Ouch … I hope I smell them from a mile away … and change course.

As a #2 person, when my level-of-current-knowledge hits a ceiling and I ask for technical advice in forums or lemmy or even social media, it often comes from a #1 person.

Assuming its specialized knowledge few other #2 have.

Half the time I get an answer (about what and how) AND background explanation (giving context and WHY).

But half the other time a #1 doesnt realize easy things for them are hard for me. When they are miles ahead their answer assumes I have a host of other skills already in place. But I dont know what I don’t know so I dont ask for them.

But … every answer from a helpfull stranger is appreciated. Just bridging knowledge is hard.

Is “choosing which files and folders” an upfront configuration thing, or does it happen “on the fly” when opening a file?

It’s a type of integration with local file handling:

• you see every folder and file in explorer / finder.
• they are just filenames but without the data
• they act normal and can be copy pasted renamed etc
• the moment a file is opened the first time, the data gets synced locally.

I use it to connect to rather large folders (bigger then my SSD) because it only takes up space of the files in use.

I deleted my comments seeing the ending side note about NC.

Does the MacOS NC app do files-on-demand?

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If you wouldnt mind getting rid of Google search entirely … settings, search, select Google, remove. I assume there is nothing to pin after that?

One of the few times I miss Files-on-demand for Win11. Connect an Office365 library with 500 GB to my laptop with an 128 GB harddrive. Integrates with file explorer, only caches local what you open, after a while you can “free space”, meaning deleting local cache version. NextCloud has the same on Win11 because its an OS feature.

Did you over engineer? Yes! Also: this is very cool!!

For my family my setup slightly different for reasons in other comments:

• do change browsers away from Chrome or Edge
• do change search engines
• allow cookies
• drop tracking surveillance traffic at the network level with something like pihole or nextdns

Don’t forget to not get K-9 Mail updates also when it’s brought in to the fold.

Thanks everybody, I learned a ton these 2 days. Like a ’ jump’ in understanding. Not only the specific answer to my concrete question but also on a conceptual level as well.

The thing that makes Linux next level for me now is the extra ‘abstraction layer’.

Thing is, for me, digital files always were as tangible as the analog object they represent. A digital document is as ‘real’ as a paper document. An email as real as a letter. But untill now files where ‘real’ digital artefacts. And thats … a bit different with ‘virtual’ files, sort of.

Anyway, new concepts to explore which is great!

Yep, I learned they have ‘portals’ for file-managing on their own.

Thanks, gives me direction in which way to do research.

When I let fsearch index from root, it counted 1.9 million files, which baffled me a lot. Before knowing the things in this thread. A typical windows install can have 50k ~ 100k files, but … 2 million I thought it was insane.

But in this context its something like if LibreOffice Calc had an API and upon start it registers a filesystem with a ‘folder’ for every worksheet and a ‘file’ named A1, A2, B1 … for every cell. Not real I know but a novice way of understanding.

Sound advice, thnx

Thanks, definitly positif first time experience with posting also.

I learned a lot in these comments but in this specific context:

• a flatpak app uses a base directory (mp3 player).
• I set it to my NextCloud folder.
• Now run/usr/1000 is “filled” with all my thousands of pdf from personal archive, several times per file (because multiple flatpaks).

These don’t need decluttering I learned, but aren’t managed by package managers either.