software i use, part 2

2026-07-27

it's been a couple years. what's new?

i originally had planned to do a sequel post to the "Software I Use" article about two years after i published that one, just to see what changed. then another two years passed on top of that seemingly in the blink of an eye. whoops.

what's changed in myself

i think i've shifted attitudes towards software and computers overall.

when i was a teenager / just on the cusp of adulthood, i made heavy use of Notion, a general "productivity" / personal wiki site, originally inspired by a friend who had set up their own personal wiki on it. i did the same for a year or two -- first setting up all sorts of dashboards, launchpads, database tables, and so on and so forth. eventually i realized that while i was having fun setting them up, i wasn't actually using any of them. whenever it came time to jot down some actually new information i knew i would need later, i found myself making a plain text page called "notes" and throwing everything on there. i would tell myself i would come back in and neatly organize everything into this filing cabinet i had built, but never actually did. (or if i did, i would wind up making another plain-text page called "random notes" and move things from "notes" into there, because it was "more organized". air quotes on that last one.)

i mentioned before that the lack of the offline mode was what killed my love for Notion. the specific incident that occurred was a time where had my phone on me and needed to note down something to use just a little while later, like a ticket number. because the cell service was crap, i was sitting there watching an icon spin for a webpage to load so that i could accomplish something i could have done with a sharpie and the back of my hand. in this instance, i think the cart was leading the horse -- i was adding a technology to my life (an always online personal wiki) in search of a problem to fix (the need to note things down and remember them later), rather than trying to look at the problems i had and addressing them directly, technology or no.

i've grown an appreciation for offline things. if there's media i really like i try to get physical copies of it. i started collecting a rolodex of furry friends. there's more things on my walls.

what's changed in software

maybe we're doomed to repeat tech bubbles forever until the collapse of capitalism or the heat death of the universe. i don't know. but in recent years the amount of software i've tried to avoid has far, far outpaced the amount of software i try to engage with. i'll give you two letters to guess as to why.

what's changed since last time

i stopped using Musicbee to manage my music, because getting everything going under Linux proved to be too much of a pain in the butt. turns out, "i must boot a VM and consult personal multi-step playbooks to add a song to my library" means that i stopped adding songs to my library. i now use Beets, and while i don't love the fact that its file organization methodology is hard-coded, it suits my needs. on Android, i switched out Shuttle+ for Pulsar, but i can't exactly remember why. possibly due to gapless playback breaking for some reason.

little else has changed. Syncthing and Obsidian still make the best note-taking solution i've used. i have tried out many plugins on Obsidian, but wind up removing them for one reason or another. the one thing i found myself surprised by is how much i like Obsidian's canvas feature, in that it became the home of all the random one-off, one-liner notes as well as my daily to-do list.

what's actually new

finally: this software list has a list of software! this time around, i'm also going to be tossing in things like browser extensions and other random things i think more people should have on their radar.

Librewolf

Librewolf is a fork of Firefox that is designed to be hardened for privacy and security first. as a result, the default options are geared toward sacrificing features that compromise security. by default, it:

deletes cookies and site data on close (signing you out of all sites until you set an exception for them)
disables some useful-on-occasion things like WebGL and DRM decoders
enables ResistFingerprinting (RFP), which forces light theme and spoofs your time zone

while i appreciate this level of security hardening, i only want some of these, some of the time. i had to set up exceptions for all the sites i want to stay on / use WebGL on, and disabled RFP because i like dark themes. one might reasonably ask: why use Librewolf if i'm going to disable its security hardening? well, because i'm trying to avoid crap elsewhere from Mozilla:

no AI garbage
no Pocket extension (i never used it)
no Mozilla VPN pop-ups
no random clutter / ads from the home and new tab pages

on Android i use Fennec, which is just Firefox for Android with all the branding and proprietary stuff stripped out.

BetterDiscord and Aliucord for Discord

BetterDiscord is a mod of the desktop client and Aliucord is a mod of the old Kotlin Android client. both introduce plugin ecosystems to Discord. both have plugins that let me send """nitro-only""" emotes as image links (because fuck paying three bucks a month for the *privilege* of sending a funny jpeg to my friends).

they also work well at hiding all the ads and upsells and general crap that has slowly grown to fill the Discord interface over the years. (although BetterDiscord on desktop sneaks through quite a bit.) there are other niceties, such as plugins on mobile to double-tap-to-edit or double-tap-to-reply.

Aliucord in particular is neat because it's a revival of the legacy Kotlin UI instead of the bloated and laggy React Native interface introduced in August 2022. the Aliucord team has been updating the application to match the backend changes from upstream, an effort i greatly appreciate.

Deskflow

okay so. dear gods. Synergy is the original software made by the company Symless, and while it was paid, you could compile builds from source for yourself for free, at least throughout the 1.X versions (called Synergy Community Edition), and then they introduced a 2.X in Nov 2017 that was primarily closed-source and required a constant internet connection and paid subscription, so community developers forked the open 1.X codebase to make Barrier, but then the most active developers eventually decided to fork Barrier to make Input Leap, leaving Barrier unmaintained, but Input Leap never got an official release and maintainers recommended Barrier for general use until it did, right up until its github got archived as of yesterday, and while all that was happening Symless in the background creating Synergy 3.X out of Node.JS and Electron and React and Rust, except no none of that it's Go and Wails now, all wrapped around the original 1.X/Synergy Community Edition, because of course they are, and then they renamed 1.X/Synergy Community Edition to Deskflow and then they renamed themselves to Synergy.

anyway. Deskflow is a virtual KVM. you can use it to move your mouse and keyboard between computers, even across operating systems (!). i put it on my work computer and control both it and my personal computer without having to constantly unplug and replug a hub.

side article: Android

different platforms and operating systems will have different software. the structure and organization of the platform and operating system will inform what kinds of software are available. let's slander all the major os'es:

windows: the software is fine but you will be forced to switch back and forth between the mouse and keyboard constantly
macOS: you will pay $15 a month for a shitty ffmpeg wrapper that blew its load on polishing its UI and won't work on half your video files
linux: hope you like the terminal!!!!!
iOS: you will pay $10 a month to disable some of the ads, for each app
android: you will pay $10 a month to disable some of the ads, for each app. you could also install the good foss apps instead, but there's only three of them

shoutouts to playsearch for letting you specifically filter out apps with ads / apps with in-app purchases. honorable mentions to F-Droid for hosting FOSS apps, and Obtainium for all the rest not on F-Droid.

lightning round: every app i paid money for

i have to really like an app to buy it off the app store, so this is all the ones where i feel the cost was absolutely worth it. several of these have a free version that is near fully-featured

MiXplorer Silver: file browser
Simple Gallery Pro: image gallery
NFC Tools Pro: NFC chip reader and writer
Just Run: running timer and C25K tracker
Nova Launcher Prime: the best app launcher for 10+ years now

games get their own section:

Slay the Spire: solid deckbuilder
Riptide GP2: just a fun jet ski racing game
holedown: chill strategy-brickbreaker

side article 2: browser extensions

gee how come your mom lets you have TWO side articles

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