a couple years ago I wrote an article about the Tools I use daily. The last nine (9) months I am partial using win10 due to new job challenges and thus I would like to write an updated version on my previous article.
I will try to use the same structure for comparison as the previous article although this a nine to five setup (work related). So here it goes.
Operating System
I use Win10 as my primary operating system in my work laptop. I have two impediments that can not work on a laptop distribution:
- WebEx
- MS Office
We are using webex as our primary communication tool. We are sharing our screen and have our video camera on, so that we can see each other. And we have a lot of meetings that integrate with our company’s outlook. I can use OWA as an alternative but in fact it is difficult to use both of them in a linux desktop.
I have considered to use a VM but a win10 vm needs more than 4G of RAM and a couple of CPUs just to boot up. In that case, means that I have to reduce my work laptop resources for half the day, every day. So for the time being I am staying with Win10 as the primary operating system.
Desktop
Default Win10 desktop
Disk / Filesystem
Default Win10 filesystem with bitlocker. Every HW change will lock the entire system and in the past just was the case!
Dropbox as a cloud sync software, an encfs partition and syncthing for secure personal syncing files.
Mostly OWA for calendar purposes and … still thunderbird for primary reading mails.
Shell
WSL … waiting for the official WSLv2 ! This is a huge HUGE upgrade for windows. I have setup an archlinux WSL environment to continue work on a linux environment, I mean bash. I use my WSL archlinux as a jumphost to my VMs.
Editor
Using Visual Studio Code for any python (or any other) scripting code file. Vim within WSL and notepad for temp text notes. The last year I have switched to Boostnote and markdown notes.
Browser
Multiple Instances of firefox, chromium, firefox Nightly, Tor Browser and Brave
Communication
I use mostly slack and signal-desktop. We are using webex but I prefer zoom. Less and less riot-matrix.
Media
VLC for windows, what else ? Also gimp for image editing. I have switched to spotify for music and draw for diagrams. Last I use CPod for podcasts.
In conclusion
I have switched to a majority of electron applications. I use the same applications on my Linux boxes. Encrypted notes on boostnote, synced over syncthing. Same browsers, same bash/shell, the only thing I dont have on my linux boxes are webex and outlook. Consider everything else, I think it is a decent setup across every distro.