I made a switch to Smart Launcher which has been quite fantastic. They don’t rely on a subscription model like most other launchers which is a huge plus in my book. They offer quite a bit of options for customizing your screen. Not as much as Nova, but it’s still good. I used Nova for a long time as well, but this has made it easier to transition to. Aside from that, Hyperion Launcher has plenty of options as well.

As a 16 yr old I started running my own BBS on a 1200bps external modem on an Older Atari 800xl computer (1990) It was a completely new world for me. :) I later upgraded to a 14400 buad external modem for the max and that was when modems peaked at 38400 baud. I was an Atari geek so naturally when I had the 14400, I ran it on an Atari 520ST computer.

I still remember the days of being a SYSOP and the exhilaration in talking with other people from across the country who would dial in and have a nice one-on-one convo. It didnt’ last too long though, I got married shortly after high school and out went the BBS. But it wasn’t so bad, because at that time, the Net was starting to take off and out went the BBS’s around the world. There are many out there via telnet if you can find a directory, they are a fun trip back in time. :)

Yes. I have a network server for my printer and works. Also a label printer hooked up via USB. Also USB SSD and other drives. You should not see any problems.

I came from Arch to Fedora as well but using Universal Blue’s images. In my case, Aurora (KDE), and daughter’s Bluefin (Gnome). They update in the background and only install when you reboot. So far, most of the newer software releases such as web browsers or the desktop environment fall within a day or two for being installed which is a nice alternative. The big plus I see on these too is they are immutable so if something installs or breaks, you just boot into the previous version from Grub and go from there.

Additionally, OpenSuse MicroOS has options for whatever environment you are used to such as Gnome or KDE, this is immutable as well. I view all of these as “Set and Forget”.

Along this line what about how it compares to Threema or Session?

In my opinion so far yes, I’ve only been on it a few weeks, but think of the immutable as locking down the root partition and any vital directories to the OS and not allowing your user to modify anything. In the event of a bad update, it’s easy enough to select the previous boot in Grub and be on your merry way.

I have a special needs adult step-daughter who’s PC I manage and I always need to keep it updated, setting it up on their Bluefin version which uses Gnome which she loves. So, I may do it this weekend. She’s currently on Endeavor OS (Arch based) but it keeps getting kernel updates daily it seems and with those a reboot. Additionally, for whatever reason, her system goes to sleep without warning sometimes so if I’m updating it, it’s gone to sleep. (Super weird). I’ve never had it do this before with Standard Arch linux so I think its something to do with Endeaver. I’ve never bothered to troubleshoot it to be honest. With a setup on the BlueFin (Aurora Linux is KDE), enabling Auto updates should be a breeze and then she’s golden for being updated without my intervention.

I use Aurora Linux which is the sister one to Bazzite, both are Fedora 41 based images. They strongly encourage using the FlatPak approach to installing software. After using it for a few weeks now, I can see why. One of the things with the immutable setup is once you install a program, you have to reboot to get it to run, but with Flatpak, it isn’t so. I think Flatpak has it’s merits - if they have an app which you normally use, then it’s easy enough to install and go.

For the Fedora side of things, you can “layer” apps over it using the rpm-ostree but they encourage you to only do that as a last resort. One of the things they enable you to do is install additional OS’s containerized which integrate with the desktop environment. For example, right now, I can only run Scrcpy in a different OS (That I’ve been able to figure out so far), so I just spin up an Arch OS container and launch it from there, and can interface with my phone normally. As I understand too, the developers plan on disabling layering in a future release. To be honest, I don’t think I have but one thing layered and that’s my Label Printer’s driver.

The benefit for me using the immutable system and this is the hardest thing to grasp for a lot of people including myself is that it truly is set and forget type of updating. With Arch, you can become sort of addicted to checking for new releases, and I’m not going to lie, it’s amazing to get some of the newest releases of your favorite app or browser especially when they fix something. With Arch, it’s generally there. With my system, I turned on auto updates, so it’s not too uncommon to bring the system up in the morning and see that updates have been given (I don’t notice them usually). It’s nice not having to worry about that as much.

https://9to5linux.com/mozilla-firefox-134-is-out-with-support-for-touchpad-hold-gestures-on-linux

At least has some of them. I think they always grab the betas and aggregate the release notes/changes during the nightly/beta tests.

Hmmm…my system is a Dell Optiplex 990 SFF PC so about 14 years old and seems to run Youtube without issues or buffering. I have yet to see if any local media does the same. But I’m also running 16gb of RAM which is the system’s max and it’s pretty much not had any issues since giving it that much.

