Pete Jones

What I use

Development environment:

  • Terminal emulator: Konsole
  • Text editor: Neovim
  • Monospace font: Azeret Mono

Laptop (used for both work and personal):

  • Operating system: Fedora
  • Desktop environment: KDE Plasma

Software for academics

I use LibreOffice as my office suite for word processor and spreadsheet documents. It's great and does everything I need.

I use Zotero as my reference manager, and I read all of my academic PDFs within Zotero. The LibreOffice integration works great. My general workflow is to import via the browser extension where possible. When the extension can't import the PDF for some reason, I download it and then use ZotMoov to rename and move it.

My research lab uses a Zulip server for all its communications, and it's a fantastic piece of software. It's hosted on a university-managed virtual machine, and our colleagues in research computing helped us to set it up.

Common software

On desktop, I use Zen as my web browser, after years of Firefox. It's a Firefox fork, and you can use Mozilla's Sync to bring your extensions (uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger are essentials!) and bookmarks. This is great for me because I like to send tabs between mobile and desktop, and it keeps setup quick on a new machine. In truth, it's not uncommon for updates to cause bugs or regressions, but it's updated so frequently that they don't usually last long. Zen is desktop-only, so I use Firefox on mobile.

I use Thunderbird as my email client, alongside Proton Mail Bridge (I use Proton Mail for all my email stuff, and my custom domains go through Proton). On mobile, I just use the Proton Mail app.

I'm not a big note-taker, but I use Joplin for notes, which offers a simple Markdown-based editing experience. I have it synced via Nextcloud so I can use Joplin's clients across desktop and mobile devices and it all stays synced. I used to include recipes in my notes app, but I switched to using an amazing website called RecipeSage which offers a free account on a public server (or it can be self-hosted).

For social media, I use Mastodon, usually via the Tokodon client on desktop or the Tusky client on mobile. Tokodon is great but can be a bit unreliable so I sometimes just use the web interface. I also use Bookwyrm for tracking my reading and mainting a TBR list etc. It's basically an open source ActivityPub alternative to Goodreads. My account is on the Bookrastinating instance if anyone wants to connect there.

Self-hosted software

I have a Nextcloud server which is managed through Hetzner's "Storage Share" product. It's really cheap and reliable and Nextcloud has an amazing plugin ecosystem which means that you get a bunch of extras on top of its file storage. For example, I use Nextcloud News as an RSS feed aggregator, Nextcloud Deck as a kanban board task manager, and Nextcloud Memories as a photo client.

I run a Jellyfin media (primarily film and TV) server on a refurbished HP EliteDesk that I picked up cheap from Best Buy. When I had an ISP that allowed port forwarding, I served it over the web using Caddy as reverse proxy.

I also run a Navidrome music server via PikaPods. I could run it through Jellyfin, which is great for music libraries too, but my home internet setup is not very reliable and I listen to music more often than I watch films and TV, so I want it to be always available and accessible over the web. PikaPods is a bit limited compared to a VPS, but it's cheap and I like its payment model which supports open source developers. My experience with it has been really good.

For Jellyfin, I just use either the web client or the mobile/desktop clients provided by the project - all of them are great.

Navidrome has a Subsonic-compatible API, so you can use any client that uses that API with it. On desktop, I use Aonsoku which has by far the best user interface IMO and is pretty reliable. On mobile, I use Tempo, which I love.

Other recommendations

There is an amazing open source app called GadgetBridge which provides a way to connect and sync with various wearable devices without connecting to any veendor apps or online services. I use it with an Honor Band 6, which allows me to get all the usual smartwatch functions (notifications, weather, step counting, heart rate monitoring, media controls etc) without any data ever being sent to any third party; it's all stored locally.

I also use Pocket Casts as my podcast app of choice. Surprisingly, it is actually open source. Some day I might move to AntennaPod using Nextcloud's Gpodder plugin for sync, but for now I'm very happy with Pocket Casts.

For gaming, I use Lutris on both my laptop and my Steam Deck. It's great for integrating game libraries scattered across multiple storefronts (GOG, Steam, etc).