As researchers and journalists, we invest a lot of work and resources, even in our ‘free’ time. As independent and critical media are on the decline, despite their importance right now, and as universities in general and the humanities in particular are more and more faced with cuts in funding, having their overall relevance questioned, it is crucial for us to defend free knowledge as a common good. This doesn’t just apply to education, or the research findings produced within these institutions. The tools used in its discovery and production should be free as well. Today, this is less and less the case. From large companies acquiring reference managers, introducing paid features or locking down previously flexible community projects, down to the basic use of a simple word processor to write summaries in the first semester of a Bachelor’s degree—many universities still promote proprietary and commercial software, and spend sizeable parts of their budget to make discounted student or campus licenses possible, although completely free, and oftentimes better alternatives exist.
What’s true for desktop and mobile operating systems is equally valid when it comes to the applications they install by default, a lot are just unnecessarily bloated or work inefficiently and unstable. Additionally, they don’t respect your privacy, often include significant vulnerabilities and you can’t even do anything about it, because the code is not freely available.
Hence, I would encourage everyone to read this piece about “The case for free and open source software in research and scholarship” by Laura Fortunato and Mark Galassi. Another more extensive document primarily aimed at policymakers, universities and scholars is the UNESCO Open Science Toolkit. The basic philosophy of Free Software and the importance of its use in education have also been provided by the Free Software Foundation Europe.
I have primarily used Free and Open Source Software for the past few years. Even though there still is a lot to discover, I want to help other writers and creatives make the change toward more digital freedom and autonomy by sharing the software that I use. Since there can be a lot of shifts regarding contributors, especially for projects done voluntarily, and some are even maintained by either a few people or just a single person, and use cases can of course change over time, this list might change with time and experience—so please feel free to revisit in the future. And if you find projects you like, I’d encourage you to think about ways to contribute.
Computers and Operating Systems
Of course, many applications run on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and there is plenty of Free Software available outside of the Linux ecosystem. But true freedom and autonomy start at the level of your computer and its Operating System, and this is where Linux runs a race without competitors. Not only do you not need to invest anything except your time, to learn how to set up a Linux distribution that fits your needs, it most probably will also not try to spy on you, sell your data, or sell you any products or subscriptions.
Since I already had am M1 Macbook, I was glad to learn about Fedora Asahi Remix, which I could install without issues even as a beginner, and have been running since. If I could start fresh, I would probably go for a Framework Laptop with the advantage of being very customizable and repairable, Tuxedo’s InfinityBook, Purism’s Librem 14, or just a refurbished Thinkpad.
On the side of Linux distributions, there are plenty of choices and possibilities. Arguments like “but I need to do X, and X doesn’t work under Linux” are almost always obsolete nowadays, and based on an outdated understanding of Linux, and an underestimation of the creative potential of the FOSS community. From software development and scientific work to music production, graphic design and film editing, there are many options, tools, and workarounds.
Unfortunately, only a few distributions are officially endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, yet many popular distributions have a bad reputation among activists for very valid reasons, mostly due to either questionable decisions that lead to a lack in privacy or security, or because of the commercial interests of the involved actors. All the different flavors of Linux distributions can be reduced to just three main variants all the others are derived from: Debian, Fedora, and Arch.
Debian
Debian is still associated with most of the main tenets of the philosophy of the Free Software Foundation. Though through the possible inclusion of proprietary firmware during installation to get certain hardware running it is not completely free. Still, its community embodies the spirit that is most beneficial for the future of Open Source, and Debian prioritizes stability and long-term usability. That being said, it might not always suitable for the newest hardware and recent interventions.
Right now I’m looking into BunsenLabs, a lightweight Debian-based distribution, in case I can spare a few Euros for a used Thinkpad. Since I’m mainly handling text, this should be enough. But I wouldn’t mind getting my hands onto a more recent one, like the Thinkpad Z13, either. Anyways, I like the sleek minimal and text-based look, and although I really like Gnome and think even macOS gestures can’t compete with it, I might wanna move away from a desktop environment to a window manager.
Fedora
Even though I use the Fedora remix of Asahi Linux, a proper assessment of Fedora’s connection to the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux, even though maybe a bit less impactful than Ubuntu’s direct ties to Canonical, would not let me recommend it to anyone. Technically, it’s an amazing distribution and stands somewhere between Debian and Arch, offering more stability while also including more timely updates.
