My free software toolkit for school, redux

Previously: 2018

I've tried my best to use only free software as part of going back to school, and for the most part I've been pretty successful.

I picked up a new Framework 13 right before school started. I appreciate having USB-C charging options on both sides and being able to move the HDMI port to either side depending on the configuration of the room.

Really I just like the orange color scheme I picked out for myself.

I installed Fedora Silverblue on it; I'm a really big fan of the whole atomic OS concept, it works quite well. I've been able to use Flatpaks for nearly everything.

Firefox: not much to say here, it just works.

LibreOffice: I take all my notes in LibreOffice, which is good enough as it's mostly just bullet points and a few tables here and there. All of our writing assignments are required to be submitted in .docx format, so my final step on every assignment is to convert my .odt to Word format. I think, but am not actually sure, Word may have better support for formatting and managing citations than LibreOffice. Its on my todo list to see what it would extra functionality writing an extension would give me.

Signal: our cohort's main group chat is in Signal, and so is my study group's. It wasn't even a thing I had to push for, it was the default that others chose! The only downside is that a number of people have set their profile name to a single letter or gibberish, so I've slowly had to set nicknames for everyone.

draw.io: I really like using draw.io to make a diagram version of my study guide, and my friends were pretty impressed with how nice they looked. During my first semester I used the website, but I've now switched to the offline Electron version.

Nextcloud: I store all of my school work in a self-hosted Nextcloud instance. I tried using the flatpak version of the desktop client but it had some issues that I went back to the RPM version, which integrates with Nautilus much better.

Kiwix: one of my professors had a rule that if we were going to use our laptops, we had to be offline. I found myself wanting access to a dictionary to look up latin and archaic terms, so I downloaded the latest ZIM of English Wiktionary and used Kiwix to access it in class while staying offline.

KeePassXC: for reasons that make zero sense, our login sessions on Brightspace (LMS) and other CUNY websites expire after an hour, which is far too short, so you have to keep logging in, over and over again. It would be pretty hard to design a system to get people to hate 2FA more than this one. KeePassXC (and other password managers to be clear) lets me store a TOTP seed in the database and generate codes. So logging in becomes a dance of: Ctrl+B (copy username), Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V, Tab, Ctrl+C (copy password), Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V, Enter, Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+T (copy TOTP), Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V, Enter.

Thunderbird is unfortunately not on this list because my school uses Outlook and they restrict OAuth access so I can't get it to work. Using webmail is actually awful, I can't believe that people have to deal with this for all their other email.