Software I use every day
I've spent a lot of time exploring various solutions to computing problems and thought I'd share a bit of my findings. You'll find a heart next to things I'd 100% recommend checking out.
Desktop
My pc runs ❤️ Debian with i3. Much more stable and simple than ubuntu, while still running all the mainstream oss apps.
- i3 as window manager
- Firefox despite some user hostile behavior. As plugins I have ❤️ ublock orgin with javascript off by default. Redirector helps avoid bad habits. ublacklist bans spam domains from search results. My search engine is now kagi, I'll give it a try with a one year starter plan. duckduckgo is also great, but I feel bad using it while blocking ads.
- Thunderbird for emails, calendar and contacts. It's a bit annoying that it can't archive + mark as read in one keypress, the calendar ui feels a bit rigid, and the "mark as spam" function just keeps the mail there. The plugins look sometimes out of place. It usually looks bad on small windows dimensions. Overally, it's a great project, I even donated, but I feel like things could be better. I'd like to contribute code there one day.
- Jetbrain All Products Pack for real world projects in all sorts of languages (js, php, ruby, rust, python)
- ❤️ Sublime Text 4 for simpler projects and notes.
- Sublime Merge when things get too hairy to manage with the git cli
- KanbanMD for project tracking instead of Trello. I need to fix the ctrl-z and tab behavior.
- BabelEdit for translations editing, so much better than doing it by hand. I just wish it was OSS to a paid translation service attached.
- OBS for screen recordings
- ❤️ flameshot for screenshots, it's great and works on windows/mac too.
- ❤️ VLC for music and movies
- Syncthing for sync of notes, photos and music mostly.
- Signal desktop but I barely use it
Mobile
My goal is to eventually transition all mainsteam apps to my iPhone X, and use a degoogled Sony Xperia 10 VI as main phone.
I'm not there yet thought, so here's what's really running on my android phone :
- ❤️ Text Launcher is the simplest launcher I could find, and makes you want to debloat your phone.
- ❤️ Aegis Authenticator for 2FA OTP without cloud bs
- Breakout 71 of course, but I don't play it much.
- Clock a simple AOSP based clock.
- Fossify Contacts to display the contacts synced by DAVx5
- ❤️ OsmAnd~ for offline maps navigation. Great, feature full, but crashes from time to time. It was a real pain to export my thousands of marked places in google maps and import them here, but I managedto do it, I should share the script one day.
- Syncthing Fork to sync notes, documents, music and photos with my desktop.
- KDE connect to remote control my pc, not required but rather nice
- Fossify file manager
- ❤️ F-Droid of course
- ❤️ Feeder, and amazing rss client
- Fossify Gallery
- ❤️ kashkal to connect to my cardav server
- open camera as a simple camera that can take low res photos (i don't need 40mpx photos of my groceries receipts)
- fossify phone for a simple phone dialer
- QUIK SMS for sms/mms
- sms.lecaro.me to send welcome sms to users that signup on https://ciboulette.net/
- ❤️ thumb key is an amazing keyboard. instead of training a model to recognize your swipes, you build muscle memory to use a keyboard layout, and then you get nearly the same typing speed as gboard without the need for an ai to "read your mind" and guesstimate what you want ot type.
- thunderbird is an allright mail client.
- ❤️ vlc for music
- ❤️ Breezy weather as a simple, very reliable weather app
- wireguard to connect to my vpn.
- fossify calculator
- mastodon but I think I prefer RSS
Some of the apps i'd like to remove or move to the iPhone :
- The play store
- Aurora Store, but i'm not using it much, multiple apps refused to start after installing from there. Google's push for install source checks is working.
- Xed-Editor for text editing (notes, todo, recipes, blog posts..). Maybe too featureful for my needs, and a bit buggy, I often get crahses when reopening a file. All I want is a plain text editor with a folder view, some tabs, full text search in folder, and maybe syntax highlighting but that's not even required. I tried markor but it's opinionated in a different direction from what I want. Basically I'm looking for sublime text mobile.
- Fennec as a slightly cleaner firefox, but I no longer trust mozilla
- My banking apps, they'll move to my iPhone soon
- IDF mobilité from the play store, it uses google maps layers
- Nebula as a youtube alternative
- signal from the play store, I want to degoogle fully and I think they rely on google services, also, feature creep.
- Whatsapp (shame, shame!). Sadly I need it to talk to customers of https://ciboulette.net/. But maybe I can offer another contact method.
- YouTube : I pay (a small price) for premium, because the content available there is just not visible anywhere else.
- Unifi endpoint (to open the office door at work, I'd rather not have work software on my personal phone)
Servers
I rent three servers from ❤️ Hetzner (about 17€/month total).
The first CX32 hosts
The second CX32 hosts
The third server is a CX23 for private use only.
- radicale stores my calendar and contacts.
- git stores my private repos
- wireguard connects all my devices in a virtual private network.
The only exposed port of the private server is a random port for wireguard.
I've had some issues with wireguard, It stopped working randomly for my mobile devices, but I'm not yet sure of the root cause.
It could very well be my home router that's the issue.
Some of the services I'd really like to self host now are:
- Discourse or another forum instead of discord for breakout discussions. I find IRC and matrix a bit too involved. I don't even have time to chat now, so this is not urgent.
- fossil as an alternative to git for projects where I work alone anyway.
- some automatic incremental backup software for my family and myself. The trick is to find something with clients for windows and mac too. Ideally, I'd like the backup to only be readable by their author and not myself as an admin of the server.