Discussion
If you want to lessen your dependency on Microsoft, or other big technology companies, and went some ideas, here's what I do for to run my own small law firm on Free software:
https://decoded.legal/blog/2026/11/running-a-law-firm-on-free-software-2026-edition/
And, while I prefer to self-host, that is not a requirement - lots of small hosting companies could help with the hosted aspects of this.
@neil great blog post as always, I appreciate all the work you put into these!
@neil every time I hear about people using Paperless in the wild I'm surprised at how popular it's become.
@danielquinn It is good and unfussy!
@neil "I need to move our mail infrastructure at some point, and I want to look at Stalwart." I'm in the same boat, but when I looked at stalwart (0.16), I didn't really like it. Two things: one was that the non-paid version had annoying buttons in the web interface that users who log in to change their password would see (I forget the exact wording, but sort of "upgrade to Pro to unlock this feature!" kind of thing). The second was that so much happens under the hood that it's hard to debug.
@neil Like, you give it access and it logs into your registrar and sets up all the DKIM/etc dns records for you. That's a bit more automation than I'm comfortable with. (And yeah, you don't NEED to enable that, but that just gives you an idea of how much it does.)
I'm planning to take a look at Maddy next.
@Andres4NY My understanding is that Stalwart *can* do this, but that it is not a requirement.
@neil Yeah, I was just using that as an example of sort of its let-me-do-everything-for-you nature. It's similar with SSL certs, and pretty much everything.
@Andres4NY Interesting - thank you!
@neil I'm planning on giving bssg a go. I was sad to see pandoc slopped.
Your markdown/css approach probably gets you where you need to go. I thought myself LaTeX while doing my masters program so I could type my (math heavy) homework. For documents and presentations, I'd load it every time vs an Office equivalent. It's so nice having everything be consistent without fighting office to make it happen. I also love Computer Modern and how it renders text.
@fullywoolly Oddly enough, I need to do some work today using a client's .tex files, so perhaps LaTeX will grow on me :)
@neil it was a bear to get started and even at my most proficient, there was always something that I wanted to change and had to go search but people have written a lot of amazing plugins available on CTAN.
Good luck. If you do have questions, I'm happy to take a stab at them but mind the time zone difference (Seattle).
@fullywoolly Oh, thank you, you are very kind. Fortunately, I am just making edits to the legal text stored in someone else's .tex document, so I don't expect to have to actually consider tex markup too much, if at all :)
I agree, as I said before what we need is a strong community now to help/support people undertaking this, esp for all the server stuff which people may not be confident enough and need reassurance that what they have is set up securely.
Linux user groups died off to some extent due to things being much easier to use, but in 2026 maybe we need FLOSS user groups to provide that network of support.
Convincing my local college to provide courses in LibreOffice may be much easier if lots of people got together and asked for these courses. Otherwise new users just get directed to Microsoft/Google for everything.
@neil Thank you for sharing this information. I don’t know how to do this, but I really would like to learn. ✌🏻