Frequently the free programs that are available for Windows are not are not for Linux. Thankfully on the Linux platform there are a myriad of good choices.

Of course Firefox, Google Chrome, Teamviewer, Skype, Pidgin, Thunderbird, VLC, Audacity, 7-Zip, GIMP and LibreOffice are all available on Linux. These are my choices of other programs for Linux…

Transmittion
Transmission is a  free and opensource BitTorrent client for Linux , Mac, and BSD.

Gedit
Gedit is the best simple text editor for Linux. It comes with Linux Mint and other distros.

Dia
Dia is a GTK+ based diagram creation program for Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and Windows released under the GPL license. Alternative says, “Dia is roughly inspired by the commercial Windows program Small Microsoft Office Visio iconMicrosoft Office Visio”. I think Dia is more than inspired by Visio. I found it much more similar than not.

Inkscape
Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It’s free and open source. It is very similar to CorelDraw.

Video Editors.
I don’t do much video editing but I have tried a few video editors. Linux has a variety of editors to choose from the very powerful Lightworks to the very simple to use OpenShot. Lightworks is far to complicated for me. OpenShot is very easy to use and is very light on system resources.

Blender
Blender is a professional free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games. Blender’s features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing and compositing. Alongside the modeling features it also has an integrated game engine.