QGIS should be the most powerful at the moment in terms of functionality and format support. If features many of the tools from GRASS and SAGA as well.
If you are working much with raster data and landscape analysis SAGA might be the tool of your choice. The functionality of the standalone installation exceeds the SAGA tools provided within QGIS.
http://www.saga-gis.org
If you generally have trouble installing software (drivers, dependencies, permissions) I can highly recommend Whitebox GAT. It is JAVA-based and runs without installation.
Probably the best open source GIS software's today (with fast learning curve) are qGIS as a complete solution and SAGA GIS for landscape analyses with more than 100 modules. However, SAGA lack the final output map design and the latest qGIS version is near the productivity of ArcGIS. So if you need detailed analyses go for SAGA, and if you like good final maps, download qGIS (or you can combine both).