Current state of affairs

There is a lot to complain about in tech in 2025. We are inundated with SaaS, AI, subscription services, enshittification, planned obsolescence, and corporate overreach.

This year I want to make more progress towards eliminating these problems from my personal tech stack than I ever have before. And I’ve been trying for a long time! Yesterday I stumbled upon a backup of a long-defunct blog I started in 2014 which included a post with a similar title to this one. In it I wrote that one of the things I was looking forward to was “migrating away from Google and WhatsApp”. 10 years later, this goal is still very much a work in progress.

Google

I’ve limited my use of Google’s products and services a lot since 2014, but I’m still using:

• Google Assistant (no good alternative yet, but my new Home Assistant Voice device is showing promise)
• Google Maps (no good alternative yet)
• Google Calendar (there are good alternatives, but my wife and I rely heavily on its calendar-sharing features, so she would have to migrate with me)
• Google Keep (alternatives exist, but they are all missing something, like a native mobile app or voice assistant integration)
• A Google Pixel phone running stock Android (installing GrapheneOS is on my to-do list)
• YouTube (planning to log out follow my favourite channels via RSS instead)

WhatsApp

Almost everyone I know still uses WhatsApp. It is end-to-end encrypted, but it is still owned by Meta, and I’d love to stop taking part in lining Zuckerberg’s pockets. Maybe one day WhatsApp will be dethroned and all my friends and family will switch to a better alternative, but for now I’m stuck with it.

I’m not perfect and progress is slow

I admit there are some questionable choices mentioned in this post. There are functional, self-hostable, FOSS alternatives to many of the tools I use. In some cases, a better alternative is no alternative at all - staying away from screens is only a good thing. I’m working on that too. All I can do is slowly edge ever closer to my ideal setup.

My tech choice philosophy

I love free and open source software. If I can self-host it, even better. I’m not strictly against proprietary software, SaaS, cloud providers, or even subscriptions, provided the business behind it has reasonable pricing, a good product, a respectable track record, and does not egregiously violate my privacy. I don’t believe all American tech companies are evil, and I don’t believe all European tech companies are innocent.

TL;DR: If it doesn’t suck, I might use it.

The list 👍

Without further delay, here are my favourite tech choices of 2025 in no particular order.

Dumb phone + iPod

In an effort to be more present and develop a healthier relationship with screens, I’ve been (inconsistently) using a dumbed-down Pixel 3a with zero fun apps on it. It can send RCS messages, make calls, help me get from A to B with Google Maps, and take acceptable photos. The launcher is made unappealing by mLauncher and the screen is grayscale to make it less enticing to use. Sometimes using apps is unavoidable - this Pixel 3a is just about smart enough to pay for parking, call an Uber, check live bus times, or search for information online.

I’m still using my Pixel 6 some of the time, but I try to keep it shut away in a drawer rather than in my pocket. I’m off all social media except Reddit. I keep an eye on a few hobby-related subreddits via their RSS feeds, and have a patched version of Boost for Reddit with any buttons leading to brain rot feeds removed.

Eventually (maybe this year!) I’ll fully commit to using only one dumbed-down smartphone without any fun apps of any kind, or perhaps a true dumbphone like the Lightphone 3.

For music, I’ve started occasionally using an iPod running Rockbox. I’ve modded mine with 1TB flash storage, a new battery, and a new shell (which was a lot of fun!).

Beeper

While WhatsApp is my main chat dependency, I have contacts across a variety of chat apps including Telegram, Signal, Discord, Matrix, SMS/RCS, and LinkedIn. Beeper allows me to merge all of these into a single app. Their new-ish Android app is rock solid, and their new desktop app (now in beta) is showing real promise and is already a huge improvement over the old one.

Beeper contribute a lot of their code as open source, and rely on the Matrix protocol to function. This makes it a great platform to tinker with. I’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with baibot and other tools.

Message decryption

At some point along the way, Beeper has to decrypt and re-encrypt messages. Their own help page explains this quite clearly. One way to avoid giving them this responsibility is to self-host their chat bridges, which are all open source on GitHub. I might do this eventually, but they are working on end-to-end encrypted, on-device bridges to solve this problem permanently, so I’m reluctantly compromising until then.

Uncertain future

Meta could ban Beeper users out of the blue. Silver lining: one more reason to move away from WhatsApp altogether!

Beeper are a small company who could fail. If that happens, I can fall back on self-hosting my own Matrix bridges. Worst case scenario, I go back to using 6 different apps.

Hoarder

I have a complicated relationship with bookmarks. Organising them is a pain, I keep adding more of them, and I can’t seem to decide on a sensible place to put them all.

I recently deployed Hoarder to the Dell Optiplex 3060 mini PC I have running at home. It’s a “bookmark everything” app with a browser extension and mobile app which pretty much solves my bookmarks problem. Now everything goes to Hoarder, and Hoarder automatically archives and tags all my links to make them easy to find later.

