I thought a few words about my set up might help someone.
At the centre of my system is Raspberry Pi 4. It sits quietly in a corner and makes no fuss. It holds a git repo of the files I use. (More on them later)
My 'workhorse' is a Starlabs Starbook laptop, running Ubuntu. It's about 5 years old, and apart from a wobble at the weekend has caused me no bother.
My backup laptop (not that I really need one) is a Dell D630 running Debian. It's built like a tank and the keyboard is lovely. I really should change the battery, but it's a heavy beast so I rarely use it on the move.
My phone (Google Pixel 9) is a weak link in the system - I haven't really found the mechanism for comfortably viewing and editing my files on there. Perhaps it's me. Maybe it's because I've fallen out of love with Google.
A pseudo-cyberdeck I pretentiously call DeckZero-Alpha, based on a Raspberry Pi 2W. I love it, but it isn't as convenient to use as it could be
A new addition: an Android tablet with a decent screen and battery life, in a folio case with BT keyboard. It provides my command line environment via termux. I'm hoping that this will fill the gap that the phone can't.
The system is bound together by Tailscale. It works really well. It feels a bit like sorcery.
There are 3 main components to my system (putting it that way makes it sound much grander than it is), 2 files and a folder. The files are calendar.txt and todo.txt. I'll put links below to how these files work. Even if you've not come across them before, I think you can probably guess what they're for. The folder is called 'Notes' and holds my plain text notes, strangely enough. The filenames all begin with a date in the format year-month-day and then some clue what might be in there. Some days have several notes. Some have one. I'm not very consistent. I also keep a 'workingmemory' file open, for things that crop up - it's a catch all inbox of sorts.
I have a script, dz, (named after DeckZero-Alpha) which pulls the todo, calendar and workingmemory files from the Pi4 and opens them in 3 tabs in vim. When I'm finished working, and from time-to-time during the day, I run another script, dz-push, which sends the updated files back to the Pi4. The same scripts run on everything but the phone. Git conflicts are rare, because it is only me using the system, and I rarely use the system on more than one device at once. When conflicts occur, I get a reminder from the script how to put them right. I'm not any sort of expert and need the reminders. For additional peace-of-mind, the files (which all live in a folder called _Daily) are backed up from the Starbook to Dropbox, but it is the git repo on the Pi4 which is the master copy.
I'm not making any great claims for this 'system'. However, it is working for me. It's really only taken me a few steps towards my intended destination, which is still a long way off. But I'm getting there.
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https://terokarvinen.com/2021/calendar-txt/
https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt
https://calnewport.com/deep-habits-workingmemory-txt-the-most-important-productivity-tool-youve-never-heard-of/
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richard <AT> deckzero <DOT> uk