I began this pretty much instantly after I posted my intentions. Get a head-start on the deshittification – after all, who wants to live with shit? Didn’t make much sense waiting.
So this is where I start from in 2026.
Ditch Windows. The platform is actively psychotic at this point. Gaming on linux is feasible now, right?
It’s gone off of my home PC. And I shall likely do the same thing with my work laptop when I’m sure this is doable. I’m using Pop_OS which is a distro with good gaming credentials. The first 24 hours with it were almost stereotypically Linux. I had to install a new desktop manager. The one the comes with Pop_OS has a bug which means it opens an overlay and doesn’t close it every so often, which means no widget can keep focus. It makes it literally unusable. I had to install a virtual machine to get a Windows install so I could update the firmware on my Xbox controller. It is full of snagging like that, but it seems mostly fine. It feels belligerently unresponsive at times when dealing with NTFS drives but that will go, I assume, as I gradually migrate over to native stuff.
So 2026 here is mostly going to be fighting the impulse to reinstall Windows and return to my comfort zone.
Pick up some wearable NFC enabled keyfob for replacing Google Wallet.
I picked up a Tapster keyfob and it seems pretty good! I did have to enter my card’s pin-code last time I used it, which was slightly problematic because I had no idea what it was. But now I just need to remember that code instead of the Google Wallet dance, which is:
1) Unlock the phone with my code
2) Open up Google Wallet
3) Authenticate with BankID because nothing in life is ever easy and it never trusts that I unlocked the phone legitimately
4) Sometimes wave the phone several times over the terminal
5) Every so often quit the process and restart because something went wrong.
The Tapster fob is really just like a card in a more convenient form factor. If only I could get the same thing for Vasttraffik I wouldn’t need to carry a phone at all
Install Before Launcher on the phone so it’s a pain in the hole to spend much time on it. Get it down to the minimum viable product for living in Sweden.
I installed Before Launcher and it does help. Putting the phone in greyscale supposedly helps but I’m not sure it’s that impactful. But I’ve also been investigating what that minimum viable product phone would be. A dumb phone isn’t feasible in Sweden due to BankID. But maybe a small phone? I quite like the look of the BlueFox NX1. Something very small and unobtrusive with a screen inconvenient enough to be annoying. Realistically I could get by in life with a very minimal device (but we’ll get back to that)..
Redirect all the intrusive shitware to a sacrificial tablet that I don’t actually use for anything much.
Sadly the sacrificial tablet I wanted to use for this is an old Huaewei one and as such can’t be used for some of the things I wanted it for (Microsoft authenticator for one thing). So instead I upgraded my existing tablet and turned my older one into the Shitware tablet. Literally at the moment all it has is Microsoft authentictor (which I’m forced to use for work) but it will eventually be where I reroute gmail and other toxic waste products. However, maybe the real answer here is something like a Yubikey – they’re a bit pricey though for what they do.
Ditch Spotify (maybe) and blow the dust off of all my old ripped MP3s. I once had an extensive music library. Now I rent the same 500ish songs on a monthly basis.
I’ve looked into this and you know what – I don’t know. Yeah, Spotify is enshittified and deeply algorithmic and screwing over artists. But it’s also so convenient. I’m going to defer this decision until later in the year.
Replace all my big-tech applications with better ones. Why am I using Word when I enjoy Obsidian so much? What are the chances do you think I could get all my favourite people back onto IRC?
Let’s be honest, the chances are zero. But I’m currently writing this in Obsidian and I moved to LibreOffice. I have no Microsoft products on this system now. Not missing anything, but that’s not surprising. I haven’t liked a single Microsoft application since Word 5 on Mac.
One super good thing about moving from Windows is that the Teams malware is no longer anywhere on my system. Fuck Teams. Fuck everyone trying to make me use it. If it’s on Teams, I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist.
