Lots of names, lots of products, lots of links: that is what this article is all about. Is this interesting for you personally? Find out for yourself. For me, it makes sense to give a short overview of my home setup before deep diving on specific tools: where does my data live, how do I communicate, which software do I use regularly?
This is a first overview, not an exhaustive list. I am focusing on the European and open-source apps I use in my daily routines and which I plan to look at in detail on this blog.
And yes, I also use Google Docs fairly often, simply because most people have access to it and you can collaborate on a document. But here I am only showing you my regularly used tools that come from Europe or are open source.
We host it ourselves
A year ago we started setting up our technical infrastructure at home. I rented my own server and we set up a small computer with plenty of storage in the home office.
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Matrix Server for communication, with the Element interface: an alternative to Slack and Teams. You can also invite other Matrix users whose accounts live on other servers into your rooms and chats.
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Nextcloud platform: known mostly for file storage and sharing, but it can do far more. I currently only use a fraction of it, but I want to add more, for instance an office variant. And if you work a lot with Markdown files like I do (important for LLMs), the built-in editor is well worth it, just as an aside.
These Nextcloud services are running for us at the moment:
- Storage: store and share files; also available on desktop and phone through the Nextcloud app
- Calendar: synced with Betterbird on my PC and Fossify on my phone
- Contacts: same setup as the calendar
- Music
- Time tracking
- Deck project management: I installed it, so far not very impressed
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Jitsi: an open-source video platform. The hosted version now belongs to a US company (8x8) and runs on American servers too. But the platform is well worth it for anyone who hosts it themselves.
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Vaultwarden with the Bitwarden interface: a password manager we use for sharing passwords securely with each other.
We run further systems on our infrastructure, but more on that another time.
I admit, not everyone can just set up a home server like that. I don’t want to suggest otherwise. But for a small amount of money these systems are also available in the public cloud, on European infrastructure. More on that soon!
A few cloud providers I use
- Tally: I need forms fairly often, not least for this blog. I really like using this product for that.
- Posteo with Betterbird as the email program: this is my main email provider, I have been a customer for over 10 years. Betterbird is an Outlook alternative and a fork of Thunderbird.
- Mistral: I work with the French AI regularly, even though Claude is my most frequently used assistant.
- Proton: even though most of my data lives on Nextcloud, I was curious what Proton has to offer, since they explicitly position themselves as an alternative to Google and Microsoft. I use the following of their products fairly often:
- Storage
- Office products
A few programs on my PC
- Ecosia: the browser is based on Chrome and uses the search algorithms of Microsoft and Google. You may not like any of that, but in my eyes the ecological goals of the Berlin startup are hard to dismiss.
- ShareX: an open-source screenshot tool (Windows only, unfortunately) that I can warmly recommend to anyone who often writes documentation or needs screenshots to present something.
- Audacity: for anyone in the need of editing audio files; a great open-source tool.
- NAPS2: an app for scans and OCR I used to rely on a lot, though the new possibilities of AI have made some of the features redundant.
Mobile (Android phone)
My phone setup is complex. Above, I already mentioned some of the tools I use. For instance, I pulled my calendar and contacts out of Google and deleted them there. But since Google is about to shut out alternative app stores like F-Droid, I have to take a step back and think about how to handle this. It will probably come down to two phones, one of them rooted, so I can keep using the apps I like. Banking and health insurance sadly don’t run on rooted phones.
I will definitely write more about this topic, at least about the apps that have worked well for me so far; and there are quite a few. But there is no room for that here.
That’s it for now. Let me know what you use! I am very curious about your experiences.