Okay, having settled on a fleet of devices and distros, the next trick was consistency of the devices themselves – I wanted them all to feel like they were all rough incarnations of the same system.
Here’s the hellscape in which I have been living for years – fragmented environments. Let’s say I have Thunderbird installed on four computers, and a phone, and a tablet. Maybe on my main computer I have all my accounts available. Maybe the phone was so annoying to set up I only got half way through and got my main account and maybe the MLU account. Maybe one laptop only has my work email, maybe another only has my personal email. Thunderbird is pretty good at letting you sync accounts to mobile devices – you get a QR code you can scan – but it’s shit at syncing between desktops. So what happens if I need to access a personal email when I am at a machine that only has the work account? Irritation, but not sufficient to make me actually fix it because doing things properly takes more time and often in the spur of the moment I just need a thing.
One solution is maybe to have fewer email addresses, but no. Bad. I shed these things like a cocoon when the spammers find them. Some are jealously guarded and only a handful of people have them. Some are open on the internet and thus hostile hellscapes full of horrors. Email addresses are toxicity containment zones.
The real solution is clearly to sync things up, but how do you do that on a fleet of systems with wildly differing configurations and software availability? You do it poorly and with bad grace! So generally I didn’t. I just allowed myself to simmer in a low-grade stew of baseline frustration.
My life for pretty much the entire Internet era has been one of mailing myself files to work with, occasional attempts to get OneDrive or Google Drive to work consistently and not with random malice, and a general acceptance that sometimes I only get to work on things at home. But it doesn’t have to be that way… and again, it is consistency of platform that is the solution. And when I spoke about the deshittification rating, I hinted at this. Full shittification, for all its flaws, is seamless and that is appealing.
Much of my Deshittify project has been to increase friction – abandoning lock-in in favour of decentralised systems I control. Now I’m starting to reap the benefits of it – I can start sanding down some of that friction in ways that I choose. And part of that is now – Syncthing and Tailscale. I’ll talk about these properly in another post.
These twio tools let me basically put a bunch of directories up into a private mesh network and sync them across many systems. Okay, so what – so does Google Drive. But what Linux lets me do is mount directories like hard-drives, which means that as far as my experience is concerned I have my work drive right there on all the other systems. I access it the same way on every system. And when I make changes it syncs on everything. So no more ‘did I email myself that file?’, it’s just there. Magic.
But wait, there’s more!
Knowing that everything is on a common core means I can be more aggressive about how and where and why that syncing happens. I don’t need five different Thunderbird config directories each taking into account path differences, directory trees, and distro expectancy. I can sync the critical elements and then patch them into the new context with a command line script. Same with Librewolf. I don’t need a mess of third party sync tools or proprietary bookmark managers. It just all syncs up. I could do it with OS themes and such too but I don’t want to forgoe the option of tweaking my desktop experience to match screen sizes and configurations.
This means that some of my ropier experiments over this year (like running Obsidian from a remote storage box through WebDAV) can be replaced with more robust solutions.
This is the kind of thing I was hoping would happen as I went through this experiment. I never intended necessarily for permanent friction in a lot of things [1], but rather I accepted friction as the present price of future smoothness. Essentially what I want is something akin to the seamlessness of living inside the Apple ecosystem but without the cost [2]. And in order to do that I needed to rewrite a lot of my habits and stop simply working around the tech. I needed to start working with the grain.
So, bookmarks, emails, application configurations, plugins, files, desktop experience, file architectures – all of it works seamlessly now. It doesn’t feel like having a bunch of computers any more, but rather owning a platform with plug-in components. Setup cost for each is a few minutes, long-term benefit is incalculable.
There are still some problems though, and they come down again to my employer. What my current fleet doesn’t let me do is outsource MFA authentication. I’m forced to use Microsoft authenticator unless I explore what a Yubikey may allow. And that authentication is on my Toilet Tablet with all the other shitware. It won’t be available when I’m at work, and if i need to authenticate I can’t. I could move the authenticator onto my phone, but of course that misses the whole point of this endeavour.
So, when do I need to authenticate? Currently:
1) When I check email. Like, at least every 24 hours.
2) When I access the Chalmers intranet, which I try to do as little as possible
3) When I need to use Teams. I’m sure there’s plenty I should be doing through Teams, but I only ever use it when someone forces it on me in a meeting.
This remains then the only real sticking point on a move to Linux. Turns out, games are fine. On Nobara I don’t even need to run third-party launchers through Steam. It all Just Works. A few hold-out shitware corporate lock-in platforms are a problem (Adobe for example) but I’ll simply refuse to use anything that requires shittification. Chalmers is the final boss of reasserting control over my technology – the enforced VPN and the constant need to authenticate through an Authenticator that they insist upon. If they let me do it through Bitwarden, there would be no problem.
I am so close to having the optimally sovereign desktop and laptop experience. It feels like finally exhaling a deep breath I didn’t even realise I was holding.
Next step here is to see how far I can carry this philosophy onto phones and tablets, or whether I need to take the plunge and find some kind of Linux phone/tablet experience that decouples me entirely from Android [3]. And then we can look at my subscriptions and work out how to finally end my dependence on big-tech entirely.
By this point in Project Unplug I had realised the futility of the task – you can’t live a life off the Internet nowadays if you’re also expecting to be a functioning person in a workplace and a society. At this point in Deshittify 2026 I’m much more optimistic. I reckon I will be able to hit a goal of 90% Deshittification by the end of 2026. It’s not the total slam dunk I’d want, but enough that I no longer feel like I’m an inventory item in a massive data warehouse being shuffled around for the convenience of Mark Zuckerburg.
[1] Although I did in some, like with my Bluefox. I want it to be less convenient to do the things I don’t want to want to do.
[2] My soul
[3] As much as I love my tiny phone, I think we may have come to the end of the Bluefox experiment.