I’m no expert. I want to include that disclaimer up front.
Nextcloud with block storage on btrfs with snapshots seems like it could work for you. No idea about VFS though. I’ll leave that question for someone more knowledgeable. The “drive” portion of Nextcloud is quite decent. I regularly use it to pass large files between my phone (Android), laptop (Linux) and gaming desktop (Windows).
Yes, I’m several years into my de-googling process and a solid email client is not something I’m worried about. K9 is great and, as Thunderbird, we can only hope that it gets better.
I bought my first handheld anything, the Palm Zire 31 in high school. Everyone thought I was weird, but I was also organized. :P
I think this is mostly because people who know about it have a mental block that it’s only for nerds. Millions have been using Android on their phones for years, though we’ll limit ourselves to desktop GNU/Linux type distributions for this discussion.
Actual usage of Linux has gotten much easier since 2006ish when I first tried it out. With all the popups and ads in Windows nowadays, its rapidly becoming harder to use than Linux, something I did not expect. I don’t see a combined Linux User Group/ Bingo Club/ Bridge Group forming anytime soon, but Linux Mint isn’t any harder to use than Windows, even for normies with an average level of tech skills.
This appears to be what I’ve been looking for. I can’t wait to try it. Thanks for sharing.
You mean after the price hike they also hiked the number of ads? I canceled when they hiked the price and managed to get it down to the old price a few months later, so I renewed for the personal heatmap. Looks like I’m definitely canceling again. I doubt they’ll give me the price break twice anyway.
Baking ads into a timeline like Strava and some other apps do has to be the worst app trend ever.
You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It’s the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most “reputable” tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.
With MS enshitifying Windows at an ever increasing pace and the hard work of open source developers, volunteers, advocates, to make Linux better and more approachable, I won’t be surprised at all to see that percentage move up.
“You mean its free and doesn’t try to sell me other products the whole time I’m using it?”
First if all, welcome to Linux. I also found it in my high school/college years and am so glad I did. Things will be weird. I remember thinking “what kind of Fisher Price OS is this?” because Ubuntu was so simple looking back then and I was used to the unnecessary clutter of Windows. There is so much to explore, but I think you are on a good path with Mint. I have also run Mint for a few years and love some of the things it does.
A helpful note: If you plan on sharing files between the two OSes, be aware that Windows won’t typically access a Linux file system like ext4 or btrfs and Linux can handle NTFS (windows) in a lot of cases, but if you have bitlocker running you may have additional hurdles.
I highly recommend getting a big external drive ans backing up regularly (like at least once a week). At some point you will screw up and be glad you did it. I only overwrote a disk partition on accident once, and I recovered the data, but I also learned my lesson the hard way. Don’t be like me!
I’ve never been able to fully transition away from the proprietary TickTick tasks. Nothing seems to have the features I’m accustomed too. Then again, I’m on a dysfunctional task non-management spree right now, so maybe when I get my shit together I’ll try again. For context, I use a modified version of the GTD strategy to keep track of my todos.
Before TickTick I used Astrid. When Astrid tasks was bought and killed by Yahoo, I thought they were over, although it seems there is a fork https://github.com/tasks/tasks (GPL 3.0) that also syncs with tasks.org. I haven’t done thorough testing yet to see what kind of issues I would have using this new Astrid and Nextcloud, but this is the best open solution I’ve been able to come up with and its been on my project shelf for over a year waiting to be tested.
For calendar, nextcloud synced with Thunderbird and a proprietary phone app (I know… I know) seems to work well for me. My partner uses icloud and it generally interoperates fine. I even have a raspberry pi in the living room that pulls in everyone’s calendar and overlays them as a “family calendar”
I chose Nextcloud as my first project because I had an interest in the project for a while. I did an old fashioned install which I later rebuilt with docker. I learned a lot doing it manually twice first. I echo the others. Find a project you like, preferably with its own community so you can ask for help when you inevitably mess something up.
Nextcloud Calendar is where I’m blocking out my time. I use a proprietary task app with a Linux client because tasks.org/former Astrid/nextcloud tasks isn’t quite there yet… for me. If I was creating a system to keep me on track today, I would center the whole thing on Nextcloud. The one thing I despise about nextcloud is how it handled locales and formats. There is no easy way to move to YYYY-MM-DD and HH-DD without messing up other stuff like day of the week captions language. The thing I love about nextcloud is how it doesn’t spam you with garbage recommendations and clutter and such like Outlook.
I’m a KDE user, but had a great experience using Budgie. I’m glad this software is an option for people.
Also, don’t be surprised if that urge never goes away. :-D
That was fascinating. Thank you for sharing. I’m still early on my self-hosting journey, but a year or two ago I would have understood next to nothing of that. :D
I’m not sure I understand. Do you mean hearing codewords triggering actions as opposed to trying to understand the users intent through language? Or is are there a few more layers to this whole thing than my moderate nerd cred will allow me to understand?
Same, I think I might give the System76 Darter a try when I eventually have to replace my Xps 9370. It’s bad enough that my computer comes with a windows logo on the super-key and often windows preinstalled. Shipping with a non-ANSI/ISO layout is a no-buy for me.
I won’t update without first creating an image of the server to roll back to. Like others on here, the web updater almost always fails and goes into maintenance mode and I have to ssh in to fix it.
Having said that, functionally, I have no issues. Only when upgrading does the whole thing shit the bed.
I bought a xps 13 9370 and several years and two self-replaced batteries later, I’m not noticing even a hint of age related slowdown. I thought the lack of USB-A ports would be a problem, but it wasn’t. I have run Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, Arch, EndeavorOS, Solus, MXLinux, Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora, and many others on this machine with minimal issues. I don’t know about the models after mine, but the 9370 was a solid choice.
Nextcloud was somewhat difficult for me the first time I installed it, though I did have a usable system in the end. Then I discovered Nextcloud AIO and haven’t had an issue since.