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Essentialism

Published: June 30, 2006. Filed under: Misc.

For the second time, Mark Pilgrim has written up a list of his “essential” software (for reference, here’s the first time). It being Friday, the day when bloggers around the world veer off and post things of very little relevance to important world issues, I feel compelled to do the same.

Wherever I go, there they are

I work with two operating systems on a regular basis: Mac OS X and Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Obviously there are going to be some disjoints between the sets of applications I use on the two, but there are a number of cross-platform apps that I use everywhere, and without which computers wouldn’t be worth using:

Astute readers will notice that everything listed above is Free Software.

Platform hopping

Most other things are optional after that; sometimes there’s a standout application for a particular niche on a particular OS, sometimes there’s just “the best I’ve seen so far”.

Are you essential?

Friday also being the traditional day of memes, do feel free to post your own lists of applications, either here in the comments or on your own site.