Everyone says they’d love having a small phone, then buy something else when it’s time to spend money.

I own a Palm Phone, a Unihertz Jelly, an iPhone 13 Mini, a Light Phone 2. Although, from that line up only the iPhone 13 Mini is viable. The rest of the phones come with other issues…

I also don’t have heavy phone usage, so battery life isn’t really a problem for me.

For example… I could play the sound of an eagle and that could be telling your Eco or Google Home device to unlock your doors.

Oh, damn! Cool!

I don’t know about foods, but do you know how to play a wind instrument? Playing trumpet for 30 seconds has been a 100% cure for me. Then you can get on with the eating.

Interesante! Gracias por compartir!

In the digital age, you still have to talk with humans. What did my coworker tell me again? The wheels need to be torqued to 150 Nm or ftlb or lbft? Shoot. He’s busy helping other customers now… uhh… I’ll just wing it.

Really my main point of doing this was to try something different. I’ve been neutral on flatpak this whole time. I’ve never had problems with native installs, but I’m also a little judicious on what I try to install on my systems. The point of this exercise was to flip those habits.

About flatpaks, I’ve learned:

• a ton of stuff I installed via AUR is available as a flatpak
• some flatpak apps seem to be a little less buggy than the native installs for some reason… (Thunderbird specifically)
• flatpaks use more disk space

Distrobox has also been cool because I usually don’t like to install random crap on my machine, but with Distrobox I’ve been doing just that. I can install random C++ libraries, Node, Haskell, Postgres, etc and not worry about polluting my main system I actually care about. In the past, I would take some time to consider if I should really install this random thing. And yes, I’d pacman -Rs pkg if it didn’t pan out.

I’m not sure if I’ll keep running the system like this, but so far it’s been interesting to run things a little differently.

Things I’ve liked:

• Thunderbird flatpak is less buggy than Thunderbird native
• Managing flatpak apps via Software Center or flatpak is easy/nice
• Distrobox seems useful for working on different types of software projects

Things I don’t personally care about (but other people might and that’s fine):

• using more disk space
• the fact that my main system is still mutable

Things I didn’t like:

• nothing so far
• I actually went in thinking I was gonna have to fight
• with the flatpak permissions, but everything has worked
• fine so far, so… not sure what I don’t like.
• maybe I’ll hit a snag soon and then I’ll change my mind

Honestly, just because I’m the most comfortable in Arch. I tried VanillaOS briefly, but it was way too annoying to install tailscale, so I went back to what I know.

Luckily, I’m able to afford more than an 8GB SSD on my laptop. 😆

$ podman system df
TYPE           TOTAL       ACTIVE      SIZE        RECLAIMABLE
Images         2           1           2.775GB     2.293GB (83%)
Containers     1           0           3.492GB     3.492GB (100%)
Local Volumes  2           2           0B          0B (0%)

$ flatpak list | wc -l
65
$ du -hs /var/lib/flatpak
12G	/var/lib/flatpak

$ df -h
Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/cryptroot  234G   31G  191G  14% /

A 256GB drive is on the smaller side and I’m barely at 14%. Storage is cheap.

OP, try it out and let us know what your experience is like! 🙏🏽

I recently brought over some ideas from VanillaOS over to my Arch install.

1. Install as much as possible via flatpak
2. Install a bunch of other stuff in distrobox (with podman backend)

That gives me like 50% (idk fake number) of the features from VanillaOS, but I get to keep control over my system.

Not that I ever had any problems with native pacman installs though… so… not sure how much benefit I’m really getting from doing this. I guess my pacman -Syu command runs faster now. That’s something…

Taken 3, Sonic 3.

Started watching Gone in 60 Seconds.

Captain’s log:

I finally got manually approved. Seems like a reasonable anti-spam measure. I’ve sent out an email and setup Nextcloud in Gnome Online Accounts. Surprisingly, I have not been asked for payment yet… Oh, I see why they get spam now.

Anyway, I learned that if you install Gnome Contacts via flatpak instead of pacman, you’ll be missing the evolution-data-server dependency and your contacts will not sync. So, pacman -S evolution-data-server fixed that for me. (WebDAV files worked fine.)

