My tech stack (2026)

Posted on June 4, 2026  •  4 minutes  • 712 words

A snapshot of what I actually use. Not aspirational, not a distro review. Just the tools that survived contact with daily work.

system

• Arch Linux : rolling release, minimal by default, AUR when I need something obscure. Same distro I’ve been on for years; I stopped distro-hopping a long time ago. I like the idea of NixOS and nix shell, but Nix flake syntax scares me.
• i3 : tiling window manager. Pretty barebones setup. Keyboard-driven, no animations, no nonsense. I replaced i3bar with i3status-rust . I don’t need a full desktop environment; I need windows where I put them.

• X11, not Wayland: I’ve been putting off the migration. Screen sharing is the blocker: on X11 I can share a specific window in a call; on Wayland I still end up sharing the whole screen more often than I’d like. i3 is X11-only anyway, so there’s no rush. I’ll move when that workflow feels solved, not when a release note tells me to.

software

• Firewall: OpenSnitch . Lovely piece of software. An application-level firewall that tells you what’s trying to phone home.
• Editor: VS Code , Zed , or Sublime Text , depending on my mood. Yes, Sublime. I still use Sublime Text in 2026. It just works, starts instantly, and I have a decade of muscle memory in it. No strong loyalty to any one of them; I pick whichever feels right that day.
• AI coding agent: I change this whenever something shinier shows up. Right now it’s Pi paired with a local LLM (Qwen 3.6 35B A3B at the moment, or whatever hot new model drops next week). Sometimes Cursor Agent too, because I got it for free.
• Browser: Firefox . I’m rooting for Firefox. Better privacy posture, and I simply don’t trust Google with the browser. Chrome becoming the new IE is not a future I want to live in. Vertical tabs are one of those things I wouldn’t go back from. Extensions: uBlock Origin , Bitwarden , Obsidian Web Clipper, SponsorBlock . The Web Clipper is essential: I read a lot and save anything I find interesting for later.
• Terminal: Kitty . Fast, GPU-accelerated, sensible defaults.
• Shell: bash. Boring, everywhere, good enough.
• Notes: Obsidian . One of the very few closed-source apps on my machine, together with the NVIDIA driver. Obsidian stores everything as plain text files on disk, so I’m making an exception. My notes stay mine and stay portable.
• Screenshots: Ksnip . Very good for what it does. I bind a key in i3, select the area, annotate, copy, and share. That’s the whole workflow.
• Games: Steam and Heroic Games Launcher for alt stores (GOG, Epic, and the like). Gaming on Linux is better than ever. Most stuff just works with Proton-GE or Proton-CachyOS . If gaming is your main thing, consider a rolling release distro. That’s where you’ll get the latest updates for your graphics stack (drivers, Mesa, and the rest).

services

• Email: Fastmail . I don’t self-host email (the operational overhead isn’t worth it), but Fastmail is privacy-respecting and just works.
• Password manager: Bitwarden . Can be self-hosted if you want. They have a masked email feature that integrates with Fastmail, which is nice. I can spin up a disposable email with a few clicks.
• RSS: Miniflux , self-hosted on my homelab. Lightweight, keyboard-driven, exactly what I want from a feed reader.
• Photos: Immich , self-hosted on my NAS. Crazy good piece of software, and very fast compared to Synology Photos. I migrated my Synology DS918+ to an all-flash NAS earlier this year.
• VPN: Tailscale with Mullvad as an exit node. I don’t buy Mullvad directly; I get it through Tailscale because it’s super convenient.

hardware

The desktop itself. A workstation I built a few years ago (I wrote about the build ) and haven’t felt the need to replace, especially with RAM and NVMe prices skyrocketing these days.

• CPU: Threadripper PRO 3995WX . A beast. I can throw pretty much anything at it. I contribute software packaging for Alpine, Arch Linux, and Wolfi on and off, so having 64 cores is nice.
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5090 + RTX 3090
• RAM: 256GB ECC DDR4
• Storage: 2TB SSD
• Case: ASUS ProArt PA602 E-ATX
• Webcam: Logitech Brio 4K
• Microphone: Shure MV7
• Keyboard: Neo65 Cu , 65% layout