wireshark is a good example, if you dont have wireshark installed on your machine you just arnt doing something right.
Sorry, but you're clearly very misguided here. I haven't got wireshark on my PC because I've no use for it. Most other people I know also haven't got wireshark on their PCs because they have no use for it. (And for the record I'm someone that works in the industry full time, I don't just power up my PC now and again to check emails and type letters.) Should I somehow be making wireshark a daily part of my routine? I perhaps could've understood you if you'd given firefox as an example for instance - but no, your quote above is, plainly speaking, incorrect.
then i looked back at my list and thought about the fact that half the programs i referenced should be on almost everyone's machines, so there are plenty of free-ware applications that are just so damn useful almost everyone should have them
From that original list I've got firefox, openoffice, avg free and 7zip. I used to have DVD decrypter so what the heck, throw that in as well. That's still WELL under half, and I know about most of the others and have absolutely no use for them.
Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against people listing loads of freeware apps they find useful here - just for the record I'll add some of my own, VLC is one heck of a media player. Generally if VLC won't play it, it's broken! Spybot does a similar job to malwarebytes but contrary to many people around here I get on far better with spybot, and FLAC is an awesome free lossless audio codec that can squeeze uncompressed WAV files down to under half their original size. You won't find better unless you look at 4-5 figure commercial licensing deals.
What I start to get a bit uneasy over though is when someone comes on here and says "if you haven't got all these apps installed on your computer you're doing something wrong." No, if you feel you need to trawl through every application listed here and install it
you're most likely doing something wrong. Some, if not most of us have no need for all those apps and would rather not clog up our systems with software, free or otherwise, that we'll never use!