It’s a good idea, but you’d ultimately have to trust the project to tell the truth about whether they really are free software or not.

That sounds simple but, especially around the edges, people can disagree about what is free and non-free. It’s quite common for free software projects to include some non-free components, either intentionally or unintentionally.

For instance, a project that doesn’t really know or care about freedom could advertise itself as open source, but include blobs, or use a non-standard license that doesn’t actually give you the four freedoms.

Even well-meaning projects can accidentally include incompatibly licensed code, or code that they actually don’t have permission to distribute to you, by accident.

A good heuristic, for Linux, is that if it’s packaged in Debian (ignoring contrib, non-free or non-free-firmware) or Fedora’s archives, it’s probably free software. This is because those communities really care about freedom, vet the packages for licenses and check that the four freedoms are actually given. Things do sometimes slip through, but when they are found, the packages are fixed or removed.

For Android, if it’s on F-Droid, it’s almost certainly free software, for the same reason.

Meanwhile, the FSF have a free software directory that contains a listing of programs they consider to be free.

My next laptop will probably be a Thinkpad T480 from Minifree. But I reckon it will be a while before this one breaks in an irreparable way.

CAD + ML is certainly difficult, maybe that needs a dedicated machine you only use for that? But that will increase costs overall. I’m also not sure how to find PC parts that I know won’t need dedicated firmware. So that part is definitely more tricky, I’m sorry I can’t be more help here :(

As for Matrix and XMPP, I started off with Matrix and found it pretty good for bridging lots of different networks together. But, over time, I came to prefer XMPP for a few reasons:

• Ultimately, I just don’t trust Element, and they do so much of the work. They complain that people are dependent on them and don’t give back, but they were the ones that created this dynamic in the first place. They are a single actor who own the dominant server, clients, and flagship instance, and can really push around the ecosystem in a way that works for them.
• XMPP is more community oriented, no one person can push through changes either at client, server, or server operator level. XMPP is based around extensions and there is an expectation that not every client or server implements every extension. That brings the con of inconsistent experiences, but at the same time, it is much more resilient over the long term (Matrix is now having to deal with the same fragmentation problems that XMPP started experiencing, and building solutions for, 20 years ago).
• XMPP’s network is less centralised, there’s not a mega-server like matrix.org with a lot of power. When matrix.org goes down (which happens semi-regularly), there is a big impact. If a single XMPP server goes down, it doesn’t cause nearly as big a problem. And, there aren’t those mega-instances with scaling problems, so the servers don’t go down as frequently anyway.
• XMPP evolves more slowly and gracefully IMO, as it is already more established (might be a con depending on your worldview). I run debian stable and an update across the Matrix network broke images on my Matrix client. That just doesn’t happen on XMPP, you can lag behind the leading edge for a couple of years and things don’t break even as the network evolves.
• I find XMPP easier to self-host - again subjective, but I could just install prosody via Debian’s archives, and once it was set up, I didn’t have to touch it. I update it with the rest of my server every 2 years, and I don’t fall behind the rest of the network or miss out on much in the meantime. Meanwhile, I have to pay much more attention to my matrix server, I get the software from upstream and not from my distribution, and there are more regular changes that I have to pay attention to.

As for advantages of Matrix:

• They have a flagship client that is available everywhere and has a decent and consistent UX. That name recognition makes it easier to get people to sign up. The XMPP community have done a lot of work to make signups work easily in a decentralised way, and projects like Snikket aim to solve that name recognition and consistency problem, but it is not 100% perfect yet.
• Bridge software to proprietary networks is more actively maintained in Matrix. There is work going on to improve this in XMPP, but I think many in the XMPP community moved focus from bridging to making the first-party experience better.

Many of the pros and cons are based on values (e.g. living on the leading edge vs using something more mature, preferring community based solutions vs commercial ones etc.), so I totally understand and support people who use Matrix instead. Ultimately, both ecosystems can cooperate, learn from each other and are millions of times better than the proprietary networks. That said, above is why I came to prefer XMPP.

I’ve had similar feelings before. You’re not the only one to struggle with this. You are pushing against the grain and doing something, aligned with your values, that 99% of people don’t know about.

What helped for me is separating what I can control from what I can’t. Everything on my device, that I personally choose to use, is under my control. So that is all free software, downloaded from system repositories, because I care about that. Meanwhile, everything I can’t control, I just gradually try to improve over time.

Here are the things I feel I can’t easily control:

I bought a laptop many years ago without free firmware for wifi, bluetooth, microcode etc. I like using devices as long as I can. Ok, no worries, lets just replace it with a Thinkpad next time.

My employer requires me to use Zoom, and some proprietary VNC client on my own device (on top of a load of proprietary software that I run on their devices). I don’t really have a choice here, unless I quit my job. So, I give in the short term, but do what I can to minimize the damage, running it in a dedicated VM. For the long term, I try and keep an eye on FOSS job boards and also network with people in the FOSS world (I’m quite bad at this, but trying to get better).

Likewise, some of my friends haven’t switched over to XMPP, which is my network of choice. Eventually, the people closest to me did, but many did not. So, I bridge those who haven’t into XMPP (via Matrix, for now, but looking to remove it eventually), and decided that I don’t want anyone “new” to contact me through the proprietary networks (I haven’t set up “enforcement” for this, an autoresponder probably, but this is the plan). The good news is that the proprietary networks always screw up eventually. When they do, your friends will get pissed off for their own reasons, and that is your chance to offer them the alternative. I never push, but let people know that I use XMPP. Some become genuinely interested, others you have to wait until they get screwed over by the proprietary networks.

Now bear in mind I am more interested in software freedom than security. So your priorities might be different. But the short story is: don’t beat yourself up over this. It’s a journey and you are pushing against the rest of society. What I do is just try and improve my setup, whatever that means to me, gradually over time.

I would say Snikket if you want decentralised, Signal if you don’t.

I use podget, which is a 248 kB bash script. I really like it, and think it will meet your requirements:

• It’s designed to be called from cron
• It lets you sort your podcasts into categories
• It automatically organises the downloads into different directories based on these categories
• It’s been around since 2005 and is still maintained

From its description:

Podget is a simple podcast aggregator optimized for running as a scheduled background job (i.e. cron). It features support for downloading podcasts from RSS & ATOM XML feeds, for sorting the files into folders & categories, for importing URLs from iTunes PCAST files & OPML lists automatic M3U & ASX playlist creation, and automatic cleanup of old files.

It also features automatic UTF-16 conversion for podcasts hosted on MS Windows servers.

eldood: lightweight tool to find dates where everyone is free.