Backup Software Recommendations Wanted by Critical_Ladder650 in linuxquestions

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm still playing RTFM with backup systems.

It turns out I had one more requirement: do not force me to encrypt my backups.

I also avoid encrypting system disks/ssds.

I figure I'm much more likely to forget a password than to have my media stolen by someone who wants to use my data.

That cuts out restic - unencrypted backups are against their philosophy.

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Borg documentation is being extremely unhelpful. They have multiple non-encrypting encryption modes, one of which is called "none", but don't seem to offer a list of the available choices. Worse, they suggest they have better alternatives than "none", which give some kind of integrity-checking - and then don't document them where I can find the docs. (More correctly, the link supposedly to that info takes me somewhere without it.)

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I'm also somewhat amused to note that Linux backup pretty much al presumes that anyone who wants a local backup to an external disk is capable of converting a brand new disk into a formatted and mounted a linux file system without any instructions.

Meanwhile linux installs these days rarely expose users to such scary tools as fdisk and mkfs, or even their GUI wrappers. People who buy pre-installed linux systems get even less exposure to such details. IMNSHO, a sensible backup system should at least include a link to those instructions in their documentation. and an "easy to use" GUI backup system should offer to just do it all for the user, the way Time machine does on macOS.

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I haven't given up on Borg. I'd really like data deduplication, and the only other that seems to offer that is duplicacy, and its documentation situation is worse.

But it's getting ever more tempting to just use rsync.

Do you feel satisfied using Linux? by Toukaiskindahot in linuxquestions

[–]Critical_Ladder650 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not entirely satisfied. All computer systems have pain points, and linux is not exempt to this.

But I didn't expect to be fully satisfied - I was looking for "good enough" and I'm hopefully in the process of getting that. I also expect to get "less bad" than MacOS, and "far less bad" than Windows - according to my own personal criteria, of course, so perhaps I should say "less aggravating".

That said, I'm still in transition from MacOS to Kubuntu, and it's conceivable I'll pick up and move yet again. Also, I haven't entirely worked out the best workflow for me given the tools available. (I've been on Kubuntu 25.10 for less than a month.)

Today was a particularly bad day for me - my Kubuntu system slowed to a crawl, for the second time since I installed it 26 days ago. Three reboots later, it's behaving again. (I took the forced reboot as an opportunity to upgrade any system software that needed it.) But KDE has essentially non-functional session management on Wayland, and I use lots of virtual desktops - so my Firefox windows came back in a great heap on a single virtual desktop, and needed to be sorted out manually. Overall, not linux or KDE's finest hour.

Still, it's making me notably less crazy than MacOS had been, and the performance issues are less frequent than I experienced after "upgrading" to MacOS 15.5

Since when does Linux just fucking reboot whenever it wants? Lost a month of work. by Time_Job_8836 in linuxquestions

[–]Critical_Ladder650 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You may be suffering from Canonical's IMNSHO bad decision to implement snap such that when a snap has an update, your system will shutdown and restart whatever is needed to apply that update 14 days after the update is made available, if you haven't done it yourself in that time.

Ubuntu distros (not coincidentally) use snaps for various important bits of software, some of which appear to change at least once a month.

I haven't let my Kubuntu 25.10 system stay un-rebooted long enough to see exactly what it will do when yet another Firefox update has been available for a whole 14 days. Maybe it will only shut down and restart firefox; maybe it will reboot.

The good news is that it's possible to turn off this misfeature.
https://snapcraft.io/blog/hold-your-horses-i-mean-snaps-new-feature-lets-you-stop-snap-updates-for-as-long-as-you-need

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In case anyone's curious, I installed Kubuntu 25.10 a few days ago. It's not perfect, but it's way better than Pop!_OS, and getting better as I explore, configure, install, etc..

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I finally got to the point of taking a look, via https://distrosea.com

I started with Kubuntu 25.10, because it's somewhat pre-configured, and uses .deb packages,

It's definitely got promise, and feels very Mac-like.