I’m not 100% sure on the KDE release cycle, as I understood, the KDE update was full of bug fixes today to the 6.2.4 from 6.2.3, and the Fedora team integrated it in their releases quickly so this might have been a faster than usual release. I’m thinking when KDE fully releases their new OS to replace Neon, I may try that one, it’s also supposed to be immutable which would be the chef’s kiss for me. :)

When I started first using Tasker back in around 2013 or so, I was mesmerized but what you could do with it. This was because at the time, too, I was rooted, so it really changed the possibilities with modes and so forth with Tasker. For example, NFC unlocking the phone when you tapped it to a NFC tag while the screen was OFF. That was killed by Google in Android 5 but before then, it was awesome! Tap on the tag and your phone would perform whatever task you told it do. Over the years, Google and other Android makers have slowly added different functions that Tasker was doing before them.

Since Tasker was taken over by the current Dev, it’s make many leaps and bounds over what it could before and simpler now. My tasks are:

Turn volume up ALL THE WAY for specific contacts and then back to the before volumes after the call. I have an older mother which hopefully live longer than 10 more years, but closing in on 80 years young, she’s going to get more fragile with her age so, my sister who lives near her, can call me in any issues pop up. (I live about 5 hours away). So, it’s essential to know when she’s calling me. On the same theme, when she texts me, I have it announce via TTS that she sent me a text. It’s also handy for when my wife calls me!

The phone restores the volume from silent when unplugged from the power charger in the morning ONLY after 7AM. I work from home and awake around 4:30am daily and around 7 is a good time to return sounds in the home. But, it is also conditional, so if on the weekend, I don’t wake up until 8am), it won’t turn sound on until I unplug it. (NOTE: The tasks to raise volume for the callers will override this mode which is good!)

The phone also turns the volume off at 9pm nightly since there’s no reason to have it make noise after then, all are home and pretty much it’s peaceful time.

The phone also sends a signal to my August Lock to send the unlock command when it put it my back pocket by reading a NFC Tag which contains a webhook to call Home Assistant to give the unlock instruction to the door lock.

When certain apps I define are open, it keeps the screen on all the time. I use this all the time when I’m at the store and running a calculator so it’s always up. A few other apps as well, but not too many.

A few others such as toggling the Private DNS server on my phone (I use dns.adguard-dns.com) on the phone to block advertisements and sometimes it doesn’t work so having a widget to toggle that off and on is super nice instead of navigating to it in settings.

I used to use Wiregaurd (Now on Tailscale), but before then, I had a task which would auto connect me to the Wireguard tunnel on my home network immediately disconnected from my WiFi, this ensured that I was always 100% on my home network. Tailscale does the same thing (If you set it to be always connected to your tunnel) , but I’ve been playing with that for a bit over a year and have pretty much settled there for now. My wireguard Tasker Profile for anyone interested:

https://taskernet.com/shares/?user=AS35m8nTnqPjajvNWFTA0s2cuT8IdHNE46iSJeH3U9724uLffLDxxiIVTbFo1jKBcieTRlRsEw%3D%3D&id=Project%3AWireguard+Toggles

Before the lock down of Covid, I used to have a profile which I still keep on which would trigger if I was NEAR a SSID for my work to silence my phone and restore the volume if I was away from it (or if I’m connected to my car’s stereo bluetooth if near the SSID). This worked flawlessly and never worried about stupid app notifications during work which would be frowned on. I occasionally go to the office and forget sometimes it’s triggered. :)

One that I’ve worked on for the last years, so sparingly was making a Google Voice robot which would see which contact you called and then send the calls through Google Voice instead of my phone dialer. I’ve made it work but not all the time, so never have trusted it. (I only give my cell number to my family and very trusted friends, everyone else gets my Google Voice number).

My Voice Robot project which is stale as I’ve had been busy with health issues off and on and life events otherwise:

https://taskernet.com/shares/?user=AS35m8nTnqPjajvNWFTA0s2cuT8IdHNE46iSJeH3U9724uLffLDxxiIVTbFo1jKBcieTRlRsEw%3D%3D&id=Project%3AGoogle+Voice+Robot

Overall, your imagination is the limiting factor for what you can do with Tasker, the dev has also made it so you can take 100% control over the phone by making Tasker the device owner which bypasses the need for root. I haven’t done it with my Pixel, but on the Samsung I had, it worked, but broke a work app so I disabled it (Requires a factory reset to enable and also disable it).

I have a Pixel 8a from Verizon, as someone else here said, they sometimes have crazy deals. This was a free one (through bill credits) for us. It was right after Google released that version and before 9. I quickly discovered that even with Google’s beta program which you can FREELY USE and all it requires you to do is connect your phone via usb through the web and it patches your phone via Google’s site to install it. I’m a beta testing type of person, so I was all in, until I discovered there was no way no how because of the bootloader.

