Brandon

Posted on Nov 24, 2019

What essential software do you install on a new computer?

#discuss

Top comments (34)

scottshipp • Nov 24 '19

A terminal tool
An IDE that speaks Java, Markdown, HTML, CSS, and JS
A lighter weight text editor
A diff tool
Firefox
A chat tool
Git
Maven
Docker
Vagrant
My bashrc and bash_aliases

Juan Carlos • Nov 24 '19 • Edited on

KDE as Desktop (because qt5).
Telegram (used a lot here).
Zeal Docs (Offline docs, because faster).
pgModeler (Postgres SQL visual editor).
Nim lang (for Fullstack dev, Python dev, Frontend dev).

Other stuff KDE already has them...

Jason C. McDonald • Nov 24 '19 • Edited on

Evolution
RhythmBox
LibreOffice
VS Code
Spotify
Brave
Hexchat
Simplenote
Minecraft ;)

And then, of course, my development stack for C/C++ and Python, including Git and LLVM. (Too exhaustive to list here.)

Andreas Jakof • Nov 24 '19 • Edited on

Windows PC:

Chrome
Bitwarden
Visual Studio
Office (+ Visio eventually)
Notepad++ (maybe at some point in the future it is replaced by VsCode)

Mac:
I would do the same minus chrome and Notepad++, Office without Visio (not available on Mac) and Outlook
(Yes, I am a Safari User)

Paresh • Nov 25 '19 • Edited on

I would suggest install "only" those you require to run your dev environment and that depends on tech stack you are using.

Minimum set would be:

Web browser of your choice (i.e. Chrom, Firefox etc)
IDE (and build tools) of your choice (i.e. Visual Studio, VS Code, Eclipse etc)
Source repo client of your choice (i.e. Git bash or some other repo clients)
Communication tool of your choice (Mail, Skype, Slack, Teams etc)

Brandon • Nov 24 '19

For me, it's:

A browser
VS Code
VirtualBox
WSL

I live mostly in the cloud, so these are my essentials 😁

Jordan Mack 🍍🍕 • Nov 25 '19 • Edited on

Absolute essentials:

Firefox
Google Chrome
Thunderbird
SourceTree
VSCode
Notepad++
Google Drive
PuTTY or KiTTY
7-Zip

Important, but not essential:

ArsClip
Discord
Everything Search
F.lux
Keepass
Greenshot
IrfanView
K-Lite Mega Codec Pack with Media Player Classic
Signal
SublimeText
Photoshop
Winamp

A bunch of these can be quickly installed all at once using ninite.com/.

Seniru Pasan Indira • Nov 24 '19

These are the apps that I can't live with.

GIMP (for image designing)
Atom
Chrome
Netbeans

Joe Mainwaring • Nov 24 '19

1Password
Chrome
Webstorm (preferred IDE)
VSCode (fallback IDE for edge-cases)
iTerm2
Docker
Brew.sh
Postman
Slack
Dropbox
PIA VPN (primarily for use abroad)

Sarah • Nov 24 '19

Slack
Chrome
VSCode
Spark
Spotify
Figma
node / npm / yarn

EmNudge • Nov 24 '19

Do you find it essential to install Figma?
I haven't had much perf problems with the web version.
Fonts are easier with the downloaded version, though. I'll give you that much.

Sarah • Nov 25 '19

I don't think it's essential for everyone, I just like having it because
1) Fonts, as you mentioned
2) I'm often having multiple things open at the same time (jira, google docs, google drive, local dev version of our product, live dev/stage/production, google calendar, notion, sometimes social media). Then it's really nice having my design files (often more than 1 at a time as well) open in a separate app, rather than a million chrome tabs or windows.

But I use the web interface a lot though, especially for quick and easy things.

Mehdi Mousavi • Nov 25 '19

My essentials for mac :

iTerm
VSCode
Chrome
Magnet (window manager)
Pine Player (music player)
Telegram (best messaging app ever!)
The Unarchiver
Persepolis Download Manager
IINA (movie player)
Android File Transfer (by google)
Paste (clipboard manager)
Some Finder Extentions (image size + betterzip viewer + webp viewer + open in vs code + ...)