paritybit.ca

What I Use

Last Updated: 2024-10-20

The software and hardware I use. Now with 30% more snark!

This is an updated page detailing what I use now, which has significantly diverged from what I used before. If you’re curious what my setup used to be like, see the old uses page.

Software

I have used a wide variety of operating systems (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, 9Front, many Linux distributions, MacOS, Windows, etc.), but these days I’m just running Ubuntu everywhere except on my mail/webserver (OpenBSD is still the best tool for the job there).

A screenshot of an Ubuntu 24.04 desktop with nothing open. The desktop is in dark mode.
The Ubuntu 24.04 desktop.
A screenshot of an open Sublime Merge window showing a change just made to my Fenen Feed Reader project. Behind this window is the Sublime Text window, and you can see several other open applications in the dock such as Thunderbird, Firefox, and KeepassXC.
Doing work on my computer instead of working on my computer.

I got tired of systems that require a lot of plumbing; where things often just don’t work well at all or without putting in a lot of effort. I don’t want to choose every little bit of my desktop environment anymore, I don’t want to configure my OS using some weird, poorly-documented domain-specific-language, and I don’t care to have some “minimalist” system or be like the kind of people who care how many packages they have installed or that their system is using *gasp* 1G of RAM instead of 150M after a fresh startup. I want stuff to Just Work™ so I can get on with what I need to do and go back to doing things in my life that don’t involve touching computers all the time.

Why Ubuntu in particular? Well, I like the Ubuntu desktop more than any of the other desktops currently available (yes, I have tried your favorite desktop and/or window manager) and the system is put together quite well such that everything Just Works™. No, I’m not interested in using plain Debian; I want a system that’s actually been put together with care and attention, not just a collection of packages offered as an OS.

“But what about the snaps!?”, I hear you cry. My answer is simple: I don’t care. They work, the auto-update mechanism is quite nice, and they’re far, far simpler than Flatpaks. I have Firefox, Thunderbird, and Steam all installed as Snaps and I haven’t had any issues. Plus, new to Ubuntu 24.10 is an experimental security panel that makes it easy to manage the permissions given to various Snaps. Compared to whatever the heck is going on in Flatpak-land, snaps are actually pretty alright.

You’ll find a recurring theme with the things I’ve switched to using: I don’t want to have to spend half my lifetime configuring every little thing of every little program, I don’t want to rely on downloading three million blobs from GitHub just to make my text editor functional, and I just want stuff to be pleasant to use instead of making me feel like I’m forcibly contorting myself to fit some weird standard of software minimalism or “computing purity”.

All this time spent “optimizing my productivity”, chasing after some kind of workflow nirvana, or otherwise poking and prodding at my computer to achieve such meaningless, minuscule performance gains is wasted time and is frankly exhausting to continuously be thinking about when I have better things I could be doing with my life.

Can you tell I’ve kind of become fed up with *gestures broadly* all this? Anyways, on with the list of softed wares:

Shell

I use the fish shell for its superior tab completion and autosuggestion capabilities. It has a pretty decent scripting language syntax and doesn’t require any configuration to be very usable out of the box.

Text Editor

Right now I’m trying out Sublime Text along with Sublime Merge as an alternative to Neovim, which I used quite heavily before getting kind of fed up with its ecosystem. If this sticks, expect a blog post about it in the future.

Web Browser

Despite my many misgivings and grievances with Mozilla, Firefox is still my main web browser. I have the uBlock Origin, Cookie AutoDelete, and I Still Don’t Care About Cookies extensions installed, and I make the following about:config changes:

I also use Pocket to save articles for reading later on my Kobo e-reader. Plus, since I made a Mozilla Account to use pocket I’ve found it convenient for setting up Firefox on a new system with less effort and it was helpful to sync browser state or to send tabs back and forth when I was using multiple computers at the same time.

E-Mail Client

My email client is Thunderbird because it Just Works™ for everything I need with very little configuration needed.

RSS Client

My RSS client is fenen which is a terminal-based reader with a mail(1)-like interface that I wrote myself to fit my needs. Surprise! It also requires no configuration to be usable.