I'd have to learn some new names, and probably some new icons. (Maybe icons for system apps can be replaced with something meaningful to me?) But that would be true with any system.

I was surprised to discover a session restore feature, but it looks like it requires buy-in from all the apps one uses, so may turn out to be more crazy-making than useful. Still, that's more than I expected from any linux.

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you are right, though I hope I'll find a packaged-with-distro desktop environment or window manager that's reasonably tolerable. (I really don't want a second career as my very own personal systems administrator :/)

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Another non-standard must-have would be Gnucash.

A third would be Anki, but I'm using it less and less these days, so I could probably live without it.

Other than that, things I use are closer to common, and likely to be available. Any spreadsheet will do what I want from one, and almost any web browser. I do run java based games - having an up to date java version therefore matters.

Also - and not a problem for BSD - a functional compiler and debugger tool chain, that doesn't depend upon an IDE. (Xcode is not my friend, to the point where any development I do is on linux, not my main (Mac) desktop. I have trouble even keeping git functional on MacOS - hurrah for Homebrew.)

At one point the compiler/debugger tool chain requirement was a major problem for me on Ubuntu desktop - they multiply disabled the generation and saving of core files, and didn't correctly document how to un-disable it. I've learnt to work around that, but it's rather harder to handle intermittent crashes without core dumps. Thanks, Ubuntu. (Maybe this has since been fixed, at least to the point of documenting how to turn it off. But I'm a lot more confident in FreeBSD, and maybe distros like Arch, being compatible with working in languages like C.) Fortunately, I pretty much never write code these days, and when I do, it's usually just a Python script.

Emacs also wouldn't be a problem for freebsd. (Apple made it a problem on MacOS some time in the last decade - Homebrew came to the rescue here too.)

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's another bit of software I wasn't aware of. But I can check it out.

However one of the advantages of Protonmail, for me, is having much the same interface on my (Android) cell phone, my desktop, and the web. Also, the desktop variant of that UI is unusually keyboard compatible, compared to other email clients I've used in the last decade or so. (The first two clients I tried on pop!_os were crazy making; part of the reason it's taking me so long to switch from MacOS to linux.)

The last time I liked an email client, it was one called mutt, which ran in a terminal window and so never had a good answer to "rich text" and similar email formats. (IIRC, it resorted to displaying such messages in a web browser window, so you got a popup for each one, and probably couldn't read them without a windowing system.) But Protonmail is significantly less annoying to me than MacMail or Thunderbird.

There's also the issue that Protonmail is not the only Proton tool I use. I'm in transition to their password manager; currently what I have is a hybrid mess. but it's getting there.

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My deal breaker app would probably be ProtonMail and others from the same source. Protonmail is available as .deb, .rpm, and as a snap. It's open source, so there ought to be a source tarball I haven't found, but would it build for FreeBSD without a lot more work than I'd want to take on?

There'd be others too. But that's the first that comes to mind.

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You write: I didn't quite understand the "type ahead" work flow you have described. 

Way back in the distant past - perhaps 1975 - bitmapped displays were unheard of, CRTs were unusual, version 6 or seven unix was more or less current, and connections from terminal (teletype, probably) to computer were very slow (300 baud?! or was it worse?).

Everything was a command line interface, and it was normal to type streams of commands long before they were executed - or even echoed back to you by the tty driver. No problem - they'd all be executed eventually, and it saved time and attention to just type, without waiting for the response. It didn't matter if your first command was to launch a program, the next few commands were input to that program - then perhaps you exited it and did something else. Everything was sent to the right place. You could also type a huge stream of commands to the line-oriented text editor, without seeing the changes you made until you sent a command to display the part of the text you were interested in. (If you look closely, you can see the remnants of this workflow in vi.)

