Yeah OK, that’s fair. It’s really a shame how dependent notifications are on Google. ALl the other things - Mail, Photos, Drive,… - are a lot easier to replace.

At this point, package management is the main differentiating factor between distro (families). Personally, I’m vehemently opposed to erasing those differences.

The “just use flatpak!” crowd is kind of correct when we’re talking solely about Linux newcomers, but if you are at all comfortable with light troubleshooting if/when something breaks, each package manager has something unique und useful to offer. Pacman and the AUR a a good example, but personally, you can wring nixpkgs Fron my cold dead hands.

And so you will never get people to agree on one “standard” way of packaging, because doing your own thing is kind of the spirit of open source software.

But even more importantly, this should not matter to developers. It’s not really their job to package the software, for reasons including that it’s just not reasonable to expect them to cater to all package managers. Let distro maintainers take care of that.

Android without a Google account is great though

As a fellow Futo user: it’s not great out of the box. My biggest recommendations are:

• under Languages and models, download all the voice models (if you use those), transformers, and wordlists you can for your languages
• if you use multiple languages, set the check on “multilingual typing” for ALL of those languages
• this is probably the biggest one: in text prediction -> Advanced Parameters, DRASTICALLY change the values. The original ones are 3.4 and 4.0 for LLM strength and autocorrect threshold, mine are currently set at 28.5 and 0.8, respectively. This takes the autocorrect from “occasionally working” to “as good as SwiftKey” for me.
• Keyboard and Typing -> Long Press -> Show hints. Could not find that for ages so thought I’d add it here.

Also, two super useful shortcuts: you can press the space-bar and move your finger around to move the pointer; and the same for backspace to fine-control what to delete.

Hope this helps, but if not… What additional gripes do you have with it?

Will do! Thank you!

That sounds great. I think I’ve given it more than a month overall, but probably never longer than a week at a time. Guess I’ll have to have my SO hide my normal keyboard lol

I built and configured an Arkenswoop some time in 2023. It’s really nice. However… I have gotten quite fast on a conventional keyboard just by using it over the years, and re-learning that is just so tedious. Every time I try, something with a deadline comes up, and I switch back “temporarily”.

Anyone have experience overcoming this?

Fair… Sorry, I always forget how prominent Apple devices are in the US.

Thunderbird for mobile is great! And in contrast to the gmail app, search actually works, lol

Oh yeah. I’ve never gotten as much reading done as when working in-office.

Now if Eelco Doolstra wasn’t fucking around, we could have had a super LTS NixOS - but NOOOO.

My exact thoughts lol

Not really, no

DNS over TLS and similar are only encrypted to the first (local) DNS provider, and of course that provider knows the query as well.

It protects against 3rd-party eavesdroppers between you and your primary DNS provider, but does nothing for privacy beyond that.

Also getting rid of my T1 Diabetes and re-doing my transition, but yeah! Hedonism as well!

They blamed it on the communist party, yes. There were 8 parties represented in the Reichstag at the time though.

Yeaaaaaaahh the auth thing is really, really complicated to selfhost. There’s a docker project out there that apparently makes it possible, but… No idea. FOr the time being I still use FF’s auth - that’s still an improvement though: Mozilla knows that I am logging in / from what kind of device, but not the content or amount of what I sync.

Spend the rest of my life on a Culture orbital or GSV? FUCK YEAH

Yep, this is the answer. Set it, forget it, accidentally have your hard drive destroyed irrecoverably, and re-set everything up to the exact working state you were used to in under 15min.

It’s a fair bit of initial setup and learning, but afterwards, the word “stable” takes on a new meaning.

Probably… I mean, I’d at least start it in a systemd service, but sure, you don’t need a domain.

But of course your mobile won’t be able to access that domain outside your network

No idea - this is my firefox sync NixOS config, in its entirety:

  age.secrets.ffsync.rekeyFile = secrets.ffsync;
  services.firefox-syncserver = {
    enable = true;
    secrets = config.age.secrets.ffsync.path;
    settings.hostname = "localhost";

    singleNode = {
      enable = true;
      hostname = "0.0.0.0";
      capacity = 2;
    };
  };