Software that brought me joy in 2025

2026-01-08

This isn't a definitive list at all. I just wanted to highlight some of my favorite software that I began using in 2025.

Fedora

2025 was the year I finally worked up the courage to switch to a Linux distribution on my main laptop.

I used Windows for most of my life, but a combination of disliking the design changes between Windows 10 and 11 and an interest in Linux's user customization finally pushed me to try it out. A few years ago, I tried Linux Mint and Manjaro in VMs, ended up liking KDE Plasma more than Cinnamon, and dual booted Manjaro on an old laptop. I didn't use the install much, because the laptop had a dead battery and was forever tethered to a wall, but it gave me my first taste of what running Linux on real hardware was like. When I got my new (current) laptop, I was initially too scared to install Linux and potentially "mess it up," so I stuck to Windows 11.

When I started college, I joined the UIUC GNU/Linux User Group (GLUG) and met a lot of people who used Linux daily. Seeing that they were able to do college coursework with almost no issues on Linux gave me confidence to try it myself. In fact, I chose Fedora because I already knew other students who daily drove it.

In January of last year, I dual booted Fedora and... basically didn't use it for six months. I really enjoyed how customizable everything was (With a combination of various themes I found online, I made my install look almost exactly like Windows 7) but my entire life was still on the laptop's Windows install.

Finally, in June, I decided it was time to migrate all of my data to the Fedora install, which is probably one of the best decisions I've ever made. Except for the rare cases where software isn't compatible with Linux, I never boot into Windows.

If you're curious about my Fedora install, check out my dotfiles!

Rockbox

2025 was also the year I attempted my first hardware repair, replacing the battery and storage in an old iPod Photo. After replacing the broken hard drive with a CF to SD card converter and a CF to IDE board, I decided to run Rockbox for its features and themes.

Being able to run modern software on my iPod from 2005 is amazing. It took less than 5 minutes to install and includes every feature I'd want in digital audio player software. It can play my FLACs and I can store my listening history to upload to my last.fm account. I use the Interpod theme, which is really modern and clean looking, almost like if Apple Music ran on iPods.

The experience isn't perfect -- I occasionally have an issue where the iPod throws an out of memory error halfway into the first song it plays after turning on, and I have to requeue songs (though everything plays perfectly afterward for the rest of the session). The cause could be some combination of having nearly 60 gigabytes of music, trying to play large FLAC files and queue up long playlists on a device with only 32 MB of ram, and hardware damage from sitting unused and nonfunctional in a drawer for over 10 years. It hasn't been annoying enough for me to try to fix yet.

Considering I can play lossless audio on a 20 year old portable music player and share my listening history from it online with my friends, I'm more than happy.

iamb

Fast, reliable, and I didn't have the same issues with trying to get my session verified that I did with Neochat. I ended up building an rpm from source (my first time ever doing this) and switched to Kitty to get image support. When I want to use Matrix on my laptop, iamb is my go-to client.

The existence of iamb makes me appreciate open source protocols more. The official Discord client is fine, but I enjoy having options.

...and beyond?

I started off 2026 by turning an old PC into a homelab, and considering how much joy it's brought me so far, it'll definitely make this year's list. Blogpost soon.