Generic
📱 Phone: Fairphone 4 with Android. Apps gotten via Google Play or F-droid.
🖥️ Computer: running Linux Mint, Cinnamon Edition.
📺 Television: Freebox Pop.
🌐 Browser: Firefox, of course.
🔐 Password Management: Bitwarden.
🔍 Search: Kagi.
⌨ Keyboard: AZERTY norme AFNOR is so, so much better than regular AZERTY!
⌨️ Blogging: WordPress.org, which is very usable on mobile web too, with a bunch of plugins.
Communications
📨 Mail Client: FastMail is indie, has no ads, and is safer-than-most without being fully privacy oriented. I was looking for an independent email client that had a web version and a decent mobile app and I’m really happy with this one. I also use K-9 mail (Android) and Thunderbird specifically for Wikimedia emails.
📮 Mail Server: Whatever my friend set up for me when he helped me create my domains, so probably OBH.
🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Obsidian and my phone’s contacts.
💬 Chat: Through Beeper, I federate my messages from Discord, WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal, Telegram, SMS, Matrix and Messenger. It’s pretty cool. My preference, in order, is Signal > WhatsApp > Email > SMS > everything else. One thing that makes me happy with Beeper is that I don’t have to open the god-forsaken apps that Discord and Telegram are. I hate them!
Personal organization
📝 Notes: Obsidian all the way.
✅ To-Do: I was using Todoist even before it got an Obsidian integration!
📆 Calendar: FastMail, synced through DAVx5 with Google Calendar for my phone and for managing my work calendar.
📁 Cloud File Storage: Nextcloud.
📑 Read It Later: Starred on Inoreader. I’ve stopped using Push to Kindle due to enshittification, but they’re still great for things that won’t require highlighting (eg. fanfiction).
📜 Word Processing: Obsidian. Sometimes Sublime Text.
📄 PDF reader: FoxIt Reader.
Media
📷 Photo Management: Nextcloud with Les Pas. I have my own cloud and create one album per month. Duplicate or bad photos go to the trash. What I’ll remember fondly in 10 years when looking at photos goes into the album. Decent quality photos that don’t hold emotional value go on Wikimedia Commons and then get trashed, so that I can revisit them and they can be used but I can focus on photos of my loved ones or of really special events.
🎵 Music: more often than not, a good old CD player in my living room. On my computer, I use the Strawberry offline player.
📚 Reading: on a Kindle Paperwhite (haven’t found a non-Amazon one more suited to my needs), through Anna’s Archive or legit websites, tracked on The Storygraph. Offline: my city’s library network, and some local indie bookshops.
🎤 Podcasts: Podcast Addict.
News
📖 RSS: Inoreader. I really like being able to create my own curated RSS feeds, and the YouTube integration, which means I never open YouTube for discovery, I just look at what my fave creators have recently posted.
📰 News: all via Inoreader. In terms of mainstream media I have a subscription Le Monde, Les Jours, Socialter and Libération. I also read the Portail des médias indépendants, and got the 25€ per year BNF access to Europresse for others (a lifesaver for Wikipedia references). I also share a couple’s account on L’Équipe − somehow this is a real thing and it fills me with joy. I’ve talked about all this in this post: Improving our relationship to news.
🔖 Bookmarks: depends on what you mean by bookmarks. Long-form reading notes go into Obsidian (although I sometimes post them on my blog if they’re worth it), some stuff goes into my website as a « Like » (or, more often, in my monthly reviews), and the frequently-used resources go into my Firefox bookmarks.
Health & Home
🛒 Shopping Lists: Todoist.
🍴 Meal Monitoring: LoseIt.
💰 Personal Finance: Linxo.
🩸 Hormonal cycle tracker: Clue. Drip is missing two of the three features I want. Drip and Clue are the only apps I’ve found that don’t aggressively gender me in the feminine and/or really focus on pregnancy. I’m not attached to Clue but simply haven’t found anything that covers my needs yet.