Except that one is automatically versioned and would have saved you this pain, and the other relies on you actively remembering to reflexively commit, and then do extra work to clean up your history before sharing, and once you push, it’s harder to change history and make a clean version to share.

These days, there’s little excuse to not use COW with automated snapshots in addition to your normal, manual, VCS activities.

Harder to encrypt though, so I question “more secure.”

We started with plain text. Then everything got more complicated, and everything came with its own incrutable DB. Now we’ve come full circle: todo.txt, calendar.txt, plain text markup documents^[1].

Some things don’t need to be more complex than they are.

The most popular Linux distros are binary based. Gentoo upgrades build all new software from source. If you don’t want long install times, don’t usr one of these compile-everything-from-source distros.

There’s no option to install Windows from source, and it doesn’t really come with anything more than the OS, anyway, so it’s apples yto oranges. Windows might not even be compilable on consumer hardware.

Yeah, I wasn’t saying it was bad; I meant only that Linux didn’t have to worry about device drivers for it, because the fob handles reading the fingerprint chip.

I dunno. I have a fair number of packages installed from AUR, and the Rust ones take forever to compile. CPUs may have gotten faster, but some popular languages have gotten much slower to compile.

Yup! It’s very much like mpd, except streaming without an additional component.

They use the SoundCloud API. You only need either gonic or Navidrome, plus a client (like ostui).

If you do, use the -k option - it locks access to the rook service to only the user session. Rook works without it, but is more secure with it.

It’s not, really. All of those programs are Go, and single executables. There’s no “install” for either gonic or ostui (IIRC, also Navidrome): you download or compile the executable and run it, and you’re off and running.

Someone mentioned Docker; in this case it’s unnecessary unless you’re doing it for security. They’re just each a single binary. You’ll have to either create a config for gonic or Navidrome, or run them with commands telling them where your music lives, but that’s it. Running on the same machine, you don’t even have to open the ports on your firewall. However, if you do, Tempo for Android lets you stream the music to your phone from gonic or Navidrome, too.

These are very, very simple programs to run. ostui is a TUI, so if you prefer GUIs you’ll want a different client, but both of the servers are easy to run and nothing to install - just run them as you, not even root.

I think that’s because Yubikey handles the fingerprint reader part, not Linux, right? As far as Linux goes, it’s a black box security fob - but I might be wrong about that.

CUPs is simply ancient. It’s due for an overhaul; I keep expecting someone to come along and Poettering it, only I’d hope without also making it take over cron jobs and logging.

Herbstluftwm. It’s one of the main reasons I use it.

You can run commands on the command line to create your layouts for one or more desktop (tagged spaces), assign programs to appear on tagged spaces, and then run the programs. Put it all in a shell script and hlwm runs it when it starts.

I use xtoolwait for programs I want multiple windows on different desktops for, like terminals.

I have three monitors; one is a status window, and the other two are grouped together in 8 different tags. Mod4+9 focuses the status screen, Mod4+[1-8] switch the other two monitors in sync to the other workspaces. It’s all set up when I log in, including the creation of several terminals each running tmux from sessions restored by trum-session. The only thing I have to do is enter a password to unlock my secrets so background processes can start doing their thing.

Have you ever used OwnCloud, before the fork?

I hated administrating OwnCloud, and that’s kept me away from NextCloud. OwnCloud was a big, resource hogging, hot mess; did NextCloud do a huge refactor and clean it up?

That would make a huge difference.

I ran Gentoo back in the early aughts; it was hella better than Redhat, but it felt like I was constantly compiling stuff, and new installs and upgrades could sometimes take more than a day. I don’t remember what I jumped to after Gentoo, but I’ve never considered it again because of the lack of prehbuilt binaries. It seemed bitcoinish to have thousands of people wasting CPU cycles compiling the same package when it could be compiled once and redistributed.

Where Gentoo is nice is in the build flags: there’s really no way to get around compiling yourself if you want to exclude optional dependencies, and Gentoo had that in spades. I am just not sure how much that’s actually used anymore, but having binaries gives you the best of both worlds.

Thanks for posting that; I may have to re-investigate Gentoo.

You misspelled “sketchy.”

An alternative would be to run gonic or Navidrome - both are OpenSubsonic servers, and provide synced lyrics support. Then use the ostui client which plays music and displays synchronized lyrics.

My experience with Brother was also good, until it got tipped during a move and came out simply covered in toner. We don’t really need a new printer, but I’d buy another Brother LaserJet in a heartbeat.

My Canon regularly gives me grief. My Epson Ecotank, OTOH, has been painless.

Shamelessly shilling my OSS project, rook. It provides a secret-server-ish headless tool backed by a KeePass DB.

• Headless server
• Optional and convenient integration with the kernel keyring (on Linux), for locking the server to only provide secrets to the user’s session
• Provides a range of search, list, and get commands
• Minimal dependencies and small code base make rook reasonably auditable

You might be interested in rook if you’re a KeePassXC user. Why might you want this instead of:

• Gnome secret-server, KDEs wallet, or pass? rook uses your (a) KeePass DB, while most other projects store secrets in their own DBs and require (usually manual) sync’ing when passwords change.
• One of the browser secret storage? Those also keep a bespoke DB which needs to be synced, and they’re limited to browser use. Rook supports using secrets in cron jobs or on the command line (e.g. mbsync, vdirsyncer, msmtp, etc, etc).
• KeePassXC? KeePassXC does provide a secret service that mocks Gnome secret-service, but you have to keep KeePassXC (a GUI app) running even if you only rarely use the UI. Rook can also be used on a headless machine.
• The KeePassXC command line tool? That requires entering the password for every request, making it tedious to use and impractical for automated, periodic jobs.

Rook is read-only, and intended to be complementary to KeePassXC. The KeePassXC command line tools are just fine for editing, where providing a password for every action is acceptable, and of course the GUI is quite nice for CRUD.

Broadcom, as you’ve discovered. That’s the one brand that I’ve always had trouble with; they go out of their way to be closed source: never publishing specs, never responding to developers. They’re horrible to the point where I will not buy any product that uses Broadcom chips. Which used to be a PITA because they were also common.

Fingerprint readers, in general, also widely seem to be poorly supported.

One of my computers has a MediaTek wireless chip where WiFi isn’t supported but Bluetooth does.

A lot of people have problems with NVidia cards; I’ve not had trouble with either AMD or Intel GPUs (although, I think all Intel GPUs are CPU integrated?).

Multifunction printers are still iffy, and even just plain printers can give grief; I’ve come to believe that this is simply because CUPS is ancient and due for a completely new, modern printing service. It’s an awful piece of software to have to work with.