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Software I use (2025)

Jonathan

• 5 min read
An AI generated illustration showing a stylised application window on the right with other decorations around it.There is an integrated circuit chip,musical notes,bulb,and lines.

I've seen various tech people share lists of the software they use, and having been inspired by Neil in this blog post I've chosen to share mine. Personally I find these lists interesting, and they've led me to find new tools that I want to use like Wallabag.

Primarily I'm focusing on applications that I use on my laptops (Linux and Windows), but I'll mention a few Android / iOS apps too.

I've written before about the six top networking tools I use (2020) and my top five general tools (2019) and both are mostly still valid.

Contents

"AI"

In my personal life I use Google Gemini, while for work I'll use Microsoft Copilot as it is part of my Microsoft 365 licence.

For development work I use JetBrains AI to save myself a lot of time, sometimes also using JetBrains Junie for bigger pieces of work. These have a credits based system, with ten credits per month included in my JetBrains all products pack subscription. Additional credits seem reasonably priced.

Audio editing

I don't perform audio editing often, but when I do it's Audacity that I turn to. Audacity is cross-platform, so I can use it on Windows and Linux, and has the tools I need for basic editing.

Backups

I use Duplicity and Dejadup on Linux to handle these. Duplicity is the engine running the backups, and in addition to providing encryption it also deduplicates and compresses the data, so backup takes up less space.

For my Windows machine, used for work, I ensure that any files I care about are backed up to OneDrive. If I want backups of other files then that's a manual process.

Blogging

Completely forgot to add this section, so had to edit the post after publishing 🤦‍♀️. For blogging I use Ghost, something I moved to in 2018. I've written some posts about Ghost in the past, including about how to fix some problems if self-hosting like me.

Calendar

For my personal calendars I'm using Google Calendar as that integrates well with my Android phones and the rest of my family.

Work wise I'm using Microsoft 365 and thus Outlook.

Development

This depends on the language I'm using:

As you can probably tell, I'm a big fan of the JetBrains suite of products, and finally took the plunge to purchase their all tools bundle in July 2025. The majority of their tools are based on IntelliJ Idea, meaning I can develop in a consistent layout with all the shortcut keys and functionality I'm expecting being present.

Disk encryption

Depends on Operating System:

  • Android - Built in
  • Apple - FileVault / iOS built in
  • Linux - LUKS
  • Windows - BitLocker

Documents, Slides, Spreadsheets

Again this varies for my personal (Google Docs) and work (Microsoft 365) lives.

When I was doing my A Levels and my Masters (dissertation here), I used LaTeX to typeset my documents. Word annoyed me with its inconsistencies and I really like the output from LaTeX.

eBook management

Calibre is my tool of choice here, and I've written about how to convert eBooks for better usage on Kobo.

File synchronisation

Mostly this is handled by Microsoft OneDrive, part of my Microsoft 365 licence. I use one laptop primarily (Framework 16) so there's not much need to synchronise files. When I have to use my secondary device (a Windows laptop) then my work files are stored in OneDrive / SharePoint. Other files I don't want synced onto my work laptop (family files, Steam games library, etc.).

Image editing

The GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP, is my go to here. For really quick edits on Windows I'll use Microsoft Paint, it's just a shame they can't keep Copiliot out of it!

Learning

This depends on the topic:

  • Pluralsight, for which I purchase a subscription (and thus should use a lot more!!)
  • Microsoft Learn
  • Webinars from ISC2 and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT

Music & podcasts

  • AntennaPod is my app of choice on Android
  • Amazon Music has a horrible interface, but can be useful before I've downloaded albums for use in something else
  • BBC Sounds seems to be the easiest way to listen to BBC podcasts, although when I find RSS feeds they get added to AntennaPod instead
  • Bandcamp is a platform that I like for music that's not necessarily mainstream
  • Strawberry music player is my go to music library manager and music player on Linux (it's also cross platform)
  • VLC is a versatile media player for files, streams, and optical media (DVDs)

I really should move to listening through a single audio app on my phone!

Password manager

I use 1Password on all my devices (Android, ChromeOS, iOS, Linux, Windows).

PDFs

Primarily I use the PDF reader built into whatever browser I'm using at the time, as I don't need to do anything complicated with PDFs. Sometimes on Linux I use the built in Gnome Document Viewer.

Read it later

Wallabag is my go-to tool for this, and I've blogged about it before.

Social networking

I'm on LinkedIn, Twitter (X), and Mastodon.

Text editing

Again, this depends on the OS I'm using. On Windows I'll use Notepad (although edit on the command line looks friendly and nostalgic). For Linux I'll use nano on the command line or the Gnome text editor.

For bigger scripts or code I'll use a development environment (above)

Text expansion (macros)

This was a category on Neil's list and not something I'd have considered otherwise.

I have macros built into my keyboards - either the Framework 16's keyboard, WASD v2, or Keychron K8 Pro. These allow me to press a couple of keys to get common expressions like my email address, web addresses, phone numbers, etc.

Web browsing

This depends on what I'm doing. For work, I use Microsoft Edge due to its integrations with Microsoft 365. Edge works on iOS, Linux, and Windows (my work device OSes). Sadly, at the moment, Edge on Linux doesn't sync my settings or bookmarks (but apparently does for some people 🤷‍♀️).

In my personal life, I'm a huge fan of Mozilla Firefox and have been for decades. With multiple online identities (e.g. my personal life, my APF account) I find the Multi-Account Containers functionality really useful.

If I'm just doing a quick search for something out of curiosity, or the browsing I'm doing isn't something I care about remembering, I'll use a private browser. A former boss thought I was very odd for doing this, but ultimately I don't need a whole bunch of cookies, cache, and history entries that I'll never care about again. Plus it gives me another browser instance for testing logins.

On my Android phone I have Firefox set to default to private browsing - no-one needs hundreds of tabs open forever that they increasingly don't care about, and this mode means tabs get auto-closed at seemingly a random time. If I care about it, I need to read about it there and then, or add it to Wallabag.

Banner image: Google Gemini created image following prompts about the fact I'd written this blog post.`