Password Manager

My password manager is KeepassXC because I wanted something fully offline but with a decent enough interface.

Dotfiles

I keep my dotfiles in a git repository for easy deployment and updating, but there really isn’t much there anymore (check the OpenBSD branch if you want to see configuration for the system I used to use).

Miscellaneous

Everything else (image viewer, video player, music player, file manager, whatever) is whatever is provided by a regular Ubuntu installation. They all work well enough.

Main Computer

A Dell XPS 13 9380 open and on, displaying a blog post in vim in the terminal.

I use a Dell XPS 13 9380 with an Intel i7-8665U, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe SSD, and a 13.3” 1080p touchscreen display as my sole general purpose computer.

This laptop also fit my requirements for a laptop almost perfectly and was not terribly expensive, costing about CA$650 in total (US$472/445€ as of 2023-03-16) including a replacement battery. When using Ubuntu, I have zero complaints with this computer.

I previously used a Thinkpad T440s followed by a T420s, but, after then using a 2009 MacBook Pro and then an old 12” Toshiba netbook, I really can’t see myself going back to bigger screens and bulkier form factors.

For the past few years I’ve desired simplifying my general purpose computing setup from a beefy desktop computer plus a portable laptop down to just a laptop that I can use with a dock. Not having to worry about file synchronization and being able to just take my computer anywhere with me while maintaining my open windows and running programs is super convenient.

I also don’t need all that much power for the things I do except when it comes to video games (and Factorio is perfectly playable at 60FPS on this laptop, so what else does anyone need anyways?). This whole setup—which includes the monitor because it’s powered by the laptop—draws an average of about 20-25W as opposed to my desktop which draws an average of about 130-150W, even when mostly idle. To put this into numbers my wallet can understand: let’s assume 150W for the desktop and 25W for the laptop setups respectively, a daily power-on time of 8 hours, and an electricity cost of 0.38€/kWh. In one year, the desktop would use 438kWh and the laptop only 73kWh corresponding to a yearly electricity cost of 166.44€ for the desktop and 27.74€ for the laptop. Given I use my desktop occasionally for gaming, we can conservatively round up a new yearly power draw of about 100kWh for my whole computing setup, which would cost 38€/year—a savings of 128.44€ per year or 10.70€ per month. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that my laptop computing setup could now be powered by a balcony solar panel and a few LiFePo4 batteries.

Peripherals

For an external display when docked, I use an LG Gram +view 16” portable monitor, mounted on a monitor arm via a VIVO Mount-UVM02 tablet holder. This display is compact, well-built, power-efficient, and has a crisp 2560x1600 (16:10) resolution, which is a combination of specifications that’s exceedingly difficult to find for desktop monitors which tend to be either too large, too wide, too low-resolution, or too expensive.

My keyboard is an HHKB Professional 2 (Black) and I use a Logitech MX Ergo wireless trackball mouse. I connect the mouse to my computer via a Logitech Unifying Receiver plugged into the back of the keyboard so that it’s easy to switch the peripherals to my desktop computer using a USB switch.

My headphones are Logitech Zone Vibe 100 Bluetooth headphones. I previously used wired “Hi-Fi” headphones (Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 250 Ohm) and they do indeed have better sound quality, but the convenience of a wireless setup is a trade-off I’m willing to make. I also sometimes use a Bose SoundLink Mini II as a speaker.

For speaking, I have a Blue Snowball Ice USB microphone which I got sometime in 2017, before I knew anything about audio. It will be replaced with something better when it breaks or when I decide the world needs another podcast.

My webcam, for the rare occasions that I need one, is a Logitech C920. It’s cheap and cheerful and does the job well enough.

Desktop Computer / “Gaming Console”

My previously-main-computer-turned-gaming-console is a custom-built PC with the following specs:

PCPartPicker build list.

When this was my primary computer, it ran ElementaryOS. Now it’s running Windows 10 LTSC and stays powered off most of the time.

I use the same peripherals with this computer as with my laptop. The display (the same one I use with my laptop) is connected to my desktop’s GPU using a surplus Dell DP alt mode PCIe card. I also have a Sennheiser BTD600 Bluetooth USB Dongle for my headphones.

