Email clients, music, word processor

[Steve]

Any thoughts on email clients?
It's usually a staple in any distribution.  Normally I use Thunderbird
but I'm not sure about its reliance on Gnome.  Probably not much, I
guess, if Firefox has none.
But it may be too big.  Are there small/fast GTK-based email clients
that would be more appropriate?

As for music and an audio system, personally I never use aRts or Esd,
I always just use the Alsa drivers directly.  I suggest including
beep-media-player in the distro.

Onto word processors, another staple.  For running on slower hardware,
obviously open office is out.  I've been quite successfully running
Abiword on my PII 300MHz.  Any thoughts?

On the same subject, I actually quite like "gedit" for text editing. 
Usually I use Emacs but when I want a GUI, gedit is my choice.  But I
know that it's a Gnome application.
Are there any Gnome-less replacements that are just as good?


Steve