For now, I’ve given it an OpenAI API key to do its tagging. I wish I didn’t have to give $20 credit to Sam Altman for the privilege, but I don’t yet have the infrastructure at home required to do all the tagging locally. Soon, though.

Obsidian

This year I migrated away from Notion to Obsidian for all my note-taking. Syncing my vault to Cloudflare R2 works a treat. I’ve kept my use of plugins minimal so it stays nice and snappy. The Kanban plugin works well for tracking personal technical tasks, and Omnisearch makes finding things a breeze.

That said, the Android app leaves a lot to be desired. Even with only a small handful of plugins, it takes forever to launch on my Pixel 6. I don’t often feel the need to take notes on my smartphone (the fewer reasons to take it out of my pocket, the better) so this is fine for now, but it would be nice if it worked a little better for those rare occasions when I need it.

Still, Obsidian has enabled me to organise my thoughts and stay on top of my own personal development. Having started a daily journal this year, being able to cross-reference notes has helped me plan my time more efficiently.

Obsidian isn’t entirely open source, but the fully-FOSS alternatives have their own drawbacks, so for now I’ll continue with Obsidian.

Linux desktop

No, it is not the year of the Linux desktop. But it is getting better and better, especially now that I have an AMD GPU. And hey, PewDiePie is using Linux now, so it must be good! /s

I do a bit of gaming in my free time. Historically, Windows has been a necessity. Not anymore! I’ve been daily driving Arch Linux with KDE Plasma for a few years now and have no regrets. It’s more stable than ever, everything I need works, there are no annoying ads, telemetry, automatic updates, or insane UI choices.

Valve’s Proton allows me to play any game I care about. At worst, I have to fiddle around testing different versions of Proton or use gamescope to get a game to work the way I want, but this is pretty rare now. I seldom have to use launchers like Lutris and Heroic Games Launcher, but when I do, they work fine.

I still have an SSD with Windows 11 installed on it which will be removed some time this year. I do miss League of Legends, but not as much as I hate dual-booting.

RSS

Several blog posts praising RSS have hit the front page of HackerNews lately, which inspired me to go back to this decades-old news feed technology. I last used RSS with Google Reader ~15 years ago (RIP), followed by a brief stint with Feedly. Since then, software for RSS has come a long way. FreshRSS has been my feed aggregator of choice, augmented by Upvote RSS and RSS-Bridge. After testing several RSS readers for Android, I’ve settled on FeedMe, though I may switch to something FOSS soon.

Worth mentioning that the podcasting world relies on RSS to deliver content, and for that I’m happily using Audiobookshelf.

Home Assistant

Tinkering with smart devices and home automation is one of my many hobbies, so it made sense to use Home Assistant. It’s a tinkerer’s dream, and has allowed me to migrate almost entirely away from Hue’s hub. I’m running it in a Docker container on my home server with a Sonoff ZigBee dongle and ZHA to control all my smart lights, switches, and sensors. To simplify accessing my HA instance over the internet, I’m paying Nabu Casa a monthly subscription fee. It’s not as cheap as I would like, but it does support the continued development of HA, so I’m okay with it for now.

One day I’ll replicate one of the many shiny dashboards people show off on Reddit, but for now I’m quite happy just having everything in one place.

Built-in OpenID Connect support would be nice - thankfully it is being worked on by the community.

Immich

Immich has been an effective replacement for Google Photos. I’ve been burned by Google Photos before - albums shared with me by friends have been accidentally deleted, with no way to recover them.

Importing my Google Takeout export into Immich was quite painless with the help of Immich-Go, and the Android app is automatically backing up every photo and video I take in full resolution.

No complaints.

Stremio

Stremio with the Torrentio add-on and Real Debrid has replaced the Plex server I used to host. My only criticism of Stremio is that it lacks a cropping feature to fix black bars on ultrawide displays (there is an open GitHub issue about this), so I often use mpv instead of the built-in player.

If this stack stops working, I’ll go back to torrenting/Usenet. Or if streaming services become good again, maybe I’ll try them.

Kobo ereader

One of the habits I’m trying to solidify this year is daily reading. I find physical paper books irritating and clunky, so I picked up a Kobo Libra Colour and stylus case for $280 last year and have been enjoying reading on it a lot. The colour vibrancy out of the box isn’t great, but after changing its colour profile it’s noticeably better.

Casio watch

As part of my efforts to pull out my phone less, I decided to start using a digital watch to check the date and time. I went with the Casio A168WA. It’s cheap, sturdy, waterproof, and works. Supposedly the battery lasts 7 years too!

More recently, I bought another Casio watch - the classic F91-W. I wanted something a bit lighter and grippier on my wrist for everyday use, but also something to hack on which I hope to do this year. People much cleverer than me have made replacement boards for this watch which offer a broader featureset. Should be a fun project.

Kagi

Google Search has been terrible for a long time now, even with an ad-blocker. SEO-optimised slop pollutes search results, it doesn’t support !bangs, and, well, it’s a Google service. I tried DuckDuckGo for years but found its search results often failed to give me what I was looking for, so I’ve been using Kagi for the past year with no regrets. It is a little bit pricey, but the search results are as good as or better than Google’s, and it has far less SEO junk. Kagi has a bunch of nifty features like (de)prioritising search results from specific websites and “lenses” for searching preset lists of websites, which I find really useful.

