I created my own similar tool: https://filepush.kevincox.ca/

It is optimized for the case where you commonly send files to the same devices. For example I have set up all of my devices as well as my partner’s phone and Steam Deck. Then I can just tap them and send the file with end-to-end encryption.

It is sort of cool that there is no backing server, just static files. All of the signalling goes over WebPush.

I don’t think it is critical to keep /home separate but if you need to reinstall it is really nice. You can reset the OS without touching your data or user-level configs. Either for the same distro because you fiddled around and broke it or another one for distro-hopping. It also makes encrypting it easy, although full-disk encryption is getting so easy that it probably isn’t an issue. Good backups also mitigate this, although the recovery will be slower than just reinstalling while leaving your existing home there.

To be honest I don’t actually keep home separate anymore. But that is mostly because I trust NixOS enough that I know I will never need to reinstall. I can always roll back or worst case install over top of the existing install from a live USB.

Overall I would say that the cost of doing so is fairly small as well. Unless you are running a lot of system services data outside of /home is usually fairly limited. Although I agree that getting the partition sizes wrong can be frustrating.

Math hasn’t changed much in 3 years 😉

For sure. Lots of people here are enthusiasts that like trying out different things and different distros. Most people will just find something they like and stick with it for years. Don’t get me wrong, it can be fun to jump around, but don’t feel compelled to. Fedora will likely serve you well for the forseeable future.

you can download from Steam.

To be clear Steam will download the Linux build by default on Linux. No user intervention required.

(If you need to for some strange reason you get run the Windows build in Wine via the “Compatibility” menu but that is unlikely to work better than the native build.)

Keeping /home separate is a good call. I can also recommend backups to a different system. Also test those backups.

Playing with things can be fun if that is what you enjoy. Being careful is good but the best way to avoid serious issues is being able to recover from the worst case.

I agree with this. I don’t know what keeping track of rooms keys is. Never heard of that problem. Adding devices to an account (cross-signing) is pretty easy these days with a popup wizard. Or a backup key if you don’t have any online devices.

If you want persistent multi-device history it is really one of the few options.

Probably the other main options would be XMPP and Jami but I don’t have much experience with either of those.

Yeah, it is sadly not advertised. Even the “Keyword” box helper text isn’t very obvious how it works. They should link to a help page.

Not to mention that they also have search engines which work in a very similar way, but have a different UI, are harder for users to manually define and don’t sync across devices via Firefox Sync.

It’s a big mess. But it works! So that is enough for me.

IDK, maybe I have a particularly bad memory but it is basically as easy for me to bookmark a URL as it is to lookup and remember a bang that they defined. Plus local will always be faster, more private and more secure.

I don’t see anything you said that it isn’t quite right.

Porn is a distributed form of entertainment.

Porn allows you to get your rocks off. You take views, so to speak and do your thing.

Distributed, in this context, means multiple enjoyers can watch porn on each of their entertainment computers and share the videos, usually to a centralized porn server.

PornHub runs a web-based porn server at pornhub.com so viewers can store their porn in a central location on the internet.

Firefox has keyword bookmarks which is basically identical to bangs but you can customize them to your preference and they don’t require sending your query to a third-party remote service.

Just set the “Keyword” option in a bookmark and type mykeyword foo in the URL bar to search using your bookmark mykeyword. I use a lot of one-character keywords such as m for https://www.google.ca/maps?q=%s, g for https://www.google.com/search?q=%s, d for https://www.dndbeyond.com/search?q=%s and similar. I also have a keyword e which runs a bookmarklet that fills in a one-time email into the currently focused input field.

You can do almost exactly this with keyword bookmarks. The only change is that you need to put the “keyword” at the start of the URL. So @l linux rather than linux @l.

Create a new bookmark with these settings:

• Name: Whatever you want.
• URL: The search query you want with the text replaced by %s. For example https://kagi.com/search?q=%s+site:https://lemm.ee.
• Keyword: The tag you want. Such as @l.

Now you can type @l foobar in the URL bar and it will go to https://kagi.com/search?q=foobar+site:https://lemm.ee. (Or whatever search engine you have configured.

Keywords can also be used for non-search bookmarks and javascript bookmarklets which are very convenient.

Substack is the worst with this. I get 2 paragraphs into the article and obscured the text to prompt for my email. Like shit, I don’t know if I want to subscribe yet, I haven’t read the fucking article. Maybe if it is good I’ll subscribe, don’t try to trick me into it. I’ll happily consider your subscript prompt after I have read the article and have an opinion on if I want to subscribe.

Now I just leave the page whenever I see that prompt and I’ve configured my browser to flag all substack links so that I don’t waste my time clicking them. (Unfortunately it doesn’t work for custom domains).

You don’t need it, but a gig of disk space is basically free, so why not? Swap is generally a good thing.

The core difference is that with swap when the system needs more RAM the kernel has a choice between A) Evicting pages from the disk cache or B) Swapping out anonymous data (memory not backed by a file). If you don’t have swap the choice is limited to just A. (There are a few other ways to reclaim RAM but these are the biggest two). The means that with swap you will see thrashing if your whole working set doesn’t fit in ram, without swap you will see thrashing if all anonymous memory + the rest of your working set doesn’t fit into RAM. Basically having no swap pins all anonymous memory in RAM, even if it isn’t being used. In most cases it is better to give the kernel more choices, because swapping out some background process that has been sleeping for the last 2h and will probably sleep for another 2 is much better than evicting a page of an active application from the disk cache (that will need to be read back soon).

Typically their is some sort of low-level knob in /sys (try find /sys | grep backlight) which can be used to set it to any value. Be careful playing around though because 0 is often completely off and it can be hard to set it back. (Although a reboot should fix it if nothing tries to be clever and preserve it at shutdown.)

We are stupid fucking peasants as they have regulatory capture so they know the worst that will happen is they get a small slap on the wrist. Most people don’t actually care and those that do don’t have the money to buy the laws that we need.

Why waste time pretending when it doesn’t make 2 cents of difference. It is just a waste of money.

But they get scared because their program has 500 bugs! Close them and now your program only has 10 bugs! Problem solved.

/s

Things like keyloggers […] will not be able to intrude on your session

This isn’t really true. Run libinput debug-events. In most distros users will have access to run this and keylog all input events.

I use Wayland and love it, but keyloggers are not prevented on most common setups.

I don’t know much about distrobox but probably. It seems like distrobox would be a bit more isolated from the host system. (Which can be both a prod or a con depending on your use case.) steam-run will also reuse the host libraries rather than downloading a new copy so it will be more efficient.

You don’t need it often. Just if you are running pre-built binaries. There are other ways to work around it but steam-run is a big hammer that basically sets up an environment that looks like a “regular” distro with a bunch of command libraries available for running that command.

One example I had in web-dev was Prisma which wants to download some pre-built binaries when installed via npm. These are available in nixpkgs (and I am now using these) but the first way to get it working was just to run it via steam-run.