (home, Internet cafes, etc).
The Gnu Image Manipulation Program (or GIMP for short) is a layered drawing package with many tools, filters and support for scripting and plug-ins. It is very powerful and moderately easy to use (there are tutorials and tips-and-hints too). It is menu driven but there is so much in the menus that you really need to get the hang of keyboard shortcuts (and you can quickly define your own keyboard shortcuts to suit your own style of artwork. Not everybody's cup of tea but if you want to touch up photographs or prepare artwork for advertising, catalogues, web pages, etc then GIMP is much better value than Adobe Photoshop.
How can you have a desktop without a chat screen?
While many of the latecomers stil believe that it was web browsing that
was the killer application
that made the Internet come of age,
this couldn't be further from the truth. The real killer application was
chat rooms which are one of the oldest applications on the Internet.
An excellent suggestion for accessing chat rooms is
gaim which knows how to simultaneously
support a bunch of different protocols so you can chat to your friends no
matter which network they are on.
Many people prefer the convenient small size of a PDA over the awkwardness of a laptop but the problem comes when you want to interface your PDA to a Linux desktop because so many of the PDA manufacturers have decided to ignore Linux and give you Microsoft-only syncing software.
Multisync is a software package that helps you synchronise your PDA with other desktop applications (e.g. evolution).
The program wine is a special system whereby binaries designed for a Microsoft operating system, can be loaded and run on a Linux system. It isn't perfect, not all programs will work with this but it can be handy if you have some old program you have been hanging onto for a long time and you want to keep it going come what may. Similarly, there are still people out there running MS-DOS programs and dosemu can get such programs running inside a Linux environment.
Please note, in all cases, native Linux programs are better... using such compatibility options is only a last resort but it is important to know that such things are possible.