Arch
For the newest updates, and hardware support for recently products that have just become available, experienced users are better served with Arch Linux, which is released on a rolling basis—the kind of innovation that first enabled Asahi to run on Apple Silicon devices. It needs some work to configure, and for users who are not familiar with the Command Line, it is generally not advised.
Literature and Citation
The most important of my activities involve reading and writing, a lot of reading and writing. So having a pleasant experience going through various books and papers at the same time, highlighting, and organizing all that I read, is the foundation of my work. In the past when I was still on Windows, I used Citavi, and then Endnote later on Mac. Reflecting that at some point I would not be enrolled in a university anymore, I found it ludicrous to imagine paying more and more money for software that was bloated and basic at the same time, so I had to look for alternatives that allowed me to keep my collections and take them with me, wherever I would go.
Zotero
Zotero has been my reference manager of choice for the past few years. There might be other views, but I prefer to use it as well to organize all of my PDF files and annotate books and papers with the internal reader. Through plugins for nearly every purpose people can use it for note taking and planning, or link it with their personal knowledge management systems (like Logseq). I use Better BibTeX, Focus Mode and Reading List, which let’s you tag your sources according to their read status. The BibTeX file I maintain with Zotero is connected to Zettlr, the markdown app I use to write and format everything from newspaper articles to term papers and book chapters. The only caveat so far is that especially because scanned PDFs tend to remain very large even after compression, when keeping to many tabs open Zotero will simply crash. There usually is no data lost, but it’s annoying. Maybe with more than 8GB RAM I wouldn’t have this problem.
Jabref
I have only fleeting experience in working with JabRef, and I liked the interface, its smooth feeling, and of course its native LaTeX support. However, the lack of an internal PDF reader comes as a disadvantage for me, and I generally found the automatic metadata recognition of PDFs not as fast and accurate as when I use Zotero. This might be because I’m not as familiar, but I also found forum entries sharing the same experience.
Org-Ref
Since I’m kind of new to the game and not familiar with either Emacs or Org-Mode, I only recently learned that Org-Ref offers modules for referencing and managing bibliographies in Org-Mode. This is definitely something I want to look into, since I’m intrigued way more by Org-Mode than I was by Notion or even Logseq.
Writing
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t frustrated by Microsoft Word or felt limited by Apple Pages. Even LibreOffice offers much more functionality in my opinion, while not breaking every second paragraph like Word. So after trying out Scrivener and Ulysses and found them not to be suitable for my needs, I found Zettlr.
Zettlr
Given the fact that it neatly does everything I need a word processor to do, I don’t know why I found it so late in my academic training. This is a free, lightweight, and endlessly flexible toolbox for every kind of writer. I can effortlessly integrate citations, and due to everything being stored in a markdown file, Zettlr let’s me write first and think about the narrative structure, before I have to think about any layout. And even at the final stage, the translation of Markdown to LaTeX via Pandoc renders the most beautiful and small PDFs I have ever seen. Even my thesis was ridiculously small. I only had to learn a little bit of LaTeX to create a cover page, but even the LaTeX commands integrated seamlessly into the Markdown text without having to do anything else.
Apostrophe
Since I use the Gnome Desktop, I installed Apostrophe because I wanted to see how it would hold up as another minimal Markdown editor. I can’t lie, Apostrophe looks and feels exactly like I wished Zettlr would look and feel like. The distraction-free full screen is exactly like I want to work, while until now I didn’t manage to make Zettlr’s title bar disappear in full screen mode. If Apostrophe could work with Citations like Zettlr does…
Outlook
There is only so much I have tried yet, or even heard of. There is also Emacs, the free/libre text editor coming from the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, and of course LaTeX and R Markdown. In the future there will also be more on self-hosting, ways to set up resource efficient websites, and minimal computing.
If this is something that interests you, please check out the reading list and recommendations I’ve compiled.
Get Involved
If you are interested in informing yourself and others about digital freedom, and want to take action against surveillance capitalism and the commodification of our private data, take a look at these organizations. And please consider how you can contribute to Free and Open Source Software—either by using it and providing feedback and suggestions for improvement, by promoting it, or by taking part in its development.