thayer

thayer, 8 months ago

I was an rxvt/urxvt fan for nearly 20 years, then Alacritty for a while. Nowadays, I just use gnome-terminal and I’ve been happy with it. Looking forward to trying Prompt though.

thayer, 8 months ago (edited 12 days ago)

My vote is Fedora. It offers fresh yet stable packaging, and a polished experience that you can rely on. You can then use flatpaks for even newer apps, or opt to run Arch in a container with distrobox/toolbox and play with as many cutting edge apps as you want, all as if they were installed on the host.

Finally, if you like what you see in Fedora, consider trying Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite, or any of their other immutable distros.

thayer, 11 months ago

I’ve never had a use for Linux Mint myself, but I’m still happy to see them cut out the middle man and base it directly off of Debian. Hopefully being closer to the source will result in even more upstream contributions.

thayer, 8 months ago (edited 30 days ago)

The best and most official explanation I’ve read is the 2017 GNOME blog post, Status Icons and GNOME.

Essentially, tray icons are a throwback to the days before designated notification and media playback APIs, and they now create some ambiguity for app developers, in addition to being ripe for abuse.

It’s a worthwhile read and the writer makes several valid points, but doesn’t address as much as I’d like in terms of actual solutions for things like instant messengers.

Personally, I would be happy if most traditional tray apps could be displayed in the dash, with status indicators, and started in a minimized state, but I still see the benefit of having some always-visible panel icons, such as instant messengers and VPN indicators.

thayer, 8 months ago

Thanks for sharing these links! I’m glad to see so much consideration being put into a better solution.

thayer, 8 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I don’t think you’ll be able to build anything with €100, but you might be able to buy an old PC or laptop locally and use it as is. I’ve never run nextcloud myself, but from I’ve read it’ll be the most taxing service on your list. Everything seems pretty minimal, though I don’t know anything about Photoprism.

thayer, 8 months ago

That’s good to know, thanks! I’m quite content with vanilla Silverblue, but I’ll take a look at their build files and see how they’re pulling it off.

thayer, 9 months ago

The bottom line is that GrapheneOS is the most security-focused mobile operating system available, and the Google Pixel is pretty well the only mainstream phone with an unlockable bootloader.

If Alphabet were to ever lock down the Pixel’s bootloader, the GOS devs would undoubtedly jump ship to a lesser available platform in order to continue the project. But until then, no other hardware comes close with respect to embedded security.

thayer, 8 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

While I’m a big fan of Vim, it’s definitely not for everyone.

I spend about half of my writing time in VSCodium, which is a community-based release of Microsoft’s open source VS Code editor. There are several markdown, grammar, and focus-oriented plugins for the platform, and you can pretty much shape it into whatever kind of editor you want.

I use VSCodium for the vast majority of my personal notes, technical writing, and project documentation (nearly all of which are written in markdown format).

thayer, 9 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I won’t pretend to know how tightly integrated the keyboard is within the Android OS, but given the interoperability between app and keyboard it seems likely that vulnerabilities could be leveraged to gain malicious access to the clipboard and other sensitive data.

thayer, 9 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

It seems that BT 5.3 in USB format is a challenge to find, let alone support under Linux. If 5.0 is acceptable, the TP Link UB500 uses an RTL8761B chipset which has been supported since around kernel 5.16.

I have a few UB500 and UB400 adapters and both have worked OOTB without issue under Fedora.

thayer, 9 months ago

That still wouldn’t answer their dilemma of older versioning of packages, unless they went to Sid.

thayer, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Flatpak apps will use the same dotfiles as apps installed via traditional methods, however the storage location will likely be different. Most dotfiles will be contained within their respective flatpak app directory under ~/.var, so you can cherry pick which settings you want to bring over.

thayer, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I’ve been running Fedora Silverblue on nearly all of my PCs for about a year now and overall it’s been great.

