
Install and Configure Desktop Apps
In many circumstances, you canât run all the software you need as a web application, so youâll need a few desktop and mobile applications. In particular, I recommend installing the following desktop apps:
Thunderbird (desktop email, calendar and contacts)
Thunderbird is the default mail software for most Linux distributions and can easily be downloaded for Windows or Mac from the Thunderbird website. When you first start Thunderbird, it will guide you through a simple email setup for your Open Source I.T. domain. By clicking on the Thunderbird âAdd-onsâ menu item, you can install âLighteningâ, the defacto calendar and scheduling plugin for Thunderbird, as well as âCardBookâ to manage your contacts. You can find a bunch of other great open source software plugins for Thunderbird in the add-ons directory, as well. âShrunked Image Resizerâ is handy for automatically reducing attached image sizes, for example.1 Unfortunately, recent versions of Thunderbird have broken backwards-compatibility with many add-ons, so the directory isnât as rich as it used to be.
You can connect your contacts and calendar to Nextcloud according to the following guide: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/18/user_manual/pim/sync_thunderbird.html You may need to un-check âLocal Address Booksâ from the âPreferences > Composition > Addressingâ settings page in Thunderbird in order for email composition to use auto-complete from CardBook.
NOTE: If you have existing contact lists that you are trying to import to Nextcloud, you may need to create groups in Nextcloud with the exact same name as your contact lists in order for these lists to be preserved.
If youâre not using Nextcloud for your contacts and calendar, there may be other Thunderbird add-ons available, such as âProvider for Google Calendarâ and âgContactSyncâ for Google.
KeepassXC (password management)
While Nextcloud offers a very convenient Passwords app, I canât recommend it, out of principle. Since remote password management systems have the ability to decrypt passwords in order to provide them back to your computer, they increase the possible attack area for your passwords to be intercepted. Using a desktop app as the authority for decrypting your passwords keeps you safer in your own computing âburrowâ â and adding two-factor authentication (2FA) will keep your passwords about as safe as you can get. That is, of course, if your passwords themselves are strong passwords â either long random strings (that KeepassXC can generate for you), or at least long mnemonic strings (like the Bruce Schneier method).
The Nextcloud Desktop Synchronization Client
If you already have a lot of data you want to sync, be prepared for this to take a while, possibly several days, depending on your upload bandwidth and the amount of data.
Install and Configure Mobile Apps

The following mobile apps are for Android. While the Nextcloud apps also have iOS versions, Iâm not sure what the open source equivalents are for the rest. Apple is not an open source friendly company.
Primary Productivity Apps
K9 mail
See the Yunohost Configuring Email Client page.
FairEmail2- Etar + Davx5 calendar and contact sync (+ ICSx5 for read-only ICS calendars like Google)
- Nextcloud file browsing and photo sync
- Tasks.org3
- keepass2android
- Element (Matrix chat)
More Open Source Fun
- F-Droid (free/ open-source software catalog/installer)
- OsmAnd (an on and off-line mapping application for driving directions, etc.)
- OpenCamera
- Open Note Scanner
- IceCat (browser)
Limitations
Unfortunately you may run into some issues if you are using U2F and NFC for logins, depending on your phone, OS and browser. A non-free combination I currently have working on my Pixel 3/ LineageOS device is Chrome + Google Authenticator. đ
- Shrunked image resizer sometimes rotates images and the settings to disable this donât seem to work. A work-around is to open the image in gThumb (or other photo editor) and quickly rotate/un-rotate the image).
- Due to a long-standing issue, I can no longer recommend K9 mail since users are not alerted of new mail once the K9 app has been âdozedâ.
- Davx5 will prompt to install OpenTasks but Tasks.org is awesome and both are equally open source IIUC.