Mastodon Lutra IT Tech blog – Tools of choice

Tools of choice

For most part, I will just work with any software that gets thrown at me. But there are some tools that I prefer over others. This list might grow and change over time

Git / project management tool

In december 2023 I was looking for a open, non commercial tool. And Forgejo has been at the center of my work since. Right at that time I joined Codeberg as member. Codeberg is maintainer of Forgejo, which started as a fork of Gitea.

Forgejo mascotte forging stuff

The only thing on my wishlist is a OpenBSD port.

Media Player

Videolan player all the way. Since the turn of the millenium or something :-) Runs on any desktop operating system I can think off. Plays any movie format you throw at it. Without external libraries. Has been amazing al those years.

Videolan logo

Office suite

Although I have licensed copies of other office suites, I still prefer Libreoffice, because it will work for me on any desktop operating system I can come up with!

Libre Office banner

Mailclient

Although a lot of different mail clients have some perks that I like, I mostly rely on Betterbird since last year. It is a Thunderbird fork that has more polish and bugfixes than the upstream version.

Betterbird logo

The things I really like is the cross-platform aspect and the S/MIME + GPG integration that works well enough.

Networking gear : Ubiquiti

High quality gear with easy to use webbased management. The integrated security cameras are great too.

Network gear

Dedicated firewall

Opnsense

For any serious firewall setup, I try to rely on OpnSense. Very nice WebUI, lots of features that just work and proper open source. OpnSense

Baldr home office firewall

At this time the home office is secured using a dedicated device from the creators of OpnSENSE. It is a really nice piece of kit that includes two 10GBE capable SFPs. So I get to saturate the KPN fiber Internet if I want to :-)