2026-02-21
Three events in no particular order.
Event 1: On November 8, 2025, Cloudflare went down, taking with itself dozens of other services that have it as a dependency. I could live without it; being offline does not mean I cannot continue my work—or so I thought. It was that day I learned that Postman needs me to be connected to the internet, something I never thought was necessary for just sending HTTP requests to my local backend application. So, after going online, I downloaded Bruno and bid Postman goodbye. It has been a very simple and straightforward solution. I just run Git as my backup for my collections.
Event 2: My experience with Linux dates back to when I started programming. But it has never been a daily driver for me. I could be just as productive and useful on Windows. I used to tell everyone that my number one and number two most favorite applications are Notepad and Paint, and rightfully so. These tools were so simple and one-dimensional in what they did, you could always expect how it would behave or how you should interact with it. I would have any and every type of draft written in Notepad. My to-do lists, meeting notes, snippets, everything. Some time 4 months back, I was prompted with a modal to use Copilot in Notepad. Now, I work professionally in the field of AI and LLMs. But it still felt very much forced. There was not any substantial need for Copilot into something that is essentially a place to just store your ramblings on a keyboard—even if it's some nonsense. Keep in mind that the copilot button was there for a long time before that—4 months. But it was not being tried to be shoved down my throat, so I did not bother. But for the past year or so, it has been feeling like Microsoft (and every other company that has any sort of visible footprint on the internet) is trying to feed me some AI bullshit.
Event 3: I used to do all my LaTeX editing on my laptop, locally. It works flawlessly. However, eventually, there came the need to collaborate with other people, and not every researcher or author is expected to manage Git repositories for academic publication (even if I think that they should be). So, like a million other people, I also had to log on to Overleaf. Don't get me wrong. It is a great tool. And for 80% of the time, it will work great. But a week before my undergraduate project report submission, I found that my overleaf project was not compiling at all. Overleaf hit me with a Time Limit Exceeded error because my project was too big. I had to get Overleaf Standard. I never ran through the whole duration of the subscription. But it is worth noting that the cost of that plan is $250/year. For something that just compiles your .tex files.
What I wanted to convey with all this is that, lately, it has been feeling like the control of our products has been slipping away from our hands all too quickly. The cost of comfort over control keeps rising, and we have to pretend that it's okay. I am no stranger to the Free Software Movement. I have been on the internet long enough. But I have never felt the urgency to take it more to heart than now. So, three months back, I switched completely to Linux for all of my devices. Then I repaired the old desktop I had at home, put a fresh install of Linux on it too, put it on all my spare hard drives, and started putting everything in it.
First, a lot of media. Pictures, movies, TV shows, books, music—everything. We had a nationwide internet blackout in July of 2024. I don't want to sound like a doomer and paranoid, but that has taken off my faith in the belief that the internet will always be there. It will not. So, anything I own had to be archived locally. Google Photos is not simply reliable anymore, and I feel much better about my privacy.
Then, Overleaf. Yes. The good folks have a community edition that you can self-host. You can collaborate without any limitations and no compilation timeouts. I didn't need anything else, and I didn't need to convince others to have TeX Live on their own systems and regularly commit to their repositories.
And then, things that are of lesser importance, and I can live without if the services go down, are Jellyfin, Gitea, n8n, Stirling, Omnitools, and Readeck (Long live Pocket).
Finally, seeding Linux ISOs. A lot of them. I have always been vocal about the necessity of archives and the right to them. I cannot host and seed all the Linux ISOs in the world. But I can definitely chip in. I have a dedicated drive that seeds data from a very popular shadow provider of Linux ISOs.