Most valuable applications
I was inspired by this article on Slashdot discussing the ten applications a user installs, after a fresh Windows install. With my Thinkpad I'm lucky enough to have a relatively quick restore process (it takes about an hour, from memory) so I don't have any issues with smoking my machine every second month or so.
What are the first ten applications everyone installs when they smoke their operating system install (not necessarily in the order you install them)?
For Windows I use:
- PuTTY (SSH and terminal emulator - essential)
- Firefox (web browser)
- Thunderbird (mail and news reader, though I only use it for news)
- ICQLite (instant messanger)
- PartitionMagic (disk manager, so I can activate the other NTFS partition on my laptop; it gets "lost" with an install)
- Microsoft Office (I should really move to OpenOffice.org...)
- mIRC (standard IRC client)
- CuteFTP (file transfers, though I think SmartFTP might be a better, free choice)
- WinZIP (compression, though I think IZArc might be a better, free choice)
- Acrobat Reader (PDF reader)
- Photoshop (image manipluation, though I don't use have of its features)
And for Debian I generally install:
- vim (text editor)
- Apache (worldclass webserver)
- MySQL (database server)
- PHP (for apache and cgi; why mess with perl?)
- bwm (bandwidth monitor)
- traceroute (traces the route to a target IP)
- nmap (port scanner)
- ncurses-dev ("make menuconfig" for a kernel compile needs it)
- Sendmail (SMTP server)
- Bind (DNS, too easy)
How are you finding ICQLite? I thought it was a great alternative to the fully featured (read “bloatware”) version of ICQ. That is until I found Miranda (http://miranda-im.org/). A protocol independent IM app, it has plugins for ICQ, MSN, AIM, Jabber and IRC (making mIRC redundant). The default install is less than a meg and memory use is completely dependent on the modules you decide to load. I highly recommend it.
Other than that, I’d pretty much agree with your choice of windows apps except for maybe CuteFTP (FileZilla). Does IZArc support the creation of RAR 3.0 archives? The features list only says that is “supports” RAR (which generally means “read only”.)
On Windows:
- Miranda (0.3.2, since anything newer has a stupid send button)
- Opera
- Divx codec (not really an app but still required)
- Ad-aware
- Bulletproof FTP
- The rest of the things most people install ie. Winzip, Winamp, MS Office.
On Debian I just install things when I go to use them and find they aren’t there.