-
Install Ubuntu
This isn't an endorsement of all of Canonical's design decisions, nor their community relations approach, but rather a recognition that as much as I'd like to like Fedora, it's just that much more difficult to use that I've never been able to make the jump. SuSE, meanwhile, lacks the same visibility with third party packagers, so it's out. I even contemplated an OS X switch recently, but I just can't justify replacing the hardware I have with Apple kit, which I'd have to do (I looked into the Hackintosh compatibility: no joy).
So Ubuntu remains the best option for me. Your mileage may vary, obviously.
-
Install Dropbox
Everything important to me is in Dropbox. Files, music and movies, yes, but also my emacs config, my bash aliases, my non-packaged applications - everything. So it's the first thing I install. Because it would take days to reload everything from the network, however, I usually manually rsync the Dropbox directory to an external hard drive, then reverse the proces