these are my essentials:

• blender -> 3d graphics software, and with the blenderbim addon it turns into an architecture/engineering beast,
• freecad -> parametric 3d drawing program, amazing for 3d printing, also has a bim addon,
• qcad -> cad drawing software,
• qgis -> topology software,
• kicad -> circuit design software,
• krita -> it used to be just a painting program, lately it's become a great graphics software,
• gimp -> it's always contested but still my favorite image editor,
• ardour -> my favorite daw,
• lyx -> great latex editor,
• at last but not least: vim -> the greatest editor of all time

For the distribution itself, I usually recommend Linux Mint to most people just jumping into Linux for the first time, it's easy to use, has a familiar(ish) layout, and should work on just about everything out of the box. Fedora is another choice, but I try to stay away from corporate backed distributions.

And for the software side of things:

1. Matrix / Element for decentralized, and end-to-end encrypted communication
2. Firefox w/ uBlock Origin & Arkenfox's user.js for web browsing
3. LibreOffice for an office suite
4. Spotube as an open-source alternative to Spotify's proprietary client if you use Spotify
5. VLC media player for playing multimedia files & streaming videos
6. qBittorrent for torrenting
7. KeePassXC for local encrypted password storage, no cloud services needed

That should have you covered for most day to day browsing and content consumption!

I have my own personal list for people switching to libre software here hosted on Codeberg.

Note these are all free software programs. Proprietary software sometimes is ported to Free operating systems (old names like Vivaldi, Discord, Spotify) come to mind. It's mostly due to the fact that these same programs are built off existing free software.

What do you use a computer for?