I just want this to be found by some internet archaeologist (maybe future version of netrunners) in the next 2,000 years, or maybe even more. For them to see what it was like to live through the chaotic year of 2025, when everyone was trying to undercut their competitors and new things popped up every week.
For those reading this now, though, it’s just a log of the switches I made this year, so that I might revisit them again next year.
First, the big one: after more than two years of using Ubuntu, I switched to macOS. To be fair, it wasn’t the OS itself that made me switch, but the fact that MacBooks are simply superior computers for the price.
I miss my non-MLX models though.
Another subtle switch: ThunderClient was replaced by Postman which was then in-turn replaced Bruno by the end of year. Though honestly, you’ll mostly find me using Swagger UI these days, since most of my personal projects are in FastAPI. It’s surprising how Flask and Django don’t even come to my mind anymore.
I switched browsers twice this year. At this point, switching browsers feels more troublesome than switching computers.
My main browser (which has to be Chromium-based, as per tradition) went from Brave to Comet and then to Helium.
I didn’t find the AI in Comet very helpful for myself, though I can see its appeal for people who do a lot of entry work. A friend of mine actually uses Comet’s AI to configure Azure and AWS (they are brave, lol). Also, not to mention the fact that your homepage becomes essentially useless during outages, which are, let’s just say, not zero per month.
Sometimes you just need a list of links for earphones in under a second, not a 50-word explanation of what earphones are after two seconds.
Helium, on the other hand, is nice. It has things I like, though it oversells the bangs a bit. Personally, I use : for shortcut searching in the omnibox, like :p for Perplexity and :y for YouTube etc. Quite vim-esque, if you ask me. Also, nobody needs a million different bangs, especially when some of them need to be spelled out anyway.
I also tried switching my secondary browser (which needs to be Firefox-based, as per tradition, of course) from Floorp to Zen. But the vertical tabs are yuck. So, I’m back to Floorp.
I switched from VS Code to Windsurf to Cursor, simply because Cursor and Windsurf gave AI free credits and then Cursor gave me Pro for a year.
Literally just that. Code-Editors are commodity.
I will use any there is no moat, atleast as of yet.
Cursor is almost as good as VS Code. Almost, because you have to jump through six different pages to install a Microsoft-made extension. To be fair, that isn’t really Cursor’s fault, but it is just bad UX.
Finally, Sublime was replaced with Zed, and it is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It’s snappy, minimal, and almost perfect.
Almost, of course, because it doesn’t support VS Code extensions. I really hope they build their own extension ecosystem and a vibrant store soon.
I switched from Heroku and Azure to GCP and excloud.in
Why no more Azure? My student credits ran out, and GCP was the only provider in India that supports UPI payments. excloud.in is amazing too, easily the fastest way I’ve found to spin up a VPS.
Wispr Flow
Really good stuff. Someone finally nailed ASR. I just hope there’s a local version of it someday.
Tauri
I made my minor project in Tauri, and boy, it’s amazing. I loved everything about it. I did a proper vibecode on the frontend. Also, that one GitButler video on Tauri is genuinely one of the best things on YouTube right now.
Mullvad
This was the first time I used a paid VPN, and Mullvad was just amazing. It was more of a necessity than a choice, honestly. Our college network admin restricted torrents, and I just needed to download Linux ISOs. And Mullvad had UPI as a payment method (you’ll save ₹10 when buying time credits on your android) I can’t stand the consumerist UI/UX of streaming apps. Not to mention, they don’t have ISOs anyway.
Affinity
Probably the craziest thing that happened as a result of a controversial acquisition. Combining all three apps into one feels like peak design UX. I made a poster for the first time in my life and was genuinely into it. Might even try again.
So, these were the significant tech switches I can think of for now. And if you’re a netrunner, we were generally optimistic about the future.