Infoworld has just published their selection of the 10 most essential open source applications for a Mac, selected out of the thousands of open source tools available. They included the following applications in their list:

1. AppleJack – a tool to trigger the standard housekeeping chores that makes your Mac run faster and smoother. I installed this on my Dell Mini 10v hackintosh, ran it and got ‘applejack: command not found’. Applejack 1.5 is not compatible with Snow Leopard.
2. Boxee, Plex or XBMC – these applications are extensible Front Row alternatives. Plex which is optimized for the Mac looks really slick and smooth. I installed and tried out a few video channels from the Plex App Store. Plex looks great on my 42″ Philips LCD TV. Plex is a keeper for me, on my Hackintosh HTPC.
3. Fink project – this is the tool that opens up the 10,000+ open source Unix/Linux packages to your Mac. You use Fink as the tool to manage and install these packages that enables you to utilize the powerful hidden Unix core of the Mac. I don’t use Fink.
4. Firefox – web browser with plenty of powerful plug-ins. My favorite plug-ins are Web Developer and Firebug.
5. GIMP or Seashore – free Photoshop-like replacements for Adobe Photoshop. I use Picasa for my image touch-ups. I like the simple and easy to use interface of Picasa.
6. jEdit – Text editor for programmers. I prefer Textmate, even though it’s not free.
7. OpenOffice – a free alternative for Microsoft Office for Mac OS X. My word processing, spreadsheet and presentation needs are pretty basic. I use Google Docs, Spreadsheet and Presentation as my Microsoft Office alternative. Everything is stored online, so I can work on different machines without worrying about versioning.
8. RSSOwl – RSS feed reader. I use Google Reader to read and track my RSS feeds. Again, I can read my RSS feeds on different machines and Google keeps track of what I have read and haven’t.
9. Thunderbird – email client from Mozilla. I use online web-based email exclusively, mostly Google Mail with a bit of Yahoo Mail.
10. VLC Player – the best media player for Mac OS X. There are versions for Windows and Linux too. I have this on all my Macs.

Out of the 10 most essential open source applications for the Mac, I only use 2 of them, Firefox and VLC Player, or 3 if I include Plex into my list. Most of these software just don’t fall into my category of essential application.

How many of these essential applications do you have on your Mac or Hackintosh? What do you think is the one application that needs to be in that list?

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