Tools Rosetta Stone
This is mostly just a list of things to remind me what to install when I reformat / start using a new PC. But I decided I would share anyway.
The prompt for creating this table wss actually discovering ksnip which resolved a lot of my cross platform screen shot pains.
| Tool | Windows | Linux | Mac OS X | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Screen shots | ksnip | ksnip | ksnip | Picking this up helped a lot as it was a major missing piece, I had tried things like, Shutter which became dependency hell every update as it isn’t a compiled tool and wasn’t cross platform. |
| Screen recording (heavy duty) | OBS | OBS | OBS | If Kdenlive was easier to use and more reliable cross system I would attempt to substitute that |
| Screen recording (lite) | Screen2gif | SimpleScreenRecorder | Missing | I would greatly love something that is easy to use and cross platform. |
| Video editing | N/A | N/A | N/A | I use a bunch of tools. Kdenlive, VEGAS Pro, iMovie, and some others. |
| Coding IDE | Jetbrains Toolbox / Vim | Jetbrains Toolbox / Vim | Jetbrains Toolbox / Vim | I pay for the toolbox. Well worth it. |
| Slack | Slack | Slack | Slack | What choice do I have? Shame it’s electron |
| Discord | Discord | Discord | Discord | What choice do I have? Shame it’s electron. There is a rewrite for OSx using swift and possibly native ui which interets me |
| Spotify | Spotify | Spotify | Spotify | What choice do I have? Shame it’s electron. There is a rewrite for OSx using swift and possibly native ui which interets me |
| Signal | Signal | Signal | Signal | What choice do I have? |
| WhatsDesk | WhatsApp and WhatsDesk are still dirty electron.. :( | |||
| Facebook Messenger | N/A webbrowser | N/A webbrowser | Facebook Messenger Native client | The native clients are nice.. Lest in Mac. In windows it /freezes/ and is a little too noisy with notifications. Be nice if it muted the phone when you had it open too. -_- Facebook tries too hard to get your attention meaning I have had to mute it in as many places as I could. |
| Webbrowser | Chrome | Chrome | Chrome | Chrome. I am getting a little bored of it for reasons and will probably look at switching. There is only one real viable alternative these days anyway. And with Electron I will still be running it everywhere. It truely is tne new OS. |
| Auth | Twillio Authy | Twillio Authy | Twillio Authy | I have many concerns about this app but it seems to work. Will be looking for a synchronising, cross platform, backupable, non-integrated solution in the future. |
| Games | Everything…. | Everything that runs.. | Everything that runs… | Truely only windows provides the best support. |
| Desktop Environment | Windows | KDE | Mac OS X | |
| Shell | WSL+ZSH | ZSH | ZSH (default) | |
| Git UI | None | None | None | |
| Compress Archive Viewer | 7zip | Dolphin (kde) and CLI tools | CLI tools | This is surprsingly bad.. I haven’t found a good FOSS replacement. |
| Media player | VLC | VLC | VLC | Works everywhere, including andorid. Gold. |
| Visual Diff tool | Vimdiff on CLI and Kdiff3 for with UI | Vimdiff on CLI and Kdiff3 for with UI | Vimdiff on CLI and Kdiff3 for with UI | KDE saves the day again. |
| Dotfile / configuration / settings sync | Chezmoi | Chezmoi | Chezmoi | I mean no surprise here. |
| Git Credential Manager | Microsoft GCM | Microsoft GCM | Microsoft GCM | This tool is really nice. No more SSH keys, or storing tokens everywhere! I mean chrome is still vunerable to people inspecting the profile files but this helps a lot. |
| GPG Manager | Kleopatra | Kleopatra | Kleopatra | This is everything you would want from a GPG key manager. It’s fantastic. It’s .. simplish to use.. KDE saves the day. Makes setting up verified commits much easiier. I do have some UI complaints but that’s for another posst. |
| Terminal | Windows Terminal | Konsole | Mac Terminal.App | I used to use putty everywhere, it was a decent with it’s pTerm but has issues. If I could use Konsole everywhere I would. |
| Dropdown Terminal | None | Yakuake | If I could use Yakuake everywhere I would. Better yet one which works as a normal terminal too. | |
| VM tools | None | None | None | I don’t really use VMs that much any more. I don’t like installing them as they screw up the networking stack. |
| Terminal Multiplexer | tmux | tmux | tmux | Rarely need it these days |
| Logitech Unified Receiver controller | Logitech native app | Solaar | Logitech native app | Fine with this. Wish Logitech would support Linux better though. Especially with their other apps such as the ones which Pair with the Brio. |
| Package manager | Winget / Ms App store | Default package manager, avoid snaps and “developer tool” installers | App store, avoid brew, and mac ports as much as possible. | This is an area where I use the system provided provided it isn’t snapd and avoid most others. On Mac os x I would prefer to install things manually than use the solutions offered as they have broken many times and required more time to fix than it takes to update an Gentoo system. -_- |
| Clipboard manager | None | KDE Default | None | Windows offers a built in one but I don’t really turn it on.. IDK about mac |
| Phone Link | Windows Phone Link | KDE Connect | None | Don’t use any on Mac because I use Android. Linux is pretty good but there is a massive difference between what Microsoft offers and what KDE offers making the two apps mutually incomparable and possibly compatible. Notification muting is something which is needed for both though. |
Looking for:
- Solutions which also work on Android
- Compress Archive tool
- 2FA Tool
- Password Manager with custom sync, used to use keypass but support for other OS was flaky
- Anything to replace Electron
- Video editor / Heavy screen recording
- Qt toolkit
- Extendable
I’m open to suggestions. Remember:
- Crossplatform is key most other things are secondary
- If it’s paid it needs to work on multiple computers with just one license
- Open source is nice, especially if it’s active and on github
- Synchronises
Also if you have your own list, add a comment here and if I like it, I will add it below!