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Neil Brown lays out decoded.legal’s Free software stack in 2026 update
Nov 7, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC
•Niklas Berg
•5min read
Neil Brown, who runs the English law firm decoded.legal, has published his 2026 account of the Free software it uses on client and server machines. The biggest change is that the firm dropped Nextcloud for Syncthing and radicale.
Neil Brown, who runs the English law firm decoded.legal, has published his 2026 list of the Free software the firm uses. He has written similar updates in 2022 and 2024, and the new post shows which tools have stayed, which have changed and which have gone.
Brown has run the firm on Free software for about five years. The firm focuses on Internet, telecoms and technology law. He uses Free software in his personal life too, which he says has taken him longer to adopt in full at work.
Client-side tools
Brown runs Debian with GNOME on a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6. He likes the laptop’s folding screen for marking up documents. The machine has a fault, though. Its Thunderbolt and USB-C ports handle power well but fail often when transferring data, so he may replace it. He has not chosen a successor.
For email, he switches between Thunderbird and mutt. He uses the Quick Folder Move and Move Message And Yourself add-ons to file messages with keyboard shortcuts. Thunderbird mishandles some recurring calendar invitations, which ikhal handles without trouble. He has not investigated the cause.
For documents, he uses LibreOffice Writer when he exchanges Word files with other lawyers. For his own Markdown, he writes in vim and converts with pandoc and Typst. He wants to learn TeX because one client asks for diffs of .tex files.
He builds presentations with reveal.js. A bash script creates a template, and he writes the slides in Markdown. He says the result looks polished with little effort and no graphical interface to distract him.
Other desktop choices include Nautilus for files, evince for reading PDFs, Xournal++ for annotating them, and espanso for text expansion. He stores passwords in Bitwarden and runs the server side on vaultwarden. He keeps YubiKeys for the most sensitive credentials. He encrypts disks with LUKS and encrypts files with Cryptomator before they sync.
Brown still uses Firefox. He says he is unhappy with Mozilla’s direction and has considered LibreWolf, but he has not switched. He joins Teams and Zoom meetings in Firefox when other people host them.
On his phone, he runs <a href="https://grapheneos.org” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>GrapheneOS on a Pixel and installs apps from F-Droid. He tried postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch and SailfishOS before settling on GrapheneOS. None of the others met his needs better, although he dislikes depending on Android given Google’s direction.
Server-side tools
Brown now runs most of his services on Intel NUCs, with fewer Raspberry Pi devices than before. The biggest change is the move away from Nextcloud. He wrote that he did not get on with it and that it caused more problems than it solved. He now uses Syncthing for file sync and radicale for calendars and contacts, and he says the pair has worked well.
He also switched video calls. He ran a Jitsi server for years but turned it off a few months before the update. Most of his calls happen on other people’s Teams or Zoom services, so the server saw little use. He now offers Signal and reports no complaints.
Mail still runs on postfix and dovecot. He plans to migrate and wants to evaluate Stalwart, but he has not set a date.
He uses Kimai v2 for time tracking. He calls it excellent and mentions a pleasant exchange with its developer. He manages matters in EspoCRM and generates PDF invoices with InvoicePlane. Clients do not use either system.
For version control, he runs Forgejo to track the website and some templates. He does not host anything sensitive there. Important material lives on a git server that is not reachable from the internet. He monitors the network with Wazuh, scans for vulnerabilities with OpenVAS and tracks uptime with Uptime Kuma. He runs WireGuard VPNs, set up with Trail of Bits’ algo scripts on one machine and PiVPN on another.
The public website is a static site built with mkdocs and served by apache2. It also has a Tor onion address, and Tor Browser redirects visitors to it. The blog moved from Hugo to BSSG, a bash static site generator. Brown praises its developer and says the simpler theme resembles the old one. He automates templates and publishing with bash scripts, so he can concentrate on writing.
He runs the glitch-soc fork of Mastodon, and he schedules posts with a cron job. He turned off the firm’s own fediverse instance because he decided it was not worth keeping.
The firm’s policies and procedures live in DokuWiki with a Markdown plugin. Unbound handles DNS behind Pi-hole. He used to run a DNS-over-HTTPS server but stopped. Backups use restic and rsync.
He uses LiberaForms for forms, including the firm’s Know Your Client questionnaire. Encryption in the database, added later, matters to him. He still deletes responses as soon as he can. He stopped running CryptPad because almost nobody used it.
What has not changed
Brown has no AI tools. He gives several reasons but does not list them in the post. He reports no problems working with clients who use Microsoft or Apple software.
Limits of the account
The post describes one small firm’s setup and offers no performance data, cost figures or security audits. Some choices depend on Brown’s own skills. He says he is very comfortable in a terminal, and he prefers terminal tools for that reason. A team with less command-line experience would likely reach different conclusions.
Several problems remain open. The laptop’s ports need replacing. The Thunderbird calendar bug is unexplained. The mail migration is still a plan. Brown’s update is useful because it names the tools he dropped and why, and the list of what still works is specific enough for other small practices to compare against their own needs.