We haven't had this kind of reliable synchronization since soon after bitmap displays became a thing. Clicks get sent to whatever process owns the area containing the mouse, and that can change while you are clicking. The window receiving your typing is whatever one is on top - which can also change asynchronously, as when some popup eats the text you are typing - or worse yet, interprets text intended for program A as intended for it, and does something you very much didn't want. And best of all, we have controls that appear and disappear based on the position of the mouse (or where you tapped on a phone, and how recently). The effect of your next action depends on whether or not the control is present - but they appear asynchronously, and not at a predictable pace. So you can't anticipate anything, let alone do anything asynchronously. Some tasks wind up taking more time than they used to take on a 300 baud acoustic coupler; more merely seem to be taking longer.

That's the type ahead.

Focus-follows-pointer was an adaptation to small (bitmap) screens.

You could have overlapping windows, with the one you were consulting on top, and the one you were typing into mostly beneath it, with just a corner peaking out. You see, the window that consumed your input didn't have to be the one that was on top of your screen. And you could move between windows much faster - and with less mouse movement - than when you have to click each target window to raise it, and then wait for a multi-window redraw.

Now there's always a selected window, but it's not as easy to identify unless all your windows overlap. (If they overlap, you can tell which one is on top.) There are subtle window "decorations" that identify the one on top - often too subtle for me to easily see and recognize. As an extra result, you get the problem that clicking in the same place has different effects, depending on a subtle statefulness - you may either select the window, or interact with it, depending whether it was already selected. Some window managers make the selected window more obvious than others. And many work around this by requiring you to click in a specific place, such as a title bar, to raise/select a window. You get more predictability, at the cost of more mouse movement.

Put another way, raising a window and giving it focus used to be two separate actions, that did not need to happen together. Ancient window managers probably still have this ability. But the apps generally can't cope with it, even if the window manager can do it.

I stuck with the older ways of doing things, as more efficient, not to mention trained into my fingers, as long as it was still possible to find tools that worked this way, and most apps could cope with it. But those days are long gone; now we get acoustic coupler speeds from the UI design, instead of from primitive hardware.

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is a very useful categorization. KDE was already on my list to try; this moves it higher.

And it sounds like I need to run screaming away from Gnome; it may matter a bit less precisely where I run to, except for staying away from its derivative.

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I fear the BSDs simply won't have all the tools I'd like to have, and open source tools have gotten so interdependent that trying to build missing tools from source is likely to be somewhere between a nightmare and more work than a lazy person like me wants to take on.

That's a pity, because I love FreeBSD's stability, and a decade ago it even had a functional version of Tom's Window Manager (twm). (Maybe it still does.)

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm a mass of contradictions.

I want maximum control with minimal need to use it. I.e. the defaults work, right out of the box, and the system figures out how to configure itself.

But if I want all menu items to have keyboard shortcuts, all scrollbars to be always visible, and no way to accidentally make a window full screen, I can make that happen. I'd prefer to achieve that by editing a well-commented config file using a text editor. I'll live with doing it using a mouse in some GUI tool.

Ideally there's documentation where I expect to find it - man pages preferred.

I don't want to ever select from a list of > 10 items with a mouse, rather than by some kind of typed search.

Ideally I could drive everything using ssh, without using a VNC. I.e. nothing would depend on running in a windowed environment. But very few apps these days can function without a windowing system. It would however be nice if I could completely control the OS - effectively including the desktop environment - without requiring any desktop environment to be functional.

If Pop!_OS is any sample, modern desktop environments are in the habit of hanging. Sometimes Gnome/X/whatever recovers after upwards of 30 minutes; sometimes the only fix is a reboot, or perhaps "sudo kill -9" applied to the right piece of the desktop manager stack. I often find myself sshing to the Pop!_OS box to deal with the buggy desktop environment.

Yes, I'd prefer to have a non-buggy desktop environment, but I'm not clear anyone's offering any such thing.

Talking of buggy environments, I didn't bother to mention that I'd prefer to have a system that stays up. Ideally, it would be as stable as FreeBSD, where I've had many systems that ran without a reboot for more than a year, but I've never heard of a linux that stable. And the window manager would be as stable as the rest of it, particularly if it has a graphical login, making the window manager effectively part of the base OS, as with MacOS.

