It’s been a while since I last discussed my devices: the last deep dive was back in 2019, and a lot has changed since.

So, it is time for a refresh, and to show how I compute, for computer nerds like me.

The switch to linux #

I am a big fan of the Apple ecosystem and hardware. However, macOS has become more and more hostile to developers over the years, such as Gatekeeper, notarization, and the growing number of hoops to run your own software (Apple’s own documentation and the notarization tightening in recent releases). That pushed me to rethink my usage of Apple products.

On the other side, I don’t trust Google anymore for keeping my data private, and the Android stack is becoming more and more opaque: Google now develops Android almost entirely in private, only publishing source code after each release (Ars Technica), and its new developer verification program requires apps to come from verified developers before they can be installed on certified devices. And the latest Android is going one step further: with Android 17 the phone itself becomes an agent, where apps expose their functions and an AI agent drives the apps’ own UI to complete multi-step tasks on your behalf. Android 17 is already rolling out, and it scares me a lot: Google blocks agent automation inside work profiles by default, which tells me a lot about how much I should trust it with my data.

Compared to Google, Apple’s public communication has been about privacy for more than a decade, like its privacy page and the “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone” campaign. They have way more to lose than Google on that side. I don’t fully trust them, but I do think the iPhone is still the best solution we have as a mainstream smartphone today. I would switch to GrapheneOS if and only if there were not so many issues (and possible trouble with the police) using that system. For example, recently, police in Spain reportedly started to associate Pixel devices, and by extension GrapheneOS, with drug traffickers.

To finish, there has been a big issue with the USA for a few years, and I am pretty scared that my computers would be locked overnight just because an orange-haired man decided to do that. The smartphone is fine, I would still switch to another solution pretty easily as I don’t use the Apple-locked applications. But my computer contains much of my digital life and I can’t really allow myself to run a vendor-locked OS on it.

In the end, I switched fully to Linux on my main computer. I sold my MacBook Pro and tried to buy a Framework Laptop 13 Pro with this money. Unfortunately, the price was so high, and the wait so long (several months of waiting, as the launch kept slipping) that I switched to another solution. I bought a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Ultra Aura Edition, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 355 in it. With it, I can reach 12 to 14 hours of usage from 100% to 10%, on Fedora 44 (balanced setting, 2.8K, and 15% brightness). The laptop has a beautiful OLED screen, so bright that I rarely need to turn the brightness up. It is powerful enough to run my daily applications on multiple desktops, or compile my personal projects quickly. The computer has 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and is lighter than a MacBook Air. I did tweak a few things on Fedora 44, but the latest Linux kernel already contains everything needed to run it smoothly.

The switch to European services #

I use Hetzner now for VPS and remote compute servers. It is cheaper than US-based hosting or computing. Also, I dropped GitHub for a self-hosted git server running Forgejo. GitHub has become an impressive pile of s*** over the last few years, and I don’t want Microsoft (or any company) to train their own products on my personal projects. For your information, that is literally their current policy for Copilot interaction data unless you opt out.

I also dropped Instapaper for a Wallabag instance, and switched from Apple Music to Deezer. I found out that Deezer’s recommendation algorithms work much better than Apple Music’s, which impressed me a lot. I also found Deezer’s UI more intuitive, which impressed me too.

Compared to most people, I don’t use OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or xAI models. I consider those companies evil, and I don’t want to feed monsters with my own money, data, or time. For LLMs and Agents I use opencode as a container image, running on Podman. My opencode usage is mainly for doing searches on the web quickly, verifying sources, or being my rubber duck for some problems. I don’t use it for coding, because I don’t want to fall into a manager role for my personal projects. As for my professional projects, I dropped out of IT, so this solved that part. I use a small subscription to opencode go, and use open-weight models when I really need one. As their documentation explains, the models served through Go run with a zero-retention policy and are not trained on my data. Also, I consider open-weight models to be equal to US or European-based models (like Mistral ones), and less costly: a Mistral Pro subscription is around €18 (French VAT included), while I have equivalent resources for less than €10 a month on opencode. I would consider moving to Mistral if their services were better and their models more ethical.

If you are looking for European alternatives too, I would consider to follow that link.