No more services, insofar as that’s at all possible
I cancelled my IDrive subscription, and my Google storage account, and instead paid for a storage bucket on Hetzner (which currently hosts my web accounts and servers and so on). Hetzner are great – they’re really just an appliance company, not a ‘service’ so they just give you the resources and stand back. So I replaced all that awkward iDrive backing up with an rsync script. 5TB of storage costs about 10 euros, which is reasonable. I might even knock it up to 10TB, especially if I do want to be streaming my own ripped music.
I’m on Amazon Prime but I’ll cancel that. BitWarden but I’ll keep that. Spotify… I don’t know. As I say, I’m torn here. I have a Singa subscription for karaoke but I’m not going to set up my own Karaoke infrastructure. I paid for a month of PocketMags to see if I’d enjoy high-friction, long-form magazine content as opposed to endless scrolling.
I did say ‘if a device or app needs a subscription it can go fuck itself’, but I had to pay for a year of Owl to make Thunderbird usable for Exchange. It was only 10 euros so it’s not that big a deal but if you make an exception for a good reason you’ll eventually make one for a bad reason. That said, perhaps I need to think of Owl as not so much a service but a necessarily line-item in a ‘defence’ budget – part of maintaining a moat so that the encroaching shitware can’t get at me.
Document ‘computer creep’ and mindfully curate.
This will be a big ongoing part of what I’m doing. Currently part of that curation is going to look at Google Photos, my gmail accounts, Spotify, Youtube, Adobe PDFs, Discord/Slack, Zoom, and Linkedin use. I really only use Linkedin because it’s the funniest social network out there but again, ‘if you make an exception for a good reason…’
If something is better digital, the next question is ‘is it better decentralised’.
I follow a bunch of people online who are into digital minimalism, and I even occasionally check out the subreddit (embarrassing to admit, but I only check Reddit for the articles). And I see people starting 2026 with their digital minimalism toolkit which is:
- A dumbphone
- A physical camera
- A notebook
- A Pen
- A pair of wired headphones
- A Nintendo DS
- An iPod Nano
- A physical book
And there’s a point where you need to ask ‘Is this deshittifying or is this fetishizing?’. I’m not implacably opposed to the phone as a multi-purpose device. I just resent how non-consensual it is. Looking at my phone, there are 23 apps that I don’t want on it and still can’t uninstall. But the idea of a single unified device that does the main things I need is still appealing. I like the idea of a device that combines my music playing and my camera and my phone and my notes app together. I don’t want to carry around a backpack of tech to replicate what one phone can do. I just want to have more control over what that phone does. Part of my problem is that I use a work phone, which means I’m subject to three separate shittification architectures (Samsung, Google, and my employer) Getting a Smallphone could be my answer.
Turn everything possible, and I mean everything into a pull ecosystem. No more pushing. The first time an application tries to get me to upgrade to a higher tier, or install an AI plugin, or whatever – it’s gone and replaced.
This one is going to need a long-term audit, and it’s going to be rough. I love Overleaf but it’s trying to force AI into every fucking crevice and I don’t want that. I’m not anti-AI, but I want it to be an appliance like a search engine. I want to use it warily and critically, not reflexively.
Otherwise, this has been a long-term goal since Project Unplug. I have no notifications on my phone, or my computer, and it’s phenomenal. The two main pieces of advice I have for people who want a calmer online life is a) get rid of as much Social Media as you can, and b) Switch off all your notifications. Your devices don’t tell you when they need your attention, you decide that.
I suspect this is going to be the ‘quiet bloodbath’ portion of the project.
So, this is the last we’ll hear about it?
Nope! This is the start of the project, and it feels like a good starting point. But the real trick is rebuilding patterns of interaction and attention. People fail in projects like this because they confuse activity with mindset. This is an aggressive reboot of my attention ecosystem, but the old grooves are hard to get out of and they’ll need mindful curation. You can rewire your computer in a week, but you can’t rewire your head.
Happy obviously to talk about any of this with anyone, and if you have any thoughts, tips and pitfalls you forsee let me know!