Then, on top of that the, GraphineOS is not able to be installed with it locked as well. I haven’t approached Verizon about unlocking the bootloader. I’ve heard some success stories on XDA I think it was about people getting theirs unlocked through them. (Probably if you get a tech who’s in a good mood helps).

I did, but it’s a home machine, personal use. So, it didn’t matter for me, but for family…that was another story! :) I just pulled the main boot drive, put a different one and installed it and went through the process. Then went back to the Proxmox drive after.

I’m in the same boat, I tried Incus or rather LXD a couple months back and gave up after a little while due to pressing business needing the Proxmox machine up again.

I have two main requirements which I have for my server:

• It must support Home Assistant OS as a VM and a USB Dongle (Zwave) I found this as a possible solution for LXD systems: https://seanblanchfield.com/2023/05/home-assistant-os-in-lxd

• It must support NFS exports so I can share my storage and data drives. I’m pretty sure since it’s on Debian, I can install Cockpit and it’s sharing plugin for this.

I think the thing which scared me off at the time too was the lack of GUI which I think I may have missed. This may be a solution: https://blog.simos.info/how-to-install-and-setup-the-incus-web-ui/

I was just thinking about Incus the other day so this might be a good time to look into it more!

Sadly, it’s for Haswell and higher, I’m on an older Sandy Lake CPU so could not get it to boot and then I saw in their Wiki about the requirements. Yeah, it’s an old PC. (~14 yrs old and as temperamental as a teenager!) :)

I deal with an issue with Firefox where it causes my Home Assistant dashboard become non responsive if the tab is not the primary one always on screen. I think it’s something with the forced snoozing of tabs. I’ve tried other Firefox based browsers and face the same problem. So this leaves me with… Chromium based browsers. As a Linux user, it’s either Firefox or Chromium based. With that said, I have not had the issue with the Chromium base, but because it’s mostly consumed by Google, I reject it mostly.

I did find that Zen was very nice to look at, and they do have an opinionated way of setting up the tabs (I don’t care about the vertical tabs). They also seem to be wanting to roll out their own extension store? In the form of “Zen Mods” but are also cross compatible with Firefox Extensions so that’s good I guess. I use a rolling release (Arch) OS, so I do see a lot of updates to Zen, the devs seem to be really working on it. For now - I’m on Firefox dealing with the unusual Home Assistant thing. I’ve used Firefox since it was before version 1 so I’m a bit stuck in my ways. :)

I really wish that there was another browser engine there which I could use which supports the Adblocking and Bitwarden (My most important extensions). It’s a bit disappointing to see that Edge, and all other browsers have adopted the Chromium base. I am hoping that with the latest judgement and order against Google to sell off the Chrome browser, sticks and if so, that the new owner(s) will strip it of some of the garbage which has been forced on the code base. (Manifest v3 comes to mind). The only Chromium based one I tolerate on my system right now is Ungoogled Chrome and Vivaldi, who has said that they are resisting the Manifest V3 as much as they can and have a somewhat decent adblocking built in using their end. Even though I have DNS level adblocking, Ublock Origin fills the gap with some of the ads which gets past my end.

You just have to turn it off. It’s an accessibility feature if you don’t want it:

Not a software one, but back when I was a teenager doing hardware modifications (or attempting to at least), I had a very valuable to me Atari 130XE computer (35 or so years ago) I wanted to solder in some extra RAM or some chip (I don’t recall now) but I had problems removing the old one so I called up my friend who did electronics repair the Mainboard. It was raining that night I took it to him so I did what I thought was best. Put it in a black garbage bag to protect it. Lets just say the next morning is when I found out that Static + circuit boards is a bad thing. Never more than a valuable less for me than at that time. He was a good friend though and out of the goodness of his heart, he gave me a replacement one so I wouldn’t be without. (Mind you, these were out of production and considered obsolete at the time maybe worth $40 at the time) and not yet vintage as they would be seen today where in some markets can fetch upward to a few hundred more as is.

Instability you ask? This is like a slow creep to instability and freeze your system. It’s called the Bash Fork Bomb (look it up if you want), but it’s a copy/paste you put in and it slows your system down by consuming all the system resources and cause it to lock up HARD. It goes away after a system reboot, though.

I was going to post the code here, but decided to play nice. But if you are curious:

https://itsfoss.com/fork-bomb/

(edit: Made ‘slow’ ‘slows’)

I tried it the other night on my Pixel (Android 15) and had no issues. I’ve been trying out different launchers in an attempt to find one which isn’t asking for a monthly or yearly sub and has horizontal app drawer as an option! Both of which are getting to be more rare these days. I couldn’t see where to make the drawer scrollable on Lawnchair, so I skipped it for now.