In terms of

1. Utility: It is useful!
2. Reliability: It will always work when you need it to!
3. Uniqueness: It gives you the option of doing things that would never have been necessary before it came along.
4. Aesthetic: It satisfies your sense of beauty: It gives you the same kind of feeling a painting or a poem would.
5. Transcendence: It transcends the zeitgeist and is the simplest it can and thus ought to be.

Mine are:

1. Vim
2. mutt
3. The Lucas Arts point and click adventure games
4. A Lisp interpreter
5. grep

I saw back in January that a lot of you were on Linux, I guess I should've expected that considering it's ~comp but I'm curious how the trend is going. But to spice things up a little bit more, tell us about you favourite programs, any hidden gems?

I personally run a fairly standard Fedora 30 install running gnome and some flatpaks. I'd say my favourite programs are

Gnome Builder :

Well, I've been trying to fight the electron uprising while still using a modern and open source IDE and well, I think it works great and looks pretty good too.

Dino.im (Using the Flatpak PR) :

It's light, supports XMPP and looks relatively modern, what more could you ask?

Firefox gnome theme :

It's not really a program and just really a skin for Firefox but I really like it. It integrates pretty neatly with the rest of the desktop. Can't wait for the Gnome 3.32 changes to come in though since it kinda clashes with the new theme.