What is really needed these days for a computer?

Seems like everything I do these on the computer requires only the following:

• Open Office .org – for writing documents/spreadsheets etc…
• Thunderbird – for email
• Firefox – web browsing

For IRC, I’m using MIRC, as that works under wine.
I also now have discovered bluefish. Which is a graphical text editor with syntax highlighting. Excellent application in my opionion.
Eagle layout program is a good PCB design application, however, it’s crashing on me recently… who knows why. I’ll compare version numbers, and upgrade if need be.