However even after fixing that, I also had some other weird behavior where Contacts and Calendar wouldn’t show up. I restarted my computer, installed Endeavour (gnome todo) from Flathub (seemingly unrelated action) and then magically my contact, calendar, and task syncing started working… 🤷 Yay!

While the webdav mount in Nautilus does technically work, it’s extremely slow. I wasn’t able to open a video from the nextcloud folder. It caused the video app to hang. However, moving the file from the mount to my downloads folder worked fine. It took a while, but it transferred fine. (I’m far away and the servers are probably not beefy.)

The first bug was definitely me, but additionally, not sure if nubo’s management of nextcloud is also a little buggy. The website definitely isn’t the fastest. IDK. Maybe it’s fine.

There is this kinda weird message in the settings page, it makes me wonder if they’re running a really old version of nextcloud:

This community release of Nextcloud is unsupported and instant notifications are unavailable.

On the homepage they list: “Nubo, that’s a subscription of €2.5 per month for 5 GB (current price).” However now that I’m here I’m being quoted €2.5 per month for 2 GB or €3.5 without shares for 2 GB.

Storage is broken up into “mail” and “cloud” storage. You can grow or shrink each type individually. Smallest size is 1 GB.

I did not currently elect to buy shares, but it seems like I’m still able to do that if I change my mind.

I also did not bring my own custom domain to nubo.coop. But again, it looks like I can still do that if I change my mind. I can bring my own or buy one from them. I believe they get it from Gandi.net?

They have a little documentation in English and I was able to communicate with staff in English via email, but Français and Nederlands are better supported. Their support forum is Français and Nederlands only. The nextcloud webui is definitely fully translated to English though.

If it matters, I’m from the US.

For my usecase, I’m not looking for maximum possible security or privacy. Actually, I care more about IMAP/POP3/WebDAV. So nubo.coop is definitely checking a lot of boxes for me.

I’m still wondering how stable these guys are and how long they’ll be around. Looks like they publicly launched nubo in 2022, wow so they’re 3 years old. Also, they’ve said they need to reach 2,000 users to be financially sustainable, but they currently have 1044 shareholders and 748 subscriptions. So they could shutdown.

OK, gotta use them for a few months now. If they’re stable enough, then I’m planning on moving my custom email domain to them. I’ll probably buy some shares later as well. Feel free to ask any questions.

See ya later.

Convenience beats owning things. 99.999% of non-techies I’ve talked to do not want to manage their computer or media. They don’t want to learn how things work or how to fix them. The video says it, “… it took away the burden of ownership.”

I can’t even convince them to use my seedbox to torrent media—heck I’ve even offered that I’ll do all the work, they just have to access Jellyfin! But, no. They prefer to pay to get access to the media now instead of messaging me, waiting for me to get the media, and then watching it.

At the same time, they’ll complain that “everything is a subscription now!” I’m like bro…

Holy moly, I did not know this existed! Thanks! Just turned this on!

I just sold my Framework 13 after daily driving it for a year. The HiDPI display bugs and workarounds just got too annoying.

I went back to my old Dell XPS 13 9310 and I’m loving it.

Any resources you’d recommend?

I suspect that it goes down and stays down whenever there is an app update, but I haven’t confirmed it yet.

Does the plain wireguard app stay up during updates?

if the cameras don’t load, open Tailscale and make sure it’s connected

I’ve been using Tailscale for a few months now and this is my only complaint. On Android and macOS, the Tailscale client gets randomly killed. So it’s an extra thing you have to manage.

It’s almost annoying enough to make me want to host my services on the actual internet… almost… but not yet.

One time, I was at a concert at a small-ish venue. I went to see a popular-ish band that I like, place was packed. The band started like 30-45 minutes late. When they finally got on stage, I happened to yell out during a brief pause, “Finally! We’ve been waiting forever!”

No one said anything and the show kept moving—but immediately after I yelled that the girl in front of me turned around and gave me a huge scowling look, like she was super embarrassed for me, like I had just done something really awful.

That look has stuck with me ever since.

OK! Fuggit. I’ll write my own review… with blackjack.

I signed up. No credit card necessary so far, but also my account is half-activated. Someone has to manually approve me, which fine. Seems like an anti-spam measure. I’ll report back more later.