Honourable mentions

• Paperless-ngx // Document management for scanned documents with tagging via Paperless-AI
• BeaverHabits // Absurdly simple habit tracker
• Atuin // Synchronised shell history
• Hugo // Static site generator I’m using for this blog
• Navidrome + Feishin + Symfonium // What I use for my self-hosted music library
• Glance // Gorgeous self-hosted homepage/dashboard
• Harmonic // My HackerNews mobile client of choice
• Lemmy + Boost for Lemmy // Fediverse-equivalent of Reddit with a few active tech communities I follow
• ReVanced // Ad-free YouTube and patched Boost for Reddit
• Giff Gaff // UK mobile network on top of O2, ethical B-Corp, cheap plans, eSIMs (referral link)
• uBlock Origin and AdGuard DNS // Can’t use the internet on my phone without these
• Dark Reader // The best web-wide dark mode browser add-on
• Unhook // Keeps the YouTube brain rot at bay
• BitWarden // Rock solid password manager, self-hostable but I decided to pay for their hosted enterprise offering
• Pocket ID // Simple passwordless OpenID Connect authentication server which protects all the self-hosted apps I’m using

On the fence 🤔

Cloudflare

I’m using Cloudflare tunnels to access my self-hosted applications, but might switch to a VPS with Pangolin and CrowdSec instead. It won’t be free, but at least I’ll be more in control of my own infrastructure.

Proton

Proton’s founder is a Trump shill now, which is… not ideal. Is it enough of a reason to move away from ProtonMail? I’m undecided.

Authy

Since Twilio’s data breach last year, my faith in them has wavered. I should really switch to Ente Auth, but moving 30+ accounts’ 2FA is a long, tedious job which I am procrastinating starting.

Fediverse

I love the idea of the Fediverse (especially Lemmy as a Reddit alternative) but there just isn’t enough of a pull yet for me to stop using established, centralised equivalents. I hope this changes.

Discord

Discord is planning to go public soon, which could mean further enshittification. It’s not too bad at the moment - the ads for Nitro and in-app games aren’t too invasive yet. One to keep an eye on. I’m not aware of any suitable alternatives, but I’m sure one will appear if Discord gets much worse.

They’ve finally fixed screen sharing with audio in Discord Canary which was my only other gripe.

Spotify

I’m still subscribed to Spotify and would like to ditch it, but I’m not 100% sold on using a self-hosted music library long term yet - the admin legwork it requires puts me off (even with automation). That said, I don’t like being told what music to listen to by algorithms and I like my music to be high-fidelity FLAC if possible. I’ve always hated Spotify’s UI/UX, and it’s filled with AI-generated music and playlists now too. Maybe I’ll switch to something like Tidal which at least has FLAC audio.

The suck list 👎

These are all the tech-related things which have really sucked.

Sony bluetooth headphones

A firmware update which introduced a hardware fault has permanently broken my Sony LinkBuds S wireless earphones. One of the earphone batteries drains from 100% to 0% in about 10 minutes, and the only solution is to have them physically repaired at significant cost (they are barely out of warranty). Sony are aware of this problem, which appears to affect both the LinkBuds S and the more expensive WF1000-XM(4|5) models. It has been widely reported by users online including Louis Rossman. Sony have done nothing about it, which is a shame because otherwise their wireless earphones are best-in-class.

Netflix

Netflix has terrible bitrate, keeps costing more and more each year, and is full of slop content designed to hold your attention just enough to keep you watching. Drew Gooden has a great video about this which I highly recommend watching.

There is a very good chance 2025 will be the year I finally cancel my subscription.

Nextcloud

I’ve moved away from Google Drive. The best self-hosted option seems to be Nextcloud, but… it sucks. Sorry. The UI is unintuitive, it feels bloated, and the vast ecosystem of mostly-out-of-date plugins is a mess. Features like OpenID Connect authentication should be built-in, not some barely-maintained community add-on which randomly disables itself after every update.

There are no good self-hosted alternatives either. Seafile is too barebones and FileRun seems a tad expensive. Maybe OpenCloud will solve all these problems - here’s hoping.

I’m not strictly against a SaaS solution, but I have the server capacity at home to host my own now.

Google Chrome

They broke uBlock Origin, so I moved to Firefox.

Amazon

We’re trying to avoid using Amazon in my household. Most of the junk on Amazon can be found for about the same price elsewhere anyway. I’m still using it to track prices and read reviews (using the Keepa and FakeSpot browser add-ons), though far less often than I used to. I’ve cancelled my Prime auto-renewal.

Honourable mentions

• Instagram // Useless for me, just deleted my account
• OpenAI // Only useful for solving very specific problems, prefer LocalAI/ollama
• AI slop in general // It’s everywhere and I’m sick of it
• Cryptocurrency // No practical, real-world use for most people