Running a law firm on Free software (2026 edition)
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Neil Brown, who runs the small English internet, telecoms and tech law firm decoded.legal, has marked roughly five years of operating the practice entirely on Free and open-source software, publishing a 2026 update to his earlier 2022 and 2024 accounts. His client-side stack remains largely unchanged: Debian with GNOME on a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6, Thunderbird and mutt for email, LibreOffice Writer for Word-format documents exchanged with other lawyers, and pandoc, typst and vim for Markdown-based drafting. He also relies on reveal.js for presentations, espanso for text expansion, Firefox for browsing and joining others' Teams and Zoom meetings, and vimwiki for knowledge management. Brown reports a hardware fault affecting the laptop's Thunderbolt/USB-C data ports, leaving him unsure what machine to buy next, and flags a Thunderbird bug with some recurring calendar invitations that ikhal handles correctly. The account matters as a practical data point on whether a regulated legal practice can run without proprietary software, and the items to watch are whether he replaces the ThinkPad and whether the Thunderbird calendar issue is resolved.
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Named in this story
decoded.legal, Debian, GNOME, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Neil Brown