Recommendations

Fairphone The Fairphone (Gen. 6) is a modular smartphone targeting Android, while officially supporting alternative operating systems, including Linux-proper.

Its modularity allows for a removable battery and replacement of most of the internal components, providing the ability to swap the battery for a pre-charged one, and easing repair of broken components.

It also supports expanding its 256 GB internal storage via a microSD card, up to 2 TB.

Its USB specification is USB 2.0. If you require USB 3.0 support, consider Fairphone Fairphone 5.

As it does not support DisplayPort-out, consider Fairphone Fairphone 5 if you require DisplayPort-out support.

Fairphone Fairphone 5 is a modular smartphone targeting Android, while officially supporting alternative operating systems, including Linux-proper.

Its modularity allows for a removable battery and replacement of most of the internal components, providing the ability to swap the battery for a pre-charged one, and easing repair of broken components.

It also supports expanding its 128/256 GB internal storage via a microSD card, up to 2 TB.

Its USB specification is USB 3.0.

Fairphone 5 supports DisplayPort-out, providing the ability to use it in a desktop mode as a PC.

Gentoo Linux is a highly-modular, source-based, Linux-based operating system which allows vast customisation to tailor the operating system to suit your specific needs. There are many advantages to such an operating system, with the most notable being the ability to optimise the software for security, privacy, performance, or power usage; however, there are effectively unlimited other use cases, or a combination of multiple use cases.

I have focused on security hardening and privacy hardening, placing performance below those aspects, although my system is still very performant. Some of the hardening I apply includes stack protection, signed integer overflow trapping, and GrapheneOS' hardened_malloc memory allocator.

You can find my Gentoo Linux configurations in my configuration respository.

musl is a lightweight C standard library which aims to be correct, standards-compliant, and safe. Unlike glibc, it greatly conforms to POSIX standards, deviating very little by keeping its own non-standard extensions to a minimum, and takes care to not break such conformity.

Also unlike glibc, due to its lightweight and standards-compliant design, musl is portable and well-suited for use in any system, whether desktop, server, or embedded.

XLibre is a community-developed fork of the X.org X11 display server which Red Hat has left to rot in favour of the very-broken and mostly-featureless Wayland display server, which is not actually a replacement for X11, but a poorly-designed, poorly-developed, ideological spin-off display server which breaks and lacks many features X11 provides, by design^[0], while misleading users about the "security" improvements it provides.

Unlike Wayland, X11 provides all features to all compositors, rather than having what is effectively stub code providing nothing of value, forcing every compositor to reinvent the wheel and cause egregious fragmentation. Wayland does not care about individual users' requirements, or users with accessibility requirements. XLibre is the true future of Linux display servers, not the poorly-written spin-off which is Wayland.

Users not being able to use their own system due to broken, or lack of, features is a security issue due to lack of availability.

Chromium is a highly-secure web browser which is often ahead of other web browsers in security aspects. It has a dedicated security team and a very-impressive security brag sheet. Chromium's security features include a strong multi-layer sandbox, strong site isolation, Binding Integrity memory hardening, and control-flow integrity (CFI).

Git is highly-flexible and feature-rich version control software which allows fast, cheap branching for any source code development use case, allowing rapid, flexible development in either centralised or decentralised configurations, whether client-server model or peer-to-peer.

Gitea is an all-in-one development platform with Git hosting, code review, team collaboration, package registry and CI/CD.

SimpleX is a secure and private messenger which can be used anonymously, allows multiple profiles within the same database, has vast metadata-stripping/metadata-hiding features, and is decentralised.

No account is required; all profiles are generated and stored on-device, are sent only to contacts and groups, and never leave the device unencrypted.

One of the multiple unique features of SimpleX is the ability to generate 1-time contact links, which expire after a single user has used it to add you as a contact. Traditional persistent links are also supported and can be used when it is preferable to post your contact link somewhere for anyone to use.

Conversations is a well-designed Android XMPP client which serves as the de facto XMPP reference client and has great usability.

It supports the latest and most important XMPP extensions (XEPs), including, but not limited to:

• XEP-0384 (OMEMO Encryption): Provides end-to-end encryption with perfect forward secrecy
• XEP-0065 (SOCKS5 Bytestreams): Allows file transfers behind network address translation and firewalls
• XEP-0198 (Stream Management): Allows XMPP to survive small network outages and changes of the underlying TCP connection
• XEP-0215 (External Service Discovery): Facilitates peer-to-peer audio and video calls via STUN/TURN
• XEP-0280 (Message Carbons): Allows synchronising messages across different XMPP clients and sessions
• XEP-0313 (Message Archive Management): Allows storing messages on, and synchronising messages with, the server, which is useful for scenarios such as being offline
• XEP-0363 (HTTP File Upload): Allows sharing files in multi-user chats and with offline contacts

ReFra is a lightweight image and video viewer with image editing capabilities.

It has a clean and modern design without including unnecessary features, and runs smoothly. It provides both individual image and video file view, and folder view.

Open Camera is a camera app with professional-grade features, including the ability to save photographs in RAW (DNG) format, manually adjust focus and exposure, and manually select which camera lens to use.

Modern Android camera APIs are supported via Camera2 API.

Image Toolbox is an image-manipulation application with a vast array of functionality, including the ability to draw on images, add layers to images, add single or chained visual filters to images, and convert images to different formats via single-image and batch processing.

NerdCalci is a calculator with scientific and programmatic features, supporting variables, advanced syntax, and syntax highlighting.