# De-Shitifying Life - Site: Analog Industries - Author: Chris Randall - Date: 2026-11-05 - URL: https://analogindustries.com/2026/11/de-shitifying-life/ ![CachyOS with the Caelestia shell on the T14s](https://analogindustries.com/images/2026/11/caelestia-desktop.webp) This is a long story, and perhaps uninteresting unless you find workflow to be a fascinating subject. With that proviso, here we go... The day Tim Apple gave Mango Mussolini [a golden participation trophy](https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/08/06/apple-ceo-tim-cook-gifts-president-trump-gold-glass-commemorative-plaque) to fend off any future tantrums was the day I took a good hard look at my life, and began the process of weaning myself from these Silicon Valley fucknuts. Obviously, my job revolves around tech, but I had been a fairly passive consumer to that point. New MacBook Pro every three years, new iPhone every two years, new iPad every year. Fully update the Windows machine three times a decade. Basically ignore Linux as much as I can. Pay my Creative Cloud subscription. Suffer the minor annoyances of dealing with all that in silence. The act of wondering out loud if I actually needed all this shit turned out to be the beginning of a sort of quest. Interestingly, Silicon Valley was an unwitting accomplice to this process, once I knew what I was looking for. The biggest roadblock, as I perceived it, to reducing my reliance on Increasing Shareholder Value for others was Creative Cloud. This is the case for most people on the creative side of tech businesses, I imagine. I've been paying for Creative Cloud since it existed and initially I thought it was a pretty good value, but when I started to add it up, I could have bought a car or a really nice [PPG Wave 2.3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPG_Wave) or paid off a big chunk of my mortgage. And that started to annoy me. In thinking about it, while I had most of the CC apps installed, to do the media creation portion of my job, all I really needed was Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. I _personally_ used Lightroom quite a bit, but that wasn't part of this equation. That didn't initially seem insurmountable, but it took the most time to get out of that hole. I'm not going to use [GIMP](https://www.gimp.org/) or [Inkscape](https://inkscape.org/), because sorry but just no. Obviously, I don't mind paying, given what I paid for CC. As luck would have it, literally while I was searching and demoing, Canva purchased Affinity and released [Affinity Studio](https://www.affinity.studio/) for free. I wasn't familiar with it, but it seemed to hit all the bullet points: integrated vector and pixel drawing, and cross-platform. It took me a couple weeks to retune my muscle memory, but it was and is capable enough for my [Audio Damage](https://www.audiodamage.com/) work, and that's all I was asking. Premiere, well, that was simple to replace. [DaVinci Resolve](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve) is easily as good as Premiere, at least for my needs. More capable in some respects, particularly in audio, where the built-in Fairlight DAW absolutely smokes the audio "features" of Premiere. And it's free! So, with Affinity Studio and Resolve (and [TouchDesigner](https://derivative.ca/) for motion graphics), Creative Cloud was replaced. Later, 'Tater. The MacBook Pro situation took some more research. I was thinking that the vast majority of the time, my MBP is just docked, and not actually being carted around. And literally in the middle of this process I went to NYC and broke the screen during the transfer from Penn Station to my hotel. $800+ for Apple to replace it, or $400+ for me to buy a second-hand lid assembly and replace it myself. Or it could just go on the stack of broken MacBooks Pro and I could buy another one. Or... The M4 Mac mini was far more capable than my M1 MBP, and significantly cheaper than a new MBP. Could I go fully no-laptop? I like working on the couch or in the back yard, but I decided to try and see if I could just iPad things. Turns out, not really. The iPad is kind of shit for actual work, in a number of ways. However, I happened to get a Short in my YouTube feed showing how someone put [CachyOS](https://cachyos.org/) on a ThinkPad T14s. I had been pondering switching to Linux for my daily driver anyhow; I can remote in to any of the other machines and use whichever one is appropriate for a given task, and most of my day is spent in terminal windows and [Bitwig](https://www.bitwig.com/), which look the same on any machine. So, I found a reputable refurb shop on eBay and got myself a refurbed T14s with a Ryzen 7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a touchscreen (no drive) for $280. There are a quadratic fuckton of these things on the market as they're used in enterprise. I stuck a 1TB NVMe drive in it and blew in CachyOS. On top of that, I installed the [Caelestia shell](https://github.com/caelestia-dots/shell), which is basically a skin on [Hyprland](https://hyprland.org/). No particular reason except that it looks dope and makes me happy. It took a couple days to get it set up and learn all the Caelestia key combinations, but I have to say that this is really one of the best OS/laptop combos I've used. The ROI is ludicrous, considering it cost less than US$300. It is now my principal machine for all things Audio Damage, and whenever I'm using one of the other computers, I end up getting frustrated that all the keyboard commands don't work. Both Adam and I have moved to a Linux-first build process for Audio Damage stuff since I did this. I have a desktop CachyOS/Caelestia machine with 64GB of RAM for sit-down-and-concentrate full metal dev work, and I have also installed it on an otherwise useless 2012 MacBook Pro for my home entertainment system, and a different Arch flavor on a Gigabyte NUC to use as a SteamBox for my living room. [Arch Linux](https://archlinux.org/) in general, and CachyOS in particular, is very good at making old machines useful again. Which brings us up to the present day. I've been using this new workflow for a couple months now, and it has made me really look at the other ways I can simply remove those Bay Area assclowns from my life. I'm no neckbeard; I don't have any desire to sit around and bikeshed Linux distros. I have work to do. But I've convinced myself that, for now anyhow, I have finally managed to start getting off the Subscription & Incrementalism Treadmill that Silicon Valley is constantly foisting on us. I'm using the M4 Mac mini for music still, and I need to keep a rolling upgrade of iOS products for work; that's unavoidable. But progress is progress.