Neil Brown has been running decoded.legal — a small English law firm specializing in Internet, telecoms, and tech law — entirely on Free and open-source software for about five years now. This is his third public audit of the stack, and the picture that emerges is less a manifesto than a maintenance log. The interesting bits aren't the ideology; they're the decisions. The client-side setup is Debian with GNOME on a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6, chosen partly for its fold-back screen and stylus support for marking up documents. LibreOffice Writer handles Word-format exchanges with other lawyers; pandoc and typst handle Markdown-to-PDF pipelines for everything else. Presentations run on reveal.js — Brown writes them in Markdown, renders them via a bash script and CSS template, and clearly loves the absence of a GUI. The terminal preference runs deep: mutt for email, vim for writing, ikhal for calendars, espanso for text expansion, vimwiki for knowledge management. The server side saw the biggest changes since 2024. Nextcloud got dropped entirely — it was causing more problems than it solved — replaced by Syncthing for file sync and Radicale for CalDAV/CardDAV. Jitsi, which Brown ran for years, got turned off because he was mostly joining other people's Teams and Zoom calls anyway; Signal replaced it with zero complaints from clients. CryptPad went the same way: low usage, turned off. The pattern is clear — Brown doesn't accumulate tools for their own sake. If something isn't earning its keep, it goes. The infrastructure runs mostly on Intel NUCs now, with fewer Raspberry Pis than before. Self-hosted services include Postfix/Dovecot for email (with Stalwart on the radar as a potential replacement), Forgejo for git hosting, Wazuh as a SIEM, Uptime Kuma for monitoring, WireGuard for VPN, and LiberaForms for encrypted client questionnaires including Know Your Client pre-engagement forms. The blog moved from Hugo to BSSG — a bash static site generator — after some annoyances, and the main site runs on mkdocs behind Apache, including a .onion version accessible via Tor. The mobile story is GrapheneOS on a Pixel, with F-Droid as the primary app store. Brown has tried postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, and SailfishOS, and none of them did what he needed as well. This is the pragmatist's tell: ideology matters, but the work has to get done. The same pragmatism shows in his browser choice — Firefox, which he describes as "fine" while noting discomfort with Mozilla's direction, without yet switching to LibreWolf. Two notes stand out at the end. First: "Working with others (who don't use FOSS tools) — No change here: zero problems." The interoperability question that dominates FOSS skepticism gets one line, because after five years it's simply not an issue. Second: "AI tools — None, for various reasons." No elaboration, no apology. The entire blog was written by a human, without AI, and the site was generated with a bash script. In 2026, that's a position statement whether Brown intends it as one or not.