• Automatic and unobtrusive updates for the core OS and user apps (everything happens in the background without interaction; flatpak updates are applied immediately, and OS updates are applied at next boot)
• I can choose to apply many core updates immediately, but rarely do
• Atomic OS updates means that everything must be installed successfully or none of the OS updates are applied, which prevents a partially updated system
• Being an image-based distro, I can and do easily rebase to Fedora’s test/beta/remix releases, and just as easily rollback, or run both stable and beta releases side by side for testing purposes
• Being image-based means there’s no chance of orphaned packages or library files being left behind after an update, resulting in a cleaner system over time
• In the event that anything does go sideways after a system update (hasn’t happened yet), I can easily rollback to the previous version at boot

Some elements not unique to Silverblue but part of its common workflow:

• Distrobox/toolbox allow you to run any other distro as a container, and then use that distro’s apps as if they were native to your host system; this includes systemd services, locally installed RPMs, debs, etc.; I use distrobox to keep most of my dev workflow within my preferred Archlinux environment
• Flatpaks are the FOSS community’s answer to Ubuntu’s Snaps, providing universal 1-click installation of sandboxed user apps (mostly GUI based); Firefox, Steam, VLC, and thousands of other apps are available to users, all without the need for root access

My only complaints about Silverblue are more to do with how Flatpaks work right now, such as:

• Drag & drop doesn’t work between apps, at least not for the apps I’ve attempted to use; for example, dragging a pic into a chat window for sharing; instead, I have to browse to and select the image from within the chat app
• Firefox won’t open a link clicked within Thunderbird unless the browser is already open, otherwise it just opens a blank tab
• Many flatpak apps are maintained by unofficial volunteers, and this isn’t always clear on Flathub; I view this as a security risk and would prefer to see a flag or warning of some kind when a flatpak is not maintained by the official upstream developer

That said, I’m confident that these issues will be addressed over time. The platform has already come a long way these past couple of years and now that the KDE and GNOME teams are collaborating for it, things will only get better.

Like I said though, overall Silverblue has been a really great user experience, and as a nearly 20-year Linux veteran it has really changed the way I view computing.

thayer, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Do you have to watch a loading screen while system updates are applied like on regular Fedora or is it in the background?

The image is downloaded and staged in the background of the active session. Upon reboot, the session seamlessly defaults to the staged image. For flatpaks, the updates happen immediately and without the need for a reboot.

On flathub.org there’s a blue checkmark for apps maintained by the devs

Aha, that must be one of the newer features implemented from the beta portal they’d been working on. I’m glad to hear it, and overall I hope to see more official upstream devs come on board with the platform (Signal, I’m looking at you).

thayer, 9 months ago

Sounds good. I don’t think the automatic background updates are enabled by default, at least they weren’t when I last installed it. To enable:

1. Edit /etc/rpm-ostreed.conf and set AutomaticUpdatePolicy=stage
2. Reload system service: rpm-ostree reload
3. Enable the timer daemon: systemctl enable rpm-ostreed-automatic.timer --now

Also, consider disabling GNOME Software’s management of flatpaks with the following:

<span style="color:#323232;">rpm-ostree override remove gnome-software-rpm-ostree
</span>

The flatpaks will continue to be updated by the backend system, but you’ll no longer have to deal with the sluggish frontend UI to keep things up to date.

thayer, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Looking so forward to seeing K-9 Mail incorporate even more modern features (snooze!) and take on the new branding. It has already come a long way these past couple of years, and made my degoogling journey much easier. Would love to see an Android-based calendaring equivalent too. Shout out to cketti for all his hard work!

thayer, 10 months ago

Longtime Debian and Arch veteran here. I moved most of my workstations to Silverblue earlier this year (maybe 8 months ago now), and I’ve been very happy overall.

There is a bit of a learning curve if you aren’t familiar with Flatpak or container-based workflows, assuming you wish to embrace those elements, but the curve is nowhere near as steep or unconventional as NixOS.

I love the automated updates. The flexibility to rebase or rollback the core OS on the fly, without any extra work, is great too. For example, it’s very easy to test out beta releases, remixes, and preconfigured software bundles like uBlue.

I still use Arch for 99% of my command line tasks, inside a container managed by distrobox.

I strongly believe that Flatpak is the future of Linux software deployment, and although the format still has its kinks, it is already quite mature and will only get better as more and more upstream developers adopts its use.

thayer, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I just wanted to point out that you pretty much can just tarball your user directory and drop it into a fresh system. If you embrace the Flatpak and container-based workflow, it’s incredibly easy to be up and running in no time. Obviously, containers and flatpaks aren’t unique to image-based distros, but are perhaps less common in traditional distros.

Sure, you’ll need to add a printer back, or reconnect to wifi networks, but your user and/or dev environment will carry over, and with a couple of commands, any package overlays and flatpaks will be reinstalled and ready to go.

I found flatpaks and containerization to be the only real learning curve with Silverblue, and only because I hadn’t used them previously. Compared to the learning curve and unorthodox approach of NixOS, Silverblue itself is as easy as using vanilla Fedora Workstation.