software

Software I use in 2025

Because I like lists!

A note, to start: My Mac Studio has largely sat idle or even powered off for most of 2025. I’m not sure why, exactly, but at some point I just found I didn’t enjoy using macOS anymore. It could be as simple as I’m much more used to the things that annoy me on Windows. Whatever the case, I will not be including Mac software below.

I will also not be listing any phone apps.

What I will be listing:

  • Software I use in Windows 11
  • Software I use in Linux Mint
  • Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) I use in both (or even the Mac, should I turn it back on)

Windows 11

  • Browser: Firefox. Backup: Vivaldi.
  • Diary/Journal: Diarium
  • Tasks: TickTick
  • Email: Fastmail (I use the web-based version)
  • Blogging: WordPress (I have tried many alternatives, none have stuck so far)
  • Text Editor: This is complicated. I can’t make up my mind, so I’m dabbling with all of these to varying degrees:
    • Obsidian
    • Notepad (built-in Windows app)
    • Notepad++
    • Zed
  • Messaging: Signal
  • Group chat: Discord
  • Social media: I am only on Mastodon now, I use the Phanpy web app as the client.
  • Music: The built-in Windows Media Player
  • Word Processor: I don’t use one much these days, but when I do, it’s LibreOffice Writer.
  • Fiction writing, with the caveat that I haven’t done much for the past few years:
    • Scrivener
    • novelWriter
  • Photo editing:
    • Affinity Photo
    • Photos (the built-in app)
    • Luminar Neo
  • Drawing: I do this on a tablet now, so nothing here
  • Audio editing: Audacity (I rarely do audio editing, though)
  • Video editing: DaVinci Resolve (I rarely do video editing)
  • RSS reader: Good question! I keep flipping through a bunch.
  • Read later: Folio (browser extension for Firefox)

The apps listed above that are paid:

  • Diarium (one-time purchase through the Microsoft Store)
  • TickTick (optional yearly subscription to open more features)
  • Affinity Photo (one-time purchase. This was before Affinity Studio launched, which is completely free but gates AI features behind a Canva subscription)
  • Luminar Neo (one-time purchase)
  • Scrivener (one-time purchase)

Linux Mint

  • Browser: Firefox. Backup: Vivaldi.
  • Diary/Journal: Zed
  • Tasks: TickTick (web version, as no native Linux version exists)
  • Email: Fastmail (I use the web-based version)
  • Blogging: WordPress
  • Text Editor: This is complicated. I can’t make up my mind, so I’m dabbling with all of these to varying degrees:
    • Obsidian
    • Sublime Text
    • Zed
  • Messaging: Signal
  • Group chat: Discord
  • Social media: I am only on Mastodon now, I use the Phanpy web app as the client.
  • Music: Rhythmbox (included with Mint). Backup: VLC Player.
  • Word Processor: LibreOffice Writer (included with Mint)
  • Fiction writing, with the caveat that I haven’t done much for the past few years:
    • Scrivener (I have the Windows version running through Lutris)
    • novelWriter
  • Photo editing:
    • Pix (included with Mint)
  • Drawing: I do this on a tablet now, so nothing here
  • Audio editing: Audacity (I rarely do audio editing, though)
  • Video editing: I have not done this on Mint.
  • RSS reader: Newsflash
  • Read later: Folio (browser extension for Firefox)

As you can see, there is a lot of overlap with Windows, which shows how much Linux software has matured in recent years. The one place I feel it lags is in photo/graphics editing (no, I will not use Gimp, the interface just repels me, for some reason1Also, they really should just change the name.).

Paid programs in Linux Mint are the same as Windows.

I think I covered all major categories, but if I’ve forgotten something, I’ll edit it in later.

Do I miss software stores? Kind of!

A floppy disk. Kids, ask your parents! I graduated from 5.25″ floppies to DVDs over the years.

In the weird old days when you wanted software for your computer (because software for a portable phone was not a thing yet), you had to go to a physical store, buy a box with a disc in it, take it home, install the software, then hope (especially if it was a game) that the copy protection didn’t screw things up. If you didn’t want to insert the disc every time you ran a game like some kind of savage, you’d have to go to some skeevy-looking website and grab a no-CD fix.

Sometimes the no-CD fix worked flawlessly, sometimes it required the tech equivalent of arcane magic to work, sometimes it did nothing (or put malware on your PC).

I don’t look back fondly on any of the stuff I just described…except for the actual experience of looking for new software/games in stores. Back in the timeframe I’m describing, roughly the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, I would learn about new games through magazines like Computer Gaming World or PC Gamer. Or sometimes I would learn about them by actually finding the new games sitting on the shelves of a software store. It seems absolutely quaint now that this was how you could discover a game, but it’s true!

Some random memories:

  • Convincing a store clerk to sell me the Not For Sale version of the Commodore 64 game The Castles of Dr. Creep, circa 1984. A friend and I played it co-op in the store and I had to have it. I can’t recall what store I bought it from, other than somewhere just outside of Victoria.
  • Going to the Eaton’s store in Duncan and buying some generically-packaged versions of old Infocom games for cheap, back around 1985 (think Zork and a few others). To this day, I have no idea if these were legit copies. They were about $20 each, which was very cheap back then.
  • Buying OS/2 4.0 on floppy disk at Egghead Software. I don’t remember how many disks it came on, but more than a few! It was also surprisingly cheap, around $50 or $60 because IBM was trying to undercut Windows upgrade pricing. I never made much headway with it, and IBM abandoned OS/2 not too long after.
  • I want to say I bought my Windows 95 upgrade (on CD ROM!) at Computer City, where I worked during the launch of Windows 95 (at the Coquitlam store), but I’m not 100% sure. It seems like the logical place to have picked it up, and I know I grabbed it right away. I worked at Computer City for six weeks before quitting. The chain collapsed and vanished the following year.
  • Going to Super Software in Richmond and splurging one day by buying two games at the same time, each costing $50. I picked up Populous and SimCity, both for my Amiga 500. Probably the best 1-2 gaming purchase I ever made on physical media. Super software was also relatively gigantic and catered to every major platform back in the day: Apple II, IBM, Commodore 64 and Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit (and probably others I’m leaving out). It seems nutty how many different systems existed back then. There’s actually a 1989 commercial for Super Software on YouTube.
  • Buying the last copy of Age of Empires II (1999) at a Future Shop location on the day of release. It came in a gigantic box and had a relatively thick manual.
  • A few years later, I bought Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002), one of the first games to come in a mini box, with little to no documentation. Steam was only two years from launching and the end of physical media was nigh, though you’d be able to buy games on disc for some years after.

The Culling: Miscellaneous software

Today I uninstalled a few programs on my Windows 11 PC I no longer use and made the great leap to open source office software (technically I already did, because I installed LibreOffice a while ago, but now it will be my default).

Uninstalled:

  • Facebook Messenger (can’t use without a FB account, anyway)
  • Arc browser (did not like)
  • Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, etc.)
  • Microsoft Bing Search (I didn’t even know this was installed)
  • Microsoft Teams (I thought I had uninstalled this already)
  • Mind Over Magnet demo (I have the full game)
  • Proton Mail (switched to Fastmail)
  • Red Notebook (did not like)
  • WhatsApp (did not use, plus more Meta junk)
  • Zettlr (did not like)

Mastodon clients: Decisions, decisions

I am a visual person and aesthetics matter to me. Sometimes they matter (a little) more than functionality.

One of the nice things about the federated social media platform known as Mastodon is that it allows for a host of third-party clients to view its content.

I tried several Windows-specific clients and found all of them to look kind of ugly. I don’t want to use an ugly app, even if it’s functional. It’s 2023, we’ve evolved beyond MIDI files and poorly compressed animated GIFs. I eventually settled on a web client called Elk. It looks a bit like Twitter and is nice enough. Then I came across Phanpy, which, despite its terrible name, looks *really* nice, even if it’s perhaps a bit too aggressively minimalist. But it looks so nice!

In fact, I like its look so much I’ve actually started favouring it on the Mac, where I own the Mona Mastodon client. Here’s how each looks, along with the official Mastodon web client, focusing on one post, all of them running in dark mode, because light mode makes me run and hide under the bed. No scaling has been applied to the images.

Mona (Mac client):

Mastodon (official web client):

Elk (web client):

Phanpy (web client):

Some thoughts:

Overall layout: Phanpy is by far the most compact, but that doesn’t necessarily mean better. It does put posts in a nicely rounded box, though, which is a pleasing visual touch. Phanpy puts the image inline with the story title and subhead, which reduces the size of the image. The others are all very similar in layout. Oddly, even though Phanpy offers the most compact layout, I think it does the best job in terms of spacing around the content, giving it a lighter feel, even in dark mode. This is done mostly by simply making the interface wider, allowing everything to spread out a bit more. Compare this to Mona, which has a bunch of empty space sitting to the right of the image.

Phanpy also does the best job of implementing a card-style interface, where each post is clearly separate from the next. Mona is also pretty good, though the contrast between posts and the background is more subtle (a to-taste thing, really).

Colour: The official web client uses a more purple-black, keeping with its theme colour, which is purple. Phanpy is a bit lighter than Elk or Mona, and I think looks a bit better.

Text: Mona wins here, with the sharpest text of the bunch. Elk is probably the worst, but still not actually bad.

Iconography: Phanpy requires you to open a post to see any icons, part of its minimalist thing. The others are all clean and functional, but not exactly delightful. They do their job. Note that several clients allow you to customize the icons. The official client probably has the least attractive icons of the bunch, but again, they are perfectly serviceable.

Options: Elk and Phanpy offer minimal options. Mona is the clear winner here, as it has options out the wazoo. It probably has options for the wazoo.

Conclusion: No one client does everything perfectly. I think my ideal would be Mona’s text/icons/non-minimalism, combined with Phanpy’s aesthetics and use of white space.

This post prompted me to dive into Mona’s options and tweak its interface again, bringing it closer to Phanpy’s. We’ll see if it sticks. The nice part is simply having the abundance of choices to start with. Now, if only a Mona-quality app existed on Windows…

Mona (after tweaking the UI per the above paragraph):

Cache me if you can

I went to upgrade my iPad to iPadOS 17 because it just came out today and I like living on the edge, and I’m also kind of dumb.

But I couldn’t, because my 128 GB iPad only had 3 GB of space left on it. I checked, and it turned out OneDrive was hogging about half the space. I found where you can clear its cache1You will never in a billion years do this accidentally and cleared the cache.

Then it took A Very Long Time to complete. But when it did, the free space went from 3 GB to over 61 GB (!)

The upgrade is in progress as I type this. It’s given me time to think about how I use my iPad Pro, which I bought a little over three year ago:

  • 90% of the time it’s for Procreate2The only app I use with a worse name is Diarium
  • 5% of the time I’m in a crossword puzzle app
  • 3% of the time I’m checking files in OneDrive
  • 2% is for everything else

So really, all I need is a good drawing tablet. Which the iPad Pro is. So I guess I’m good. (But I secretly want a Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra, not because of the super unsexy name, but because it has a super sexy 14.6″ AMOLED display. A larger canvas for drawing is also super sexy. If I win the lottery, it’s mine. If I don’t, well, 12.9 inches is not bad. Hehe /Beavis.)

Using Linux Mint, Part 4: End of line (for now)

Tonight I pulled the plug on my Linux Mint installation, fixed the boot launcher to boot straight into Windows (farewell, grub!) and reclaimed the space on my main drive that had been reserved for Linux, allowing Windows to once again hog all of it.

I may try Linux Mint (or another distro) in the future because I’m still interested in messing around with it, but if I do, I will put it onto its own drive. I’ll still need to dual boot, but won’t have two OSes sharing space on the same physical drive, which puts constraints on both.

The main reasons for nuking Linux Mint for now is related to something I saw (that I cannot find now) stating that Linux is 98% there for most people–which seems excellent! But that last 2% may include a vital piece of software that isn’t available, and becomes a dealbreaker. Linux Mint is free, which is great, but once you eliminate the price and just look at what it offers vs. Windows 11, it comes very close in most regards, but ultimately falls a bit short–for the average computer user. And for me.

I could use Firefox, Discord, Signal and Obsidian. This was nice. But I could only use the online version of Word. OneDrive likewise is reduced to the web version without using third party solutions that aren’t officially supported (and may come with subscriptions). The photo-editing software is not what I want, and just getting photos into the OS is more of a hassle. The game support is actually decent, but imperfect. Again, that 2% is the killer.

In the end, Linux Mint was fun to play around with, to experiment in, but just didn’t have quite what I needed to be a primary OS. In terms of how I’d rate them in overall functionality for my own use:

  1. Windows 11 10/10 – does everything, though not equally well
  2. macOS 8/10 – comes close, but falls down on gaming and third party peripheral support remains spotty for me.
  3. Linux Mint 7/10 – falls down on photo-editing, some specific apps it lacks, cloud storage and gaming (to a smaller extent)

Using Linux Mint, Part 3: A few software wrinkles

After some more time using Linux Mint, which I’ve done more often the past few days as Windows 11 is perpetually applying updates that require a reboot (thus making it easy to select Mint from the boot menu), I’ve encountered a few things that have made the experience a little less smooth vs. the Mac or Windows:

  • Music: My music library is a local folder on the PC and while I might be able to find a way to access the files remotely, right now the music player in Mint wants to just redownload everything, which is not an idea solution (though it works fine if you let it do its thing)
  • OneDrive: There is a paid solution (InSync) and while I can access my OneDrive folder on the PC through the Mint file manager, it obviously does not actually sync changes or anything. For that, I need to use the web version, barring setting up an open source/free alternative.
  • Microsoft Office: While I generally only use MS Word when I have to, Office is not available on Linux, requiring me to use workarounds like saving in .docx format in LibreOffice, or using the web versions, where it’s surprisingly easy to come across something the web version doesn’t do.
  • Journaling: My go-to journaling app, the unfortunately named Diarium, is available on every platform–except Linux. And there’s no web version.
  • TickTick: My to-do app of choice also has no Linux version, though the web version works decently, at least.
  • Pixelmator Pro: This is my primary photo editing app and is Mac-only.

On the plus side, it still feels snappier and more solid than my current Windows 11 install. I’ve actually toyed with the idea of completely nuking all 3 terabytes of storage I have on the PC and just starting over. I don’t know if that would actually fix or improve anything, but it appeals to my urge to cull cull cull.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to juggle between all the OSes like a big dum dum.

Using Linux Mint, Part 2 of an undetermined number of parts

You can see my initial post on using Linux Mint here: I’m posting from Linux, woo (woo?)

For the past month, I have been generally ignoring the Linux Mint installation, because my desire to explore strange new OSes apparently ended shortly after I had completed the initial set up.

However, Windows has been driving me mildly batty lately for a few reasons, some more important than others:

  • Less important: The desktop wallpaper keeps changing on its own. I’ve spent more than a fair share of time troubleshooting this, to no avail. It’s simple to correct, but it’s maddening that it happens. Probably related, Windows will also move my desktop icons from one monitor to another, then back, seemingly at random (not on the fly, but after a reboot or when it is awakened from the screensaver). Multiple monitor mayhem? Maybe!
  • Somewhat important: General slowness all around the OS. The Start menu hesitates when I click on it, or icons take a few extra moments to load. Nothing feels “tight” or snappy. I almost feel like Windows 11 has regressed to that “time to reinstall the entire OS” version of Windows we used to go through in order to regain lost performance. And that was way back in the Windows 98/XP era. Yeesh.
  • More important: File Explorer is crazy slow, even at simple things. I have always found File Explorer slow (this is one of the few ways I find the Mac’s Finder to be superior) and it often wants to (slowly) refresh a folder that hasn’t had any changes made to it. Bleah!

Anyway, enough kvetching about Windows 11. I have updated Mint and installed a few apps:

  • Firefox (actually, it’s pre-installed, but I have updated it)
  • Obsidian (initially as an AppImage file, then as an actual installed app)
  • Discord

Those three apps alone give me most of what I need. I have also spent some time tweaking the settings, look and feel of the desktop, and have run into a few kinks with permissions to the non-Linux folders on my PC. But still no need to use a command line yet!

As a bonus, Linux also hasn’t changed my desktop wallpaper arbitrarily. What a treat. For maximum lolz, I am using the AI-interpreted version of the original Bliss/XP wallpaper that you can find on Microsoft’s site here.

My desktop (click for full size):

At this point, I’ll probably keep using it until I need another OS for something specific (Windows for gaming, Mac for photo/image-editing). Maybe I’ll find yet another OS to install. Maybe I’ll just start doing everything on a used Commodore 64 and pretend it’s 1985.

Right now, Mint does feel faster than Windows, but it’s also only a month old and has minimal software installed. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned for Part 3, in which maybe I have to use the command line or something horrible like that.

I’m posting from Linux, woo (woo?)

Today I did a cray-cray thing: I installed Linux Mint on my Windows PC, giving it 500 GB of space on my primary drive, with Windows getting the rest.

