I have learned a lot from looking at other people’s working hardware and software, and I wish I’d started recording mine years ago. However, in the spirit of “the second best time to plant a tree…” this is my current hardware and software stack as of June 2026.

Hardware

• Main working PC: Dell Inspiron 16 Plus laptop .
• The “Homelab”: Runs on an old Dell XPS 15 and a Raspberry Pi 5 .
• NAS: QNAP TS469 Pro .
• Dock: The Inspiron connects to a Dell SD25TB4 dock.
• Monitors: An HP 24" and an HP 23". The laptop is on a stand so the screen sits at roughly the same height as the external monitors.
• Mouse: Logitech M590 .
• Keyboard: Currently a Logitech MX Keys S . I am on a hunt for a near-silent keyboard that feels good to type on, so this is not my “forever” keyboard. I am looking into having a split ergonomic keyboard made with Choc Twilights in the hope that it will be an improvement.
• Audio interface: Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 .
• USB Hub: A generic USB 3 hub, because there can never be enough USB ports.

Software

• OS (Working PC): Manjaro —a flavor of Arch Linux that is not quite so scary to install. I have gone from Windows through Linux Mint, then Kubuntu, and am currently on Manjaro. I have no real incentive to move.
• OS (Homelab): Both machines run on Ubuntu Server . This was based on a recommendation from Mischa van den Burg and has not caused any dramas.
• Desktop Environment: Sway and Wayland . I prefer keyboard-driven switching to flashy graphics and normally turn all animations off. So far, after some initial teething issues, this has been working very well. Booting up automatically opens three sessions: Obsidian, email, and a browser, and I open others as required.
• Email: Thunderbird . I have a couple of automations built in here to easily track emails in Obsidian.
• PKM: Obsidian . I moved here from Evernote and have never regretted it.
• Clipboard Manager: CopyQ . I used Ditto on Windows and this was the closest I could find.
• Keyboard Expansions: Espanso . The only niggle I have is that it seems to lose its connection if I plug in the dock. I have a Zsh alias set to reconnect, but it would be great not to have to.
• Menu & List Handling: wofi . I use “drun” to pick from everything and utilize a couple of custom configs for things like my month-end finance process and a quick calculator.
• Taskbar: Waybar .
• Screenshots: Gradia for images that need tweaking, and Grim to go straight to the clipboard.
• Cloud Backup: pCloud .
• Phone Connectivity: KDE Connect .
• Voice-to-Text: whisrs . I am looking at alternatives at the moment.
• Music Recording: Ardour .
• Local Music: Audacious . Still looking for the perfect solution here.
• Browser: Brave Origin, but looking around.
• Terminal & Shell: Kitty as the terminal and Zsh as the shell, using Starship for the prompt. I previously used Alacritty and only left because I wanted built-in image support.
• Text Editor: Neovim for editing, programming, and debugging. I was a long-time VS Code user but like the fast startup and Vim key productivity. Learning the Vim keys is still a journey—and I know I can use them in VS Code—but I’m sticking with Neovim via LazyVim for now. I just need to figure out a remap to avoid messing up the paste buffer.
• Office Suite: LibreOffice . It’s close enough to what I’m used to for me to be quickly productive.
• File Manager: Yazi manages most of my files. I revert to Dolphin if I need drag-and-drop, but rarely otherwise. I have looked at Ranger and Midnight Commander, but Yazi was the first and it’s hard to dislodge.
• Git Client: LazyGit is my command-line Git client of choice. I use SmartGit if I want a full GUI.
• Backups: All done with rsync scripts.
• E-Book Management: Calibre for handling books and working with my Kindle.
• PDFs: Created via scans with gscan2pdf and viewed with Okular .
• Finances: hledger .

That’s about it for regular programs. I do some scripting in Python and Zsh, utilizing fzf and ripgrep there. I’m sure I have left some things out, but I will add anything missing as I find it.

• Productivity