I switched to Tumbleweed from Ubuntu but was wary of the rolling release idea. I went in thinking “Well yeah, they need a file system like BTRFS to back out of bad updates.” And this was the case for me when Zoom stopped working after an update during a month when I really needed Zoom to be working. But, somehow, BTRFS has turned into a personal requirement for me everywhere. Things went wrong on Ubuntu too, wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to easily roll back the change that did it?

So, I still find it irritating how often little things change with Tumbleweed, but I love having BTRFS in the background making sure I can back out of any major issues.

Does Lemmy life feel any different using your private instance now?

I don’t see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.

Adding my “Me too” to Vorta/Borg. I use it with Borgbase, which I like because it’s legitimately cheap and they support Borg development. As well, you can set Borg backups with Borgbase to “append only,” which prevents ransomware or other unexpected “whoopsies” from wiping out your backup history.

I backup most of my computer every hour, but have pruning rules that make sure things don’t get too out of hand. I have a second backup that backs everything up to my NAS (using Vorta, again). This is helpful for things like my downloads folder, virtual machines, or STEAM library - things I wouldn’t want to backup over the network, but on occasion I do find myself going “whoops, I wanted that.”

I also have Vorta working on my Mom’s Macbook, then have Borgbase send me an email when there isn’t any activity for longer than a couple of days. Once I got automatic pruning working right I never had to touch this again.

I moved from Kubuntu to Tumbleweed and really like it. For some reason I really don’t like RPMs and that caused some hesitancy when I thought of switching, but really I never deal with RPMs directly. Zypper is ok and I’ve made peace with Flatpak. I update the whole distro every weekend and I’ve tested out reverting using Snapper.

In the year and a half of using it I can think of two problems I had from updating - one is fixed by removing the GPUCache directory of an Electron app when Mesa gets updated, the other is with Zoom which I mostly fixed by moving to the Flatpak version.

I did this this year for wildfire smoke, and it works great. Having said that, it is not quiet and the way I was using it was to run it at full blast for an hour, then leave it off for most the day.

If you wanted an always-on solution, I think I’d actually suggest a commercial air purifier.

The model for most the content on the internet doesn’t work without advertising. The people who are “zero tolerance” on ads are going to prevent possible compromises from being made and just encourage an arms race. I don’t think we win that arms race, we get more insidious forms of tracking and brazen advertising.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

I find the emphasis people put on speed interesting, because by far the slowest part of any interaction I have with my computer is caused by me just figuring out what I’m doing next. When I’m functioning at top speed not needing to click around, or say, having the perfect keyboard shortcut, would save me only fractions of a second.

Actually… to add to this I think the cognitive load of visually navigating is much lower than typing specific things it. I think this is why I find I’d prefer to click around my bookmarks or files to find something than just pull up a “Find” dialog and type something reasonable in.

I tried using KOrganize which had KMail and some other stuff integrated together and ended up feeling like it was a gigantic, archaic codebase just hanging on by a thread. It struggled a lot with Gmail and several times I deleted my whole mail profile to try to fix some strange bug.

If I recall, what did me in was that it would stop sending emails after running for a while. The fix had something to do with restarting Akonadi. It was really disappointing, because I love a good UI/Plasma integration.

I use Thunderbird now and … eh. It’s ok.

Doesn’t VirtualBox use KVM if it’s available?

I likeVBoxManage. Any crazy thing I’ve ever imagined doing with a VM it’s already supported.

So, to answer your question - I use VirtualBox because it does everything I want and I’ve never had a reason to look elsewhere.

“Chaser” because we live out in the country and use it to pick up our dogs who sometimes wander off and we have to go retrieve. Also, because it’s a Chevy. It’s Chevy Chase_r_.

Some of the videos of this are really frustrating to watch. Like, what are you trying to do!? You just found your spot, now you’re coming back out?? More circling, stopping, going back, going forward. Uughghhh…

Wow, thanks for this. Those are two very similar flags and I missed this entirely.

Everyone - Now that you know my passphrase, be sure to keep it a secret!

VisiData may do what you want.

Are you happy with the Kiyo X?

Really? There are some pretty serious trade-offs that Qubes requires if you’re going to use it as your daily driver. I’m far more security-conscious than anyone I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to make those trade-offs.

I’ve reconsidered my view of Anker being a quality brand. I bought a USB C hub of their’s that was supposed to provide 100W power delivery, but it couldn’t keep a 65W Dell laptop happy. So, I powered the Dell separately and still used the hub. After a while the display port started to cut out.

I’ve also bought a USB C PD cable of their’s that was supposed to support 100W power delivery. With my 85W MacBook I noticed that the cable was starting to get hard (non-bendy) spots in it. Soon after my MacBook would report being unplugged when I did anything that would draw significant power.

Ok, so I go over to Amazon and start looking at reviews that are 2 or 3 stars and holy shit. I got the distinct feeling that these were the real reviews. They’re not good.

Their rechargable batteries are so incredible deal.

If you’re strictly doing backup you could checkout Hetzner’s “Storage box” (or something like that name). For something more S3-like I like StorJ, but, that might be a lateral move price-wise from Backblaze, I’m not sure.