So far it has gone pretty smoothly. I haven’t had to use the terminal once!

I’m not sure why I installed it, I think I just wanted to try something different. It did drive home how much of what you do on a computer is done through a web browser, and it doesn’t really matter much what the OS is behind it.

Supposedly Linux is faster than Windows, or uses less resources or something. I’ll keep trying it for a bit, and if I love it, I will marry it! Well, no. But I’ll keep it. If in the end I feel it offers little over what I’m getting with Windows 11, I’ll probably reclaim the space back to Windows.

For now, though, I’m a triple OS guy on the desktop. Such a nerd. Or idiot. We’ll find out soon enough

EDIT: Here’s a link to the Linux Mint page. It’s like I completely forgot my internet manners!

https://linuxmint.com/

Culling 2022 (bonus post): From many lists to one

Another recent culling decision was to move to a single reminder/to-do app, and the winner there ended up being Microsoft To Do. TickTick was a close second, and I could see myself possibly going back to it eventually.

The things I like about Microsoft To Do:

  • It’s free, with no limitations (free is good, no subscription was my real preference)
  • At first, the My Day feature bugged me, but I’ve come to embrace it. It’s basically a blank page for you to add things to and it’s easy to add daily stuff (which is also viewable elsewhere). It provides a way to focus, which I need.
  • The UI is unusually pleasant
  • Sync works fine, regardless of platform (PC, Mac, phone)

The thing I don’t like:

  • The name. Come on, they didn’t even try! And this replaced Wunderlist, which is an absolutely delightful name.

And here is a CGI cat writing a list in Stable Diffusion:

Speaking of buggy software: Everything Apple produces

When you speak to old Mac geezers (OMGs), they will often wax poetic about Snow Leopard as being the best version of OS X (and remind you it’s the Roman numeral 10, not the letter X), not because it came with a boatload of new features, but because it didn’t. Apple advertised it as having “0 new features” because it focused on improving existing features and fixing bugs found in Leopard, the previous version of OS X.

Back then (roughly the first decade of the 2000s) Apple released its updates on a “when they are ready” schedule, which meant you could go almost two years between updates. That changed in 2012 when Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) came out a year after Lion. Henceforth, all Mac OS updates would come out on a yearly basis, ready or not.

Ready or not.

iOS updates and the rest of Apple’s lowercase-Uppercase OS releases followed suit, and now yearly releases are the norm.

And they are a bad idea, bad for the industry, bad for users, and Tim Cook should feel bad.

Why? One word: Bugs.

Apple has tacitly admitted it can’t keep up with yearly releases, because it now regularly leaves out major features until “later”. Just this year they delayed iPadOS 16 altogether from September to October just to get things working properly. Yearly releases are not sustainable, they’re dumb, and serve no one when they come with incomplete or missing features and copious glitches. Apple is the 800 pound gorilla in consumer electronics, so if they change course, the industry is likely to follow. And they should!

And the thing is, if Apple switched to updates every two years or “when they’re ready” people would still buy tens of millions of iPhones, plus oodles of iPads, Macs and AirPods, not to mention staying subbed to the cash cows that their services have become. But Apple is not only gigantic, they are incredibly conservative and unlikely to change course unless forced by circumstance or the law (but mostly the law).

Why do I think this? Why am I posting now?

Because watchOS 9 is a bug-riddled mess and since I use my watch for my running workouts, the glitches affect me on a regular, ongoing basis. None of these issues happened before watchOS 9 was released (Apple eventually forces updates, so you can’t even just stay put, eventually you’ll need to upgrade).

Among the bugs I’ve encountered:

  • Stuttery or missing animations (not a big thing, but annoying)
  • Unreliable heart rate monitoring, especially at the start of a run (this is a big thing)
  • Music playback on the watch being permanently muffled when interrupted by a notification. It happened today (again) and even closing the music app did not fix it. I restarted the app and tried three albums before the music finally popped back to regular volume.
  • Pausing music playing from the watch via the AirPods (clicking the touch control on one of the earbuds), then unpausing, and the playback switches to whatever you were previously listening to on the iPhone. It’s like having someone come into your living room, quietly pick up the remote, change the channel from whatever you were watching, then just as quietly leaving the room.

I suppose I should be happy most things are still working. But bleah, the yearly updates are clearly not going to improve, so I really wish Apple and the whole industry would move away from them.