Neil Brown shares his 2026 update on running decoded.legal, a UK law firm, entirely on Free software. He continues using Debian with GNOME on a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6, though hardware issues with USB-C ports may force a replacement. Key tools include Thunderbird for email, ikhal for calendar, LibreOffice for documents, and reveal.js for presentations.
He relies on vimwiki for knowledge management, LUKS for disk encryption, and Cryptomator for synced files. On the web, he uses Firefox or links, and schedules Mastodon posts via cron scripts. For PDFs, he uses evince, Xournal++, and PDFarranger.
Password management is handled by Bitwarden with a vaultwarden server and YubiKeys. He prefers terminal-based tools for their efficiency and minimal distractions, using espanso for text expansion and Apostrophe for Markdown editing. Paperless-ngx handles document scanning, and a FOSS web UI manages Brother label printing.
Despite some annoyances, like Thunderbird’s calendar bugs, Brown remains committed to Free software for both client and server operations.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing