a collection of tools, alternatives where feasible
September 28, 2025
Exercise your vote in the market. Choose products that reflect your values. Build towards a future you want to experience. When you can, don't use anything made by these people. I say this as I write from a MacBook.
Ketan Joshi
5mo
Incredible clip of tech CEOs fawning over Donald Trump. Someone store this clip in the underground archive vault
Some of my alternatives are aspirational. I plan to / hope to move to them in the future. I will mark those as such.
Hardware
Laptop
Currently on a MacBook Air M1. I love the thing. I'm willing to use macOS but am interested in Nix. I never want to look at Windows again.
For my next laptop, I am looking at the Framework 13. I can get storage and memory for a better price than what Framework sells. Otherwise this is my desired config.
Again, I am ok with using Apple hardware but stay away from depending on their services. I am on the iPhone 14 Pro. The Fairphone 6 is looking pretty decent. Probably want to own a camera if you go that route. These days iOS gives a lot of the customization I would want out of Android anyway, and I love the Shortcuts app. I find Apple more benevolent than Google in aggregate.
E-reader
Kindle Touch. Got it out of a drawer at the in-laws place. It's so old it doesn't connect to wifi but the firmware is too new to jailbreak, so I just plug it into my laptop and push books to it from Calibre. Works a treat.
Machines
Bambu makes the best appliance-tier 3D printers right now. I got the combo with the AMS for automatic material switching for a great deal from Microcenter. I use it in local mode and Orca slicer so there is not communication with Bambu services.
Arc is dead, long live Arc. I loved the Arc browser dearly until Josh Miller decided his core user base is unimportant. Zen is a great successor built on Firefox by just a couple devs. They've replicated all of the differentiating experiences from Arc. It's a good time.
Discord. This is one I desperately want to get away from. It's a data mining scheme with gotcha monetization. I still have communities on there while alternatives are on the path to viability.
Slack. A bunch of communities talk there, including my FIRST Robotics teams I mentor.
I’ve finally cancelled my Spotify Premium subscription. I prefer supporting artists over funding attack drones and ICE adverts. My replacement is a combination of Qobuz for streaming and a self hosted Navidrome instance with my personal library. Arpeggi is a great iOS client for Navidrome, although it is still in TestFlight. I purchase music for my library on Bandcamp.
On the reading side, I’ve gone fully off big tech. I get all my news from Bluesky feeds and RSS. NetNewsWire clients on all my devices pull content from my FreshRSS instance on my server.
Affinity suite. These are made in the UK, recently purchased by Canva who are based in Australia. Perpetual license. One filetype for their whole suite of tools.
Penpot. The open source self hostable Figma alternative. Features are still a little early (they just added component variants), but all the files are non-proprietary. Why do I prefer an alternative to Figma? Any monopoly is bad. I'd rather pay no subscription and control my software and files. Also, donate to open source 🫶🏻.
Cursor. Been playing around with Zed too. I'm not a developer by trade. I did pursue a CS minor while in school, bailing after a few useful classes when I realized I take 5 prerequisites for 2 minor courses. Not worth. With the help of robots I can get my ideas to a works-like-ish prototype.
I converted my PC to a home server a few months ago. I only ever used it for infrequently playing Risk of Rain 2. Now I host a bunch of services on it as I trudge towards digital independence.
I'll add or update if I realize I missed something later. Wouldn't it be cool if this were all organized in a native AT Protocol lexicon where you could share your stack and compare with others? I think so too. See that idea and many others in my blog post.