My Ideal Hardware

I have reached my ideal hardware setup. A laptop as my only general purpose computer with a more powerful system for gaming plus a very pleasant set of peripherals is really all I need. I wanted my computing to be as relatively uncomplicated as possible, and I think I've just about reached that goal.

A not-very-urgent change I would eventually like to make is to switch to a dock that supports USB-C display output, since then I could dock my laptop with one cable instead of two, but, yeah, that's not really important.

Perhaps in the future if there's a laptop featuring a chip with a good enough integrated GPU (or a power-efficient separate GPU), I could even get rid of my desktop system altogether. I'm not keeping my fingers crossed for that though, especially since I hope to continue using my current laptop until at least 2030.

(I could get an external GPU enclosure but those are quite expensive and I'd be limited by the speed of the Thunderbolt 3 ports on my laptop.)

Phone

I have an iPhone 12 mini with 64GB of storage which I purchased second-hand for 361€. I like small phones.

Also, my phone is just an appliance to me. It takes good pictures, it holds a digital copy of my train tickets, it lets me look things up, communicate with friends and family, and navigate while on the go, and it opens DHL Packstations for me. I’m not a power user and I don’t keep anything important or valuable on it.

I also use the greyscale screen filter at about 50%; not for reducing screen addiction, but rather because I prefer the aesthetic and find the normal display a bit too stimulating.

I previously had an iPhone X that was given to me for free by a family member but it developed an issue with phantom touch screen input making the phone intermittently and unpredictably unusable. It needed to be replaced.

Prior to the iPhone X I had an iPhone 6 that was given to me for free by a family friend which is still usable except for a lack of app compatibility (specifically public transit and messaging apps).

Before that I had an ASUS Zenfone 2 Laser that I purchased new for C$300 in 2015. It was (stuck) running LineageOS with Android 8.1 and I primarily replaced it because its original battery failed and then the replacement battery I bought for it failed within a year. Turns out, I like iOS more anyways.

My Ideal Phone

Honestly my ideal phone would be no phone. I would switch to using a physical TAN generator for authorising bank transfers and use a physical TOTP token generator for two-factor authentication. I would print my train tickets out and call my family using a W48.

Unfortunately there's just a lot of convenience in having a smartphone in modern society. Not like "oh it's so convenient that I can keep up with my friends at all times or send and receive emails from anywhere", but more like being able to buy a train ticket as I'm stepping onto a train or having a map of the whole world in my pocket so I can figure out where I am in a foreign city or being able to redirect packages to a no-contact pickup station so that I don't have to be home to receive a package and can pick it up at any time.

My only issue, really, is that I cannot stand the size of modern smartphones. I have no idea what I'll get when my current phone breaks and the last iPhone mini goes out of support. I have no interest in FOSS phone jank, and nobody seems to be interested in making a stripped-down-yet-still-functional mini phone so I have no clue. Hopefully enough people (especially those pesky influencers) complain about the death of the small phone enough for someone to come around and make something worth buying.

E-Reader

I use a Kobo Clara HD with the SleepCover and stock interface (I tried koreader but didn’t like it). It serves my needs well, is easy to dump books onto and get highlights off of, and can also browse text-heavy websites decently well. The integration with Pocket is also very useful, since I often find myself wanting to read long-form blog posts through a more suitable medium than a vertical computer screen. I like how hackable and relatively open Kobo’s products seem to be even though I don’t take advantage of that at all.

Homelab

My email server and website are hosted on a VM with 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, and a 50GB HDD running OpenBSD and hosted at OpenBSD Amsterdam. It costs 4,33€/mo plus a mandatory 1,25€/mo donation to the OpenBSD Foundation, paid yearly. It’s a pretty good deal in my opinion (and a clever way to support OpenBSD development).

As a Homelab (for running non-production stuff I want to experiment with such as rrdtool, Docker, or Owncast), I have a Minisforum UN100L with the following specifications:

It gets the job done nicely, quietly, and draws something like 2-3W in total under normal loads. I got it on pre-sale for 229€, which was not much more expensive than the recent generations of used Dell or HP Micro machines with comparable power idle power draw but much worse efficiency under load.