---
title: How I Pick Software
description: My personal criteria for selecting software
date: 2025-10-19
tags:
  - "meta"
---

## Introduction

So recently I have somewhat been forced into thinking about the software I use.
Reasons range from moral disagreements to software bloat to trust. So I wanted
to describe a little bit about how I pick my software.

In each section I will align a score from 1-5, 1 being the worst and 5 being
the best, and then at the end I will tally up the score and see if it is worth
using. Be warned that there are some special cases that will not follow this
tally system.

## Criteria

### Morality

This is likely the most important part of picking software for me. But it goes
much deeper than "is this company a war profiteer?". It also goes into the
potential impacts of the software. For example, let's take a look at shinigami
eyes, this browser extension at a first glance seems innocent and like it would
help protect transgender people online from transphobic people. However, the
same way that it can guide a trans person to safety, it can be utilized by
transphobes to disregard trans positive content and further push them into a
transphobic bubble. For this reason I would give shinigami eyes a 3/5 for morality.

### Alternatives

When picking software I always want to make sure that there are alternatives.
Sometimes there are not any alternatives with all the features I need, or even
any alternatives at all. In the latter case I no longer really have a choice so
I provide it 100 points, which is almost an automatic pass.

In the case where there are alternatives I will look into them both and see
what I need most between them. For example, let's take a look at wezterm and
ghostty, both are amazing terminal emulators, they both have tabs and splits,
but wezterm is a lot more customizable whereas ghostty is a lot faster and
more native feeling on macOS. In this case I would give wezterm a 4/5 and
ghostty a 5/5 making it win this category.

### Trust

Can I trust this software? is the biggest question here. Trust can be earnt and
lost, but it also starts at different base levels. I have much less trust in
google products since they often shut down for business and then force you to
an alternative weather you like it or not. On the other hand, open source
software can mitigate a fair amount of this since I can fork or keep copies of
the software from versions that I like or trust.

### Do I really need it?

This is usually the final question I ask myself before using this software. The
ultimate challenge because this is the ultimate veto. A real application that
has not made it past this stage was a shopping list app since I can just
remember my shopping list.
