It’s the time of the year again to spend a few minutes looking back to the major things in tech that happened for me this year and ended up on this blog. So without further ado, let’s jump right in and have a look at the things that moved me in 2025.
Let’s start with my smartphone operating system. As I like my privacy, I’ve switched from device manufacturer Android flavors on my mobile phones a long time ago to fully open custom ROMs. First was Cyanogen Mod many years ago, which was followed by LineageOS. This year, I switched to GrapheneOS, which is probably the most secure and privacy preserving mobile operating system around. After half a year, I’m still fully convinced it was the right move.
On the fixed line side, I’ve celebrated the 10 year anniversary of getting fiber access in our Paris flat. In most parts in Europe this is probably not worth writing about. However, I spend most time in Germany rather than in Paris, and fiber in this country is still the exception, including at my home in the center of Cologne. Looking forward, I don’t see things happening on that front in 2026. But let’s see, I like positive surprises!
Next on my list is the fact that I spent more time editing office documents in the web browser on my Nextcloud / Onlyoffice deployment than I edited with the native Libreoffice application on my notebook. These days, I work on many documents on different notebooks and also mobile devices, and I also often work in collaboration with other people on the same documents. It’s a real game changer and I’m glad there are at least three competitive privacy preserving open source solutions that can be self-hosted.
Almost 20 years back I started to edit first documents on my smartphone with a Bluetooth keyboard. But then, notebooks became thinner and smaller and its advantages outweighed the even smaller size of a smartphone. This year, however, I’ve picked up this somewhat forgotten habit again, as smartphones have become a lot more powerful, which in turn has significantly improved usability. I call it ultra-mobile work.
Over the years, I have bought quite a number of hard disks, as my storage requirements kept expanding. Older and smaller drives are reused for other purposes, e.g. creating an extra layer of redundancy for the data in my cloud. Over time, some of my hard drives kept getting slower and I was wondering why that was so. It turned that this was due to Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) used by those drives and I had a close look at many different drives and performance over 8 blog posts. Also, I noticed that the price per GB of HDD storage has not decreased over the last decade, so storing more and more data has not gotten cheaper or remained flat.
Staying in the storage domain for a moment, I didn’t only have a look at my disk drives but also at the SSD Flash storage drives I’m using in most of my servers. My main server has accumulated 43 TB of write access this year. While this sounds like a lot, the endurance of the drive is significantly higher, so it’s likely that the server hardware will give out long before the SSD flash cells will wear out. The same is even more true for the SSDs in my other servers that are less used. So no problem here at all.
Running one’s own cloud is not a one time project, but an ongoing process and I have changed quite a number of things again this year. First was the STUN/TURN server I require for voice and video calls. As my setup would not upgrade easily to a new Ubuntu LTS, I switched to Eturnal. The same was the case for Selfoss, my RSS feed aggregator that I’ve used for more than a decade. Development has somewhat slowed and containerized images were not readily available. So I decided to switch to CommaFeed.
Next on the cloud agenda was a refresh of one of my Nextcloud instances I mostly used for testing. Initially installed before containers became a thing, I decided that this test instance would be an ideal candidate to move to a containerized version. Nextcloud has an All In One (AIO) containerized version and getting it up and running just took a few minutes. Once up and running, exploring its possibilities took a few days, as there was much to learn and optimize for my purposes. I’m quite impressed with the setup and would like to migrate my main Nextcloud server to a cloud based setup as well, but that’s a bit of a hairy procedure I have not yet had the courage and time to do. Something for 2026 perhaps.
While the Eturnal, CommaFeed and Nextcloud changes could be seen as maintenance only offering little if any new functionality beyond what I had before, I also introduced a new service I wanted to self host for a very long time: Immich, a perfect open source alternative for Google photos (which I never used). It is also my first service with a useful AI component (for picture search) I installed on my servers and use on a daily basis. And if you wonder which and how many services I run on my own and on what kind of hardware, here’s an overview.
While I communicate over XMPP and Conversations with most of my friends, I’ve been using the Signal messenger for many years on a separate device to communicate with a wider circle. The reason for this was that Signal requires Google’s Firebase notification service which is integrated into the Google Play services, which I don’t have on any of my personal devices for privacy reasons. But 2025 was the year I discovered Molly-FOSS, an adapted Signal client that can use Unified Push (UP) over XMPP for notifications. As it’s not one of my core services, I did not set-up my own UP server but use an external service for this. Good enough for the purpose.
Two more things that stood out in 2025 for me before I close this post: First, I discovered Rustdesk, a great open source remote support tool with which I can remotely support smartphones. And finally, I had some fun with Starlink again this year. Starlink has further shrunk its mobile terminal to the size of a notebook, and I can easily carry it in my backpack together with my other equipment. This year, I took ‘Dishy’ to Iceland to see how it would do far North and it performed very well without any outages despite the high latitude and fewer satellites passing by.
And there we go, this was 2025 for me in tech. Looking forward to another exciting year coming up!