So, what do we use? (brenetic)

We talk a good talk here at the Rebel Tech Alliance, but what do we actually use day to day?

I thought it would be good for me to share the apps and services that I use daily. Some I have used for many years, others I have only come to use more recently.

I will caveat this by saying that I am not in the open-source-or-go-home camp. I will happily search out an open source option, however sometimes the best option is indeed a proprietary product.

The people at Ente (an encrypted photos backup app) created a little site called PrivacyPack which is what I used to create the header image for this post. Go ahead and make your own.

Some of the above apps and services were arrived at via a multi step process. For example I only recently swapped to using Syncthing. This is used to sync folders and the files in them directly between devices - no need for a third party server to 'bounce off' and store in the middle. I spent many years using Resilio Sync which is a proprietary peer to peer system based off of the BitTorrent protocol. In my opinion it is a far superior file syncing tool to Syncthing in terms of performance and also in user experience. Honestly I think it's superior to Syncthing, but for now I will keep going.

Phone

I currently rock a Google Pixel 9a and I recently wrote about my experiences installing and using GrapheneOS so do go read that if you missed it.

Laptop OS

I have used Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems both professionally and personally throughout my life and Mac OS to this day feels like the most polished and intuitive system available. I have avoided installing the Liquid Glass version though 😆.

That being said, I have recently been trialing a flavour of Arch Linux on a 2015 Macbook Pro called Omarchy and I am enjoying it immensely. It has a very opinionated set of defaults and forgoes the use of a mouse as much as possible by leveraging a tiled windows management system. As a software engineer it suits me quite well. It also is almost immediately useful out of the box, which is a far cry from my very first attempts at installing Linux many moons ago.

It's creator, DHH, is somewhat controversial. I will leave you to {insert_your_search_engine_or_AI_of_choice_as_a_verb} him and make up your own minds.

Laptop

It does make me think that the next time I come to replace my laptop I will mostly likely get one which I can install Arch Linux (probably Omarchy). Perhaps something like a Framework or a Starlabs.

Here's the full list:

TL;DR. I came here for the summary

You can just do things.

Swapping away from the big tech providers of services did not happen overnight. The services they create are often, quite frankly, very good.

However the alternatives (open source or otherwise) have come a long way, often beating out the older incumbents, especially those who have begun leveraging ad based mechanisms which hinder the consumer user experiences significantly. And of course you get away from creepy tracking and start supporting ethical tech.

We publish a list of many alternatives on our main site. I encourage you to go and check them out and pick the ones that suit your needs the best. Just start with one.