Ok, I realise that my title could create a flame-war but I want to pull some heads here to tell me otherwise, to show me some software that I have missed, or features I am not aware in the Linux programs.
I’m a cross-platform guy spending 50% of my time between different *nixes and Windows (albeit Vista).
That said, there’s some very cool Windows OSS that sometimes exceeds it’s Linux counterpart.
KeePass Password Safe is a very good example where it’s the parent of the Linux version KeePassX. Both are password database safes that use AES or Twofish encryption algorithms for managing passwords but KeepassX search functionality doesn’t work.
Putty , a SSH client is another example where it came before it’s Linux equivalent but take a look at the Linux version, even though I am certain they use GTK, it looks like an ancient TKinter program on Linux. Ugly as hell.. but it does it’s job well though.
I have been a long time admirer of the Windows diff program WinMerge and only came across a decent Gnome equivalent the other day called Meld, which just happens to be written in Python. The KDE equivalent of this would be Kdiff – which I had used for sometime previously. Still though, neither seem quite as nice or easy to use as WinMerge.
In FTP land, we have Filezilla and we have, of course the Linux equivalent GFTP but there’s a few things about GFTP that just don’t work as nice as Filezilla. For example, in Filezilla you can drag a bunch of files and folders into a subfolder, or up a directory level. This isn’t possible in GFTP. Additionally, try and rearrange your bookmarks in GFTP.. go on, try it.. it sucks.
WinSCP is a great little SCP / SFTP program for Windows. It builds on Putty and provides a gui and connection manager in an Explorer or Norton Commander style interface. There’s no straight up and down, standalone Linux equivalent for this program though. What we have in Linux is the fish:// protocol in Konqueror or the sftp:// protocol in Nautilus. Their syntax is straight out standard scp syntax ie:
For Konqueror: fish://user@host/home/folder/
For Nautlius: sftp://user@host/home/folder/
From memory, fish:// uploads a perl script to the server to assist the connection, whereas Nautilus just seems to leverage the standard sftp protocol. Both are great and can just be added as Bookmarks. Actually, I think the linux way here is much nicer than needing an add-on program. It’s almost the Linux equivalent of SMB albeit secure.
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