My Setup (or, An Evolving Tale of Technological Terror)
Updated:
Computers were a mistake. Despite over thirty years of building, configuring, fixing, and progamming computers---including a decade of doing it professionally---I hate them. Hate them. I'm using the word "hate" here, about computers.
So, naturally, I've done the very sensible and rational thing, and filled my home and pockets with them.
Whatever.
These are the voyages of the Nerdship Jeff. Or, said another way, this is my current setup. Devices, operating systems, software. And when I say "current," I mean that I intend to update this thing as needed.
Think of this document as a warning. Or maybe even a threat.
I've broken this description down by device. I have two laptops, one smartphone, and one tablet. One laptop is my "daily driver," the other is sitting in a closet due to hardware flakery. My phone is the newest member of the family, replacing the potato I'd been carrying around for five and a half years. My tablet exists primarily to do all the things I would have done with my phone if it hadn't been a potato.
Yes. I paid hundreds of dollars for a tablet rather than go through the process of ordering a new phone, swapping SIM cards, and talking to a customer support representative. It turns out, the fear it would be so difficult to upgrade was only partially justified.
Primary Laptop
This is my main machine, the one I use most of the time, and it's front and center on my desk. It's a Dell XPS 17 9710 with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM. I think it's from 2021. I have an external monitor, a powered USB hub, and a "Hyper-X" gaming headset which is quite nice.
It's running Ubuntu 24.04. Every so often, I ask the Interwebs which Linux distribution is the most reliable and least annoying. For over a decade, Ubuntu is the most common answer to that question.
Despite what the purists might tell you, Linux has always been notoriously flaky on laptops, and this is still true today. Laptop hardware is often "special," with so many oddities and edge cases that it's really hard to write robust software against all the possible variations out there in the wild. I mean, the simple act of closing the lid while the machine is running? If you're running Windows or on a Mac, the machine probably does what you expect. If you're running Linux? Well...let's just say that simple act becomes an Adventure.
In my experience, Ubuntu is the least bad distribution when it comes to dealing with laptop hardware. Canonical, for all of their faults, seem to have figured out the right drivers, configs, and dead chickens to wave during install to give you a reasonably good chance of having working wi-fi and video after your first boot.
(You still shouldn't close the lid, though.)
I use GNU Emacs for absolutely everything I can. This includes writing and editing text, obviously, as well as hacking on source code. It also includes maintaining this site, reading and sending email, and managing my todo lists.
I can't stress enough how central to my digital world Emacs is. In particular, Org-mode is like a third hemisphere of my brain at this point.
I use Firefox as my browser on all of my devices. I can't say this will be true for much longer, given that Mozilla has spent the last couple of years speed-running their demise.
I use Calibre for managing ebooks, and GNOMEBoxes for virtualization so I can spin up specialized machines as the need arises.
I've used VirtualBox for years as my standard solution for getting a virtual machine up and running quickly, but it's not-entirely-FOSS and it's controlled by Oracle. Given that Larry Ellison (Oracle co-founder, executive chairman, and CTO) is all-in on total surveillance, I decided I'd rather not run their software.
GNOMEBoxes seems mostly fine, but I'm still very much getting used to it. I will say that it was harder to set up than VirtualBox, but it still took me only about ten minutes and two reboots. That's way less of a headache than I expected.
Secondary Laptop
This was my main system from early January 2025 to the begining of February, when I finally took the time to replace Windows with Linux on my main machine.
The hardware is a Dell XPS 15 9500 with a 500GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. It's from early 2020. It came fresh from the factory with some kind of hardware issue that my executive dysfunction prevented me from complaining about so I'm stuck with it. By January of 2025, the issues had grown more significant, so it's less "testing" machine and more "paperweight" at this point.
It's been sitting in a closet since I got my primary laptop where I want it.
Phone
This is a Samsung Galaxy A16 5G. I can't say I'm happy about that.
I only bought this because I was previously on an ancient LG phone running an ancient version of Android. If it wasn't part of a crypto-mining botnet, it's only because the crypto-miners felt bad enough for me already.
I wanted to replace it with a smartphone capable of running a purely FOSS and de-Googled Android version. Ideally, this would be a phone running open hardware as well, but I'd settle for just being able to swap my OS.
Well, it turns out the lowest price point of "phones which can run a vaguely-supported de-Googled OS" is about $500. You might be able to get something older for cheaper, but if you want a phone produced within the last three years? Not so much.
I'm only willing to throw about two hundred dollars at a phone, so I got this thing.
I barely run any software of note on it, aside from the usual phone, contacts, and calendar app---all deeply Googled. I did replace the browser with Firefox, though, which syncs quite nicely with my other systems.
One other app I should mention is Discord. It's very hard to overstate how deeply entrenched Discord is, especially among gamers. There just isn't a viable FOSS alternative if you want all of: ease of setup; ease of administration; ease of use; channelized text, audio, and video chat; and screen sharing. If you don't want to use Discord for these things, the only real option is to just not do those things.
I'm trying very hard to not want to do those things.
Tablet
A Samsung Galaxy Tab S8. When I bought it a couple of years ago it was the beefiest one available. And I bought it under the theory that if I had a kick-ass Android tablet, I could cheap out on any future phone purchases. So far, that's working out quite well!
I'm still looking into options with regards to the OS, though. I want to be running a FOSS Android that doesn't taste of Google. Sadly, I've turned up very few options, none of which I feel confident I could install without bricking it.
As far as I can tell, none of the obvious replacements support the device. It's looking very much like whatever remaining options I have boil down to: "You'll have to lobotomize it manually, hope you can find the right blobs, and maybe even spend days crosscompiling stuff. Good luck with that!"
I use the tablet extensively as an ebook reader, with all of Amazon Kindle, Google Play Books, Scribd, and Book Reader installed on it. My reading situation here is a giant mess, to be honest. I'm hoping to clean it up soon, with Book Reader (a FOSS app!) being my go-to, but I own so many ebooks through Amazon that...yeah, it's a process.
VLC should get a mention, here. I frequently shuttle movies over to the tablet from my computer and watch them while sitting on my bed and crocheting or whatever.