As I stated in a previous post, I am slowly but surely migrating from Big Tech. This journey started many years ago but built further momentum during 2025, with the questionable actions of major players in both technology and social media. My focus is now on Open Source and privacy-focused applications and services.
Sometime ago I picked-up an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4. I used this as my daily driver for quite a while, undertaking some basic Python lessons using Thonny, an excellent IDE for fledgling Pythonistas, which I still currently use on all my machines while I weigh up the pros and cons of things like Pulsar Editor, PyCharm or Zed Editor.
I use Joplin to take any lessons notes with but aim to move over to something like Logseq for storing snippets of information and linking them. C…
As I stated in a previous post, I am slowly but surely migrating from Big Tech. This journey started many years ago but built further momentum during 2025, with the questionable actions of major players in both technology and social media. My focus is now on Open Source and privacy-focused applications and services.
Sometime ago I picked-up an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4. I used this as my daily driver for quite a while, undertaking some basic Python lessons using Thonny, an excellent IDE for fledgling Pythonistas, which I still currently use on all my machines while I weigh up the pros and cons of things like Pulsar Editor, PyCharm or Zed Editor.
I use Joplin to take any lessons notes with but aim to move over to something like Logseq for storing snippets of information and linking them. Calibre is used to sort my eBook collection, including the excellent Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart and a number of useful guides by Flavio Copes.
A Lenovo G50 laptop has been happily running Manjaro Linux with Xfce for quite sometime now and is my back-up development machine. Before the skyrocketing prices of RAM, I was going to build a new desktop PC with Fedora KDE. This will still happen but probably not until 2027. In the meantime, I aim to simply dual boot my ASUS TUF laptop as I move further away from dependence on Microsoft.
Syncthing keeps my project files synchronised across my machines and, along with an external hard drive and Déjà Dup, I use cloud services such as Filen for backup purposes. This works extremely well for myself, though I do plan to use something like Nextcloud or OpenMediaVault in the future.
Whereas I refreshed my GitHub account at the start of the year, I will be moving to Codeberg before the end of 2026. I will probably join the Fediverse as well at some point, to have some kind of presence on decentralised social media.
Whereas there are other Open Source tools and services I use, this post has covered most of the ones I use on a daily basis. With some research, you may find one or two excellent alternatives for yourself.