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My personnal setup & recommendations

This post is about my software & hardware setup. This is a more personnal post than other content on this website.

Choosing the right tools for your usage and your intimacy is important, even more in the current timeline where important governments want to apply mass surveillance.

Computer & OS

In the last few months, I decided to change my computer, my old one was starting to be slow, loose all of its battery, and worse of all, in many cases would be unusable with many docker containers because out of memory.

After finding a good deal, I also decided to go with no pre-installed OS (thanks lenovo for proposing this btw), after years of being on Windows (in fact, from xp to 11) I made the choice to go on Linux. After all, I used alot WSL to work so Linux seemed like a better choice overrall.

Here come the problem, there is probably as many Linux distributions as physically possible, thus comes the great question “Which one should I choose?”.

Let’s look at my profile :

  • I’m a student
  • I’m used to Linux (I’m not afraid to go in cmd)
  • I don’t specifically play games nor use Adobe software
  • I want something that 99% of the time works, is lightweight and used enough to have actual solutions to problems

The only distribution I knew whas Ubuntu, the most used Linux distro out there, but still, I never had an experience close to “okay” with it. So, taking my profile in account, I went with Fedora.

It checks all the boxes, is very fast, lightweight and just works 99% of the time especially if you’re not afraid to open the cmd from time to time to install some softwares.

After searching I also made a kind of “simple” recommendation list depending on the needs of peoples, based on what I found (not my experience) :

  • For gaming : bazzite (or steamOS for the steam deck)
  • For very beginners afraid of using the cmd : Linux Mint
  • For peoples who aren’t afraid of sometimes using the cmd : Fedora
  • For peoples who like customization : Arch
  • For peoples at risk, like a whistleblower : QubesOS

As for my hardware, with a cheap option I found a lenovo thinkpad which is powerful, has alot of memory and disk, can be repaired and upgraded, this is a long term choice and also the choice of a computer on which I’m not afraid to install Linux with the risk of seeing my drivers disapear and impossible to re-install like on my older Huawei laptop.

Phone

For my phone, I recently made the choice of changing after my old phone started getting very slow thanks to the updates, which made me learn to never buy a samsung phone ever again especially if it’s not the high end.

I made the choice to buy a used Google Pixel, which ended up being still very fast on Pixel OS. If it ever becomes slow or Google take very bad decision especially on the privacy point of view, I can always switch to either Lineage OS or for privacy, Graphene OS.

This means, the phone I buy actually belongs to me and does not become worse overtime because the company wants me to change. Great.

Software

Now, let’s talk about software.

This is a very important part of the setup, since I’m on Linux, some software (like Adobe’s 🙃) don’t work on it or work very poorly. Also, even before switching, I got tired of all these cloud / web apps which are generally bad.

Dev

For development, I mostly use the very classical VS Code which works for 99% of my work. I generally hate software which does too much behind the scenes. I hate even more autocompletion, if I want an AI, I open a small page / window otherwise i’m writing.

For containers, like anyone, I use docker, mainly because it’s the most used and it means I don’t take the risk of losing time to make a container from school work because of compatibility issues if I used something else (like podman).

Other stuff

For my note taking in school and generally, I prefer to use Obsidian, it’s a file based software which is fairly lightweight, uses Markdown properly, is not bloated and does not force you to sync like Notion. Meaning, it’s simply a note taking software which does more than enougn, doesn’t send you in the rabbithole of taking 1 week to make a beauthiful board that you will never actually use and which is not very efficient, all that to be locked out of your own notes the second Notion’s servers are down.

Obsidian is fully free, you can support them, today the only problem I have with it is it’s not open source.

For image processing, since I can’t use Adobe’s Lightroom on this pc, I’m trying many softwares :

  • Affinity
  • RapidRaw
  • DarkTable
  • And the recent Davinci Resolve 21

For now, I still prefer to use Lightroom on my windows pc though.

The browser is very important, today my preference is on Zen, but some websites don’t work on firefox which Zen is based on, in this case I use helium. A very simple example I have is the google webstore not working on Zen but working on Helium.

This is most of the stuff that I find very good while most peoples (imo) either miss the point of (for example the whole “Obsidian second brain” thing which is nothing more than marketting) or don’t really know about, as for the rest here are some small things I will not go into detail but would recommend :

  • Do not use a private password manager like Apple’s or Google’s or whatever -> use something that doesn’t tie you to a brand.
  • Don’t look into the very popular VPNs if you want some kind of privacy
  • If you want to have crypto currencies, make sure to buy a cold wallet and if possible don’t buy it on a website
  • Use real privacy focused messenger apps (not like WhatsApp)
  • As much as possible use different email addresses
    • I’d recommand ProtonMail as your “base” email and then aliases (look at SimpleLogin btw)
    • Keep your “already leaked” email for official purposes
  • Always have A2f activated with an application and not your phone number
  • If possible use a non trackable phone number (but keep in mind it’s very costly and there are very few providers which will not ask for your identity)
  • Do not use cloud sync for your photos and sensitive data, even if it’s very unlikely that tomorrow Google or Apple will get hacked at the system level, your account can always be hacked.

Next steps

I now plan on working towards self-hosting some / most of the applications I use, for exemple, self-host my drive, some tools like overleaf, some distant VMs to be able to work on any device, even my tablet, and much more.

Unfortunately, it is for now almost impossible to do because of the current prices for memory and drives (SSD & HDD), which would make the operation too costly for me to currently consider it.

Things I’d like

There are few things I’d like to improve my setup.

First, I think it might become closer to reality, but in my opinion, we need Google to make a tab for android, which would mean that Google would probably develop software to make android tabs more interesting, but also means it would be one of the few tabs where we can change the android on it (switch to Lineage or Graphene).

Secondly, I really hope we’ll get more efficient processors on laptopts other than Apple, with a proper support for ARM. I’m also thinking of “AI” pcs becoming more affordable which means, it would become possible to selfhost LLMs without spending too much.

Obviously, this post will evolve in time.