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The following list represents my "must have" applications on any linux desktop I use, be it RHEL at the office, Crunchbang on the work laptop, or Debian, LMDE, Ubuntu, etc. on various home computers.

• Application Launcher - dmenu - by far my favorite app launcher, very lightweight (no resources used) yet functional enough to get the job done (more info, my guide on adding locally installed apps to dmenu)
  
• Archive Manager - File Roller - simple, effective archive manager
• Backup Tool - rsync - I like good old rsync for backups as it is quick, reliable, and easy to script (cron)
• File Manager - Thunar - a great, light, no frills but all you need file manager
• Firewall GUI - Guarddog
  - I prefer guarddog over straight iptables rules as its less of a
  learning curve; however, I am gradually moving to iptables scripts as I
  dont like all the overhead (purely amount of packages/files needed, not
  system resources) with any GUI
• IDE - Eclipse - not exactly lightweight but very robust Integrated Development Environment
  
• Image Viewer - feh - lightweight, lots of cli options and just works well
  * also check out Viewnior
  
• Image Editor - The GIMP -
  
• Image Manager - Shotwell - a nice, basic image manager
  * also check out digiKam - very robust and integrates well with lots of online / social services 
• Instant Messenger - Pidgin - the 'old faithful' of multi-client IM support
• Media Player (sound/video) - VLC - VLC doesn't stand for "Very Lovely Cosmetics" but it plays just about anything in the audio and video world
  
• Media Manager -
  
• Office Suite - LibreOffice
  - I prefer LibreOffice over OpenOffice as it is moving at a faster pace
  (new features) and has a wider distro support at the current time
  
• Partitioning Tool - GParted - the swiss army knife for disk partitioning (see my repartitioning guide)
• Password Manager - KeePassX - the best password manager I've used (multiple platforms supported including mobile)
  
• PDF Viewer - Evince - just a small, basic PDF/document viewer
  
• Search Tool - find - I personally prefer the command line based 'find' app for finding files/directories but Catfish, and SearchMonkey are also tools I tend to use
  
• SVN Manager - RapidSVN - small svn viewer/manager
• System Monitoring - conky - a great lightweight tool for monitoring your system with lots of extensions that let you check/view email, weather, and more
• Task Manager - htop - command line based (think top) task manager that lets you see and kill running tasks
  
• Text Editor - SciTE -a great basic text editor, lightweight, quick, and lots of tools if you need them
  
• Terminal - XFCE Terminal - basic, effective terminal emulator
  
• Web Browser - Firefox - I'm still a firefox fan for my #1 browser
  * also check out Chromium - this is the open source base of google's Chrome browser
  * Midori is also a great lightweight browser which I typically install as a second browser
  

If you have comments / suggestions please leave a comment and I'll try to address.