app defaults 2026
Here are my app defaults as of February 2026, with some commentary. I loosely adapted the list template from here. Lots of interesting app lists on that page to browse!
- 🖥️ OS: Solus Linux KDE. Yes, I know the last time I recapped my Linux adventures, I said I was hoping to stay with Mint. I did stick with it for a while, but various factors sent me distrohopping again, and my path back to Solus was interesting and unexpected. I want to see if it really sticks this time before I write more about it, but I also wanted to put on record that this is what I’m using at time of writing, which contextualises the app choices available to me.
- 📨 Mail client: Fastmail web
- 📮 Mail server: Fastmail
- 📝 Notes: Obsidian
- ✍🏻 Writing: Obsidian most of the time. Ghostwriter or Typora if I want a change of environment.
- ✅ To-Do: I just use Reminders on my phone for time-sensitive tasks that need to pop up an alarm, while other tasks get slotted into my calendar as an event. If I can’t do them on that day, I move them to a subsequent day. It works very well to ensure I don’t have tasks floating around in the “someday” bucket that never get done. If I keep thinking “I should do this” but don’t feel motivated to put it in my calendar, the honest truth is, I probably don’t actually want to do it that much. A useful litmus test.
- 📷 Phone photo shooting: default iPhone camera
- 🟦 Photo management: Apple Photos, reluctantly. This is my biggest Big Tech cord I haven’t cut yet. I would really love to move off it, but all other alternatives I’ve tried just aren’t as good. I also use the Shared Albums feature a lot with my all-iPhone family, which makes it doubly difficult to migrate away.
- 📆 Calendar: Fastmail calendar, accessed through CalDAV on the default calendar apps on my devices.
- 📁 Cloud file storage: Synology NAS + Synology Drive
- 🗄️ Backup: Synology Hyper Backup runs local backups of my data onto an external HDD, and remote backups onto Koofr. I bought 1TB lifetime storage with this deal and I’ve been pretty happy with it. Because I am obsessive about backups, I also have 500GB pCloud lifetime and I manually upload copies of particularly important files there, as well as to yet another external HDD.
- 📖 RSS: Miniflux
- 🙍🏻♂️ Contacts: Fastmail
- 🌐 Browser: Vivaldi, as of now, which is a surprise even to me. I was a diehard user of Firefox and its forks for many years, particularly after Chrome killed uBlock Origin. But when I embarked on my Linux adventure, I took the opportunity to try out different browsers. I found that when bolstered with DNS-level adblocking, Vivaldi’s built-in blocker + uBlock Origin Lite was good enough for me. The panel sidebar, drag and drop tab tiling and command chains make it more powerful than any other browser, and the Chromium engine generally performs more smoothly with most websites than Mozilla’s. Plus I like Vivaldi’s no AI stance. The company genuinely seems to be good folks.
- 💬 Chat: Telegram for personal chats, mostly. Whatsapp gets used more for work. I’m on Discord only to keep up with butai.
- 🔖 Bookmarks: Linkding
- 📚 Ebook management: Calibre
- 📑 Read it later: Wallabag, sent to my Kobo with KOReader. But I no longer indiscriminately dump everything into my read-later app: things go to Linkding first, and when I run out of articles in Wallabag, I go through my TBR pile in Linkding and pull out only articles that I really want to read. I often bookmark stuff that looks interesting without much thought, so if I come back to it later and feel like actually I’m only so-so on reading it, I don’t send it to Wallabag. This works pretty well to stop my read-later app from becoming a bottomless black hole.
- 📜 Word processing: Google Docs, when needed. I hardly do word processing when I’m not at work.
- 📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets, likewise.
- 📊 Presentations: Nope, don’t make them.
- 🛒 Shopping lists: Reminders on my iPhone.
- 🍴 Meal planning: Mela. I have a self-hosted Mealie instance, but I find Mela so much nicer to use that I end up defaulting to it. My only other app still tying me to Apple devices. I figure as long as the much bigger elephant of Apple Photos is still in the room, I’ll just keep using Mela if it works for me.
- 💰 Budgeting and personal finance: Actual Budget.
- 📰 News: 🙅🏻♀️ I look at the news all day for work. I don’t want to look at it in my free time.
- 🎵 Music: Plexamp mainly, Audacious or fooyin sometimes if I just want to play an album locally without disrupting my Plexamp playback/stats.
- 📺 Video: Jellyfin/Plex if I’m streaming off my NAS, mainly mpv for standalone video files, VLC for playing Blu-rays on my computer. FreeTube when I’m watching YouTube. I really miss Infuse/Vidhub on my computer as a Jellyfin/Plex frontend, but I have yet to find a Linux equivalent that’s as nice. Currently trying out Fladder.
- 🎬 Video management: MakeMKV for Blu-ray rips, OBS Studio for recording, Video Trimmer for edits (usually all I need to do is clip bits off the video, so I don’t need a full-fledged editor).
- 🎤 Podcasts: Nope. I used to use Overcast, but I’ve pretty much stopped listening to podcasts because I just don’t have any occasion to.
- 🔐 Password management: Bitwarden, which along with Vivaldi is also a surprise to me. The last time I talked about password management, I mentioned that I had been using 1Password for years and had no intention to leave it. But it is so much not a good Linux citizen that I thought maybe I’d check out Bitwarden, and I was really surprised how far it had come since I last tried it. It used to feel very unpolished next to 1Password. This is no longer the case. The UI is sleek and pleasant to use. It imported all my data seamlessly from 1Password, even the 2FA setups. There are still a few paper cuts with autofill that IMO give 1Password the edge especially if you’re on a Mac, but I’m comfortable in Bitwarden right now.
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