Let’s talk about ebooks #

I buy less and less physical books every year. This is the consequence of the Amazon Kindle Scribe I bought earlier this year. I use it in Airplane mode, so that it doesn’t sync with Amazon servers, except when a system update is needed or interesting. I use Calibre to manage my ebooks library, and buy mostly DRM-free ebooks, borrow digital books from my local city library, or, if I really need to, buy the ebook and remove the DRM afterward. I am not providing sources for those tools, as they can be considered harmful for several reasons, but I encourage anyone to move from license-use to product-use.
Also, I encourage everyone to buy more books and to pirate less (except if you don’t find the book anymore, of course), as authors are strongly impacted by the non-ethical free-use of their works by Big Tech: Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle with the authors whose books it downloaded from pirate libraries to train Claude, the largest copyright settlement in US history, worth at least $3,000 per title.

About software #

I’ve almost entirely replaced VSCodium with neovim. I still have bad habits with some neovim plugins (like dap), so when I get frustrated I switch to VSCodium while I debug my software. I still depend on LazyVim, but I plan to switch completely to a hand-written configuration as soon as I have enough courage to learn more about the foundations of neovim.

I still use alacritty as my main terminal. Some people encouraged me to switch to Ghostty but I don’t see the point of switching to another opinionated terminal if I don’t have any issue with my current one.

I use Podman to build my container images and manage them. No docker since a while, and never wanted to switch back.

For ebooks synchronization, as I said earlier, I use Calibre, which an excellent tool to manage my Kindle device and its library.

I dropped most social networks, and got back to RSS feeds to follow interesting people. I use FreshRSS to keep track of my feeds, and I connect this instance to FeedFlow and NetNewsWire (on my iPhone only). For audiobooks and podcasts I use an Audiobookshelf instance, and synchronize my audiobooks and podcasts through this solution. I try to buy mainly DRM-free audiobooks, from Libro.fm or LibriVox for the public-domain classics, as Audible and others prefer to lock their users into proprietary solutions (and licences).

For file hosting I switched from Google Drive to Proton Drive, which is a great European-based alternative.

About team collaboration and notes I use AnyType, which is an open-source and P2P alternative to Notion, like Obsidian. It syncs really well, and I can use it safely on both my Linux laptop and iPhone.

Finally, for backups, I use Pika Backup, which reminds me a lot about how Apple’s Time Machine is (spoiler: simple, and great).

About programming #

I still use Swift, Python and the C programming language for my personal projects.
I tried Odin and Zig, which I enjoyed a lot, but I will wait for their stable releases.

I really enjoy programming in Swift, and I strongly encourage anyone looking for a new programming language to learn to take a look at it.
The Swift community is also really nice to talk with.

As I said earlier, I dropped IT in my professional life. Since the engineering shift with “AI” (I discussed that shift in The mud and the mind and The five pillars of the post-AI interview), I don’t enjoy trading my brain, quality and safety for yet more automated slop. I prefer to focus more on research and education, especially about how people perceive bias, fairness and confidence towards modern AI/ML algorithms. And to people still thinking “but AI is not trading safety for slop!”, I wonder how concerned you are that even the creators of those tools took months to discover what their own agents had done. So, please, don’t talk to me about “safe AI” yet.

Let’s keep physical #

I still use paper and pen every day. It helps me to focus, and I have a color-code to keep my ideas and TODO list up to date. I only use 3 pens: a red one, a green one, and a blue one. All have an eraser, as I don’t like to cross out things on paper. Red is for important things, or questions I need to answer. If I have a question, I keep two lines after the question in order to answer it as soon as I have the answer. If this is an important thing to do, I draw a green check at the left once the task has been done. Blue is for non-important things, like meetings I had, summaries of meetings, etc. Green is for solutions: drawing check marks, writing brilliant ideas I had, or solutions / answers I got based on a Red question.

Maintaining technology-free tools is really important, mainly to keep the brain working without getting drained by notifications, but also to focus on one thing at a time instead of an entire world. Remember that even the best ereader, or ewriter, contains way more features than a simple notebook and a pen.

Also, as a reminder, your life doesn’t need to be stored in the cloud.

A note for the future #

All the US things, and the fact that Big Tech has a tendency to lick the feet of the creep that runs the US right now, from the million-dollar donations to the inauguration to how well the charm offensive paid off, made me think about my dependency on US services. I dropped most of my US-based solutions and products for European-based ones, except YouTube and my smartphone. European products are actually a great alternative, and they work great on multiple devices. The main issue with those is that they are mainly word of mouth instead of spreading like US products do.