open source tools for students
As I’m no longer a student I wanted to share what open source tools I’ve used through my education to minimize my dependency on vendor locked-in software, optimize my data availability and get a little more privacy.
But you probably wonder why you should use open source tools as a student when your school or university most likely have all the licenses you need for the proprietary tools that you’re used too? Good question.
Like I mentioned in the opening, you start of by avoiding vendor lock-ins. This will help you keep your notes even when licenses expire. “But Sid, my notes are still locally on my laptop?” Yeah yeah I know, but here comes the second point.
You’ll optimize your data availability, since you no longer rely on a specific program for your notes (with those custom, weird file extensions). This means that you can explore a ton of tools to use and find one that fits you the best, without having to worry about copying and pasting all those notes into a new program or exporting them out in another format.
No? That’s not enough to convince you? Well then, privacy! There’s so much tracking and documentation of what you’re doing in school, and it’ll probably be quite hard to achieve privacy within the school system. But, why add even more tracking by using proprietary tools as well?
Additionally, many of the open source tools I’ve used are free of charge, so you save money! That’s music playing in a students ears.
“Well then, what should I use?”, you ask. Look no further! I’ve made a list over some of my favorites below, hope you try some of them out and start your open source journey :)
List of my go-to tools (+ alternatives)
| Category | Chosen tool |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Linux <3 Choose any distro you want. |
| Browser | Firefox (Waterfox / LibreWolf / etc. for more privacy) |
| Notes | LoqSeq / Joplin / StandardNotes |
| -> Notion-alternative | AppFlowy / AnyType |
| Thunderbird | |
| Password manager | Bitwarden |
| Ebook library | Calibre |
| Office suite | LibreOffice |
| Whiteboard | Excalidraw |
| Video conferencing | Jitsi |
| Blogging | Bearblog.dev |
| IDE | VSCodium / Vim |
| Project management | Focalboard |
| Resume-builder | OpenResume |
| Document signing | DocuSeal |
| PDF-stuff | Stirling PDF |
There’s probably a lot more of categories and tools which I forgot, so if you’d like to add something to the list -> /contact
