Everything I actually use, with a line on why each one, because a list of product names tells you nothing. Nothing here is aspirational; if it's listed, it ran today.
Desktop
Less riced than it used to be. The interesting part moved into the terminal.
- Fedora44 · KDE Plasma · Wayland
Recent packages without the rolling-release homework. I wanted a desktop I stop thinking about, and this is the first one that stuck.
Everything works out of the box, and anything that doesn't is a settings page away rather than a config file away.
Terminal
Where most of the day actually happens.
Fast, GPU-accelerated, and configured in a plain text file. Copy-on-select is the setting I'd miss first.
- tmux
Panes, windows and sessions without leaving the keyboard. This is my tiling window manager now, it just lives inside one window.
A prompt that shows the directory, the branch and the runtime, and nothing else. I don't need the weather in my shell.
Staging hunks interactively is the one git operation the CLI genuinely makes worse.
- eza, bat, fzf, zoxide
The standard set of modern replacements. `cd` learning where I actually go is the one I'd miss most.
- Claude Code + opencode
Aliased to two letters each, which says enough about how often they run.
Editor
A VS Code fork, so every extension and keybind I already knew came with me.
For quick edits without leaving the terminal. The config is one line long, and I've made peace with that.
Stack
What I reach for on a new project before thinking about it.
- TypeScript
Strict mode from the first commit. Turning it on later is a rewrite.
- Next.js
Server components mean most of my data fetching never reaches the browser. This site is Next 16.
- Bun1.4
Installs fast enough that adding a dependency stops feeling like a decision.
- Tailwind CSSv4
v4's CSS-only config finally removed the last JavaScript file I didn't want.
- Node + Express / NestJS
What most of my backend work is actually written in. Boring, well-understood, easy to hand over.
- Go
For small CLIs I want to ship as one binary with nothing to install first.
- PostgreSQL + Drizzle
A real database and a query builder that doesn't hide the SQL from me.
- Docker
So 'works on my machine' is a statement about the container, not the laptop.
Daily
- Google Chrome
Where the DevTools I already know live. Not a principled choice, just the one I stopped arguing with.
How I think through anything with more than three moving parts. I liked it enough to build a Chrome extension so I could save drawings locally.
- Spotify
Always on. It's also the thing feeding the now-playing card on this site's homepage.
- Discord
Where I actually talk to other developers, including the server I run.
- Slack
Where work talks to me. Kept separate from Discord on purpose.
Hardware
- Dell Precision 5520i7-7820HQ · 32 GB RAM · 1920×1080
A 2017 workstation laptop. It is not fast by 2026 standards, and it has never once been the reason something took too long.
- The built-in keyboard
No mechanical board yet. This is the honest answer and I'd rather write it than invent one.