Moving from macOS to Debian 11 Bullseye Linux: applications

Screenshot of GNOME 3 application manager

I’ve been working towards a move from macOS to Linux for a while now, and the very concerning announcement from Apple that it intended to write code to scan content on users’ private devices hastened that move.

I’ve been using Debian 11 (Bullseye) exclusively for a couple of weeks now, and I’m looking forward to a longer term experiment.

While a different operating system is fun, the software I use for getting through my day-to-day tasks is arguably more important.

Given the increasing prevalence of browser-based tools, this is perhaps as easy now as it has ever been. For me, the CRM, time recording, and invoicing systems for work are all web-based, so I just access them through my browser.

Software requiring something different

macOS Debian Comments
1Password Bitwarden I was in the course of moving from 1Password to Bitwarden anyway
ClipGrab YouTube_DL Downloader for YouTube
FileVault 2 LUKS Disk encryption
gpgtools gpg gpg encryption
iTunes Rhythmbox? jellyfin? There isn’t really an equivalent to iTunes / Music for managing music on an iPhone. For that, I’m stuck with a Mac. For listening to Internet radio, I use Shortwave. For music, I use the jellyfin web client, to my jellyfin server - I’d probably use this if I wanted to watch a film on my computer, which I don’t tend to do
MacDown apostrophe markdown editor/writer
macOS Mail Evolution Evolution does more than macOS Mail, and I use it for calendaring and contacts too
MetaMovie Nothing I’ve found yet Adds metadata to DVD rips
Microsoft PowerPoint / Apple Keynote pandoc / LibreOffice Impress Rather than a like-for-like replacement, I decided to give pandoc a try. I’ll write about this separately, but basically means I can write my slides in markdown and convert them into a presentation
Microsoft Word / Apple Pages LibreOffice Writer It’s just about good enough. It cannot open Pages files, so you’ll need to convert those first (or open them using icloud.com, if you like that kind of thing (thanks, Vince))
PDF Pen Pro Still working on this Redacting PDFs is important, as is OCR’ing PDFs . But I don’t have answers yet
Pixelmator GIMP Image editor
Preview Document Viewer For quickly blurring bits of images, Obfuscate
QuickTime audio recording Sound recorder
QuickTime screen recording Kooha
Remote desktop GNOME connections
Safari Firefox I’ve enabled DNS-over-https in Firefox, but I have also set it system-wide using dnscrypt-proxy.
Super Duper! A combination of rsnapshot and rsync Backup utilities. I use rsnapshot for doing incremental backups of my /home and /usr/local directories, and rsync for some other bits. I should probably standardise on rsnapshot. Don’t forget to back up any cronjobs…
Tweetbot Cawbird Twitter client

For file shares for which I was using afp, I’ve added smb support, so I can browse them using Files and smbclient.

Extra stuff I didn’t do on macOS

Software with macOS and Linux support

(And lots of the usual command line utilities I use: curl, wget, bash, vim, ssh, rsync etc.)

Things still to solve

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