Joseph Leskey

I really like where Ente is going. It's open source, end-to-end encrypted, audited, and self-hostable, but at the same time has a clean UI, fairly priced centrally hosted cloud storage (across multiple servers), and incredible cross-platform support (across mobile, desktop, and web). It even has quite decent on-device machine learning (face and concept identification) and geotagging. It has basic image editing support. The team behind it seems friendly and transparent. I heartily approve and am...

I really like where Ente is going. It's end-to-end encrypted but provides full cross-platform syncing. It has pretty good on-device machine learning. It looks and feel great. I'm really excited to see where it goes from here; it seems like it's shaping up to be the best photos platform yet.

Twitter was pretty fun. X is paywalled in all the wrong places, bloated, and AI-infested. That's not to mention the degraded quality of its content and the somewhat cultish culture of its biggest fans. It's moderation is a joke, amplifying extremists and possible bot activity while seeming to go against journalism and peaceful dissent. And it's proprietary and centralized, which I think is kind of outmoded these days. Would not recommend.

Bluesky is quickly turning into my favorite social media platform at the moment. It's open source, technically decentralized, and very fun. It has a good set of features – it lets you quote posts, unlike Mastodon, though I'm still hoping for the option to save them – and some of them are particularly enjoyable, such as the feeds. The default feeds are excellently sensible (a discover feed and people you follow, for example), but you can follow or create others at will. The look and feel is...

Mastodon is a very solid, open source, and pretty well decentralized alternative to Twitter. It's fairly minimalistic and easy to work with, but there are some caveats. It does not appear that you are currently able to quote posts, and sometimes the synchronization between decentralized pods is not quite what one would like it to be. Still, it is very much worth a try.

KDE Plasma is an incredible take on the traditional desktop metaphor. It is at once lightweight, feature-complete, and aesthetically pleasing. What's more, it is arguably the most customizable and flexible desktop environment I have come across. Add to that its solid integration with modern technologies, quality of life features like external device battery monitoring, and the vast KDE ecosystem, and it's really hard to beat it.

The Battle for Wesnoth is one of the most well-designed games I have yet played. It's hard to beat the feeling of successfully leading one's armies to victory after a grueling battle. Wesnoth is focused on the selection of recruits, tactical engagement, and the proper use of environment and terrain.

The gameplay, while simple, is remarkably satisfying. Players can choose to play multiplayer scenarios (against other players and/or AI) or story-based campaigns that tap into the lore of...

Proton offers a good quality alternative to the Google ecosystem, and it is on track to offer a great one. Proton Mail offers quite robust privacy features and all the functionality I could want from an email provider. I've had a very solid experience so far.

Though Firefox is not perfect, it's considerably closer to perfect than most browsers. It's simple, fast, and easy to use. It has reasonable privacy features, great development tools, and broad functionality. I have tried many different browsers, but I always seem to come back to Firefox.

Though I prefer Fedora and consider openSUSE a better alternative, Ubuntu is not without its perks. If you prefer a slower pace when it comes to updates, solid stability, and broad support, Ubuntu is a decent option, and it is very easy to use. It is extremely popular for good reason. It has had some controversy over telemetry and its snap packages, but it remains a considerably better operating system than others I could mention.