I just bought a 17 inch MacBook Pro. The reason I went with the Mac is because apple hardware is the only hardware that can run all three of the major operating system out of the box. In my day to day life I support Linux, Windows, and OSX systems. Even though I have to support three operating systems, I like to try to use the same software stack on each system, to make my life easier. So below is my top five applications that are the same on each OS.

  1. Open Office – An open source office suite that offers pretty good support for documents generated in Microsoft Office. With the coming version 3, Open Office will use the native Aqua interface on the OSX version.
  2. Filezilla – Filezilla is the best open source FTP client bar none. It is close to WS-FTP Pro for you Windows users out there. I didn’t know this until I was setting up my Mac but, Filezilla now offers an OSX version.
  3. PeerGuardian / Moblock – I have to break my rule for selecting applications that run on all three operating systems here. That didn’t use to be the case. The Linux version of PeerGuardian has fallen out of favor and has been replaced by Moblock. Both applications look at your incoming and outgoing network traffic and block any traffic coming to or from those that might want to snoop on you. They basically keep the RIAA and the MPAA from seeing what you are doing. Don’t use a P2P network without running one of these applications or you might get a nasty letter. PeerGuardian for OSX Lepord can be found here. For OSX Tiger it can be found here. For Windows it can be found here. The Moblock project page and source can be found here but, you should probably install it from the repositories for your particular distribution.
  4. FireFox – You are probably already using this but, for the sake of completion, here it is.
  5. VLC – VLC is a media player that will handle just about anything you throw at it.

I am going to throw in another application that is not necessarily free on all platforms but is available. VMware is an application that allows you to run one operating system on top of another in a window. It allows Windows users to run Linux, Linux users to run Windows, and OSX users to run both Windows and Linux. You are not limited to those three operating systems either. The major advantage of VMware is that you can use the best application available regardless of the operating system required. There is a player client that allows Windows and Linux users to run client operating systems developed by others for free but, if you want to do a custom install of an operating system yourself, you will either have to look up the hack for VMware player or purchase a copy of VMware workstation.

If you have any additions please leave a comment.