Thank you so much, comrades! I am feeling pretty comfortable with linux mint, and now would like some suggestions for some absolutely necessary FOSS or free license software for the OS. So far I have the standard, Firefox, ThunderBird, LibreOffice, yada yada. Thank you again to everyone on the linux comm! 
Inkscape for drawing vector images.
Loads of command line tools to process PDF files, like extracting images or text.
All those tools for automated processing of data, including script languages like perl.
The MediaWiki engine that allows me to run a local wiki at home for my hobby.