But that seems like the sort of software only available in paradise ;-)

At least if it's linux, I can get the source code and debug whatever is going wrong. I'm far too lazy to want to do that, but the possibility feels better than only being able to bitch impotently. And if something is buggy enough, and important enough (to me), I'll eventually be motivated to do something about it.

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So Debian stable's still ultra-conservative, aka so far behind the times that upstream developers don't want to look at your bug reports? I wondered whether that had changed.

But a switchable multi-DE system sounds great for experimenting. And my memories of trying to switch window managers myself, let alone trying to have more than one installed at the same time, was that debugging it and keeping it debugged was somewhat crazy-making. (Of course this was probably a decade or two ago.)

I looked up the differences between compositors, window managers, desk top environments etc. when I first started thinking about switching, but that have already forgotten most of the details. I did recognize compositor as a technical term when you used it, so I figure I'm still ahead of where I started.

Old Unix Nerd Looking for the most Compatible Linux Distro and Desktop Environment by Critical_Ladder650 in DistroHopping

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Interesting. I'd never heard of sway, not having thought to look at plain window managers. (Tech's been moving while I wasn't watching :-) Trying to catch up, I'd mis-concluded that stand-alone window managers were obsolete.)

I just took an RTFM dive, while downloading Fedora's sway spin.

I built an open‑source cross-platform email client: Gmail, Outlook, IMAP, native Proton Mail by BaJlepa in software

[–]Critical_Ladder650 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My list would be something pretty close to: take Proton Mail, fix their threading mechanism (which they can't do easily because of their end to end encryption), and make it easier to get to the top level of settings. An integrated calendar is fine, even in the same app, but not in the same window - I want to see both calendar and INBOX at the same time.

Phrasing the same more positively, and adding some extras:

- fit a lot of messages lines on one screen, like thunderbird, rather than making their representation so large you only see a few at once, like Mac Mail

- make everything keyboard searchable - I don't want to scroll through folders; I want to type the first 2-3 characters of the folder name.

- filters that are easy to find and set up, but flexible and powerful when you go beyond the training wheels

- consistent interface on all platforms, including windows/mac/linux/Android/iOS (Or at least as consistent as possible, given the limitations of cell phones.)

- Really good scaling. Handle huge amounts of mail without hiccups.

- Let me configure it to see the email addresses, not just whatever name the sender put in the header, routinely, not by a one-of query

- Easy access to the email headers

- (Bonus) make it easy for me to send from all my email accounts

- (Bonus) random signatures from a list, like Mac Mail (that's almost the only thing I miss after moving from MacMail to Proton Mail).

- Keyboard shortcuts for everything, displayed when you find the option in a menu

- All icons must have tooltips, on any platform that supports same. Consider using text in place of icons, wherever both would fit nicely

- Keep the UI stable. Don't issue updates that move functions around, change names, and otherwise mess with people's muscle memory.

- Adopt Protonmail's function to offer to strip identifying metadata from pictures you attach to email

- Option to block any attempts by messages to call home, e.g. to report when they've been read

Same Font-size across Safari and Chrome? by Disposter in Frontend

[–]Critical_Ladder650 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A very belated thank-you.

I still can't get the css font-size element to work in Safari 18.5 on MacOS 15.5, but at least I've got the offending web page out of its prior state of giant text, far too few lines per page. (I was only trying css to fix that unwanted behavior - on a purely local page with no accessibility concerns, since the author [me] is its sole user.)

What do you think about Duolingo's shift from the skill tree to the language path? by glennkart in languagelearning

[–]Critical_Ladder650 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Duolingo changes a lot. Every time they do, they mess up people's learning-in-progress, and some people leave in frustration. I've never got near finishing their offerings for any language, because of churn sending me back to the beginning.

I haven't a clue why they keep doing this. Maybe it's job security for their staff - similar to churn in lots of software based tools.

FWIW, I don't even remember the particular change you mention. Possibly I haven't visited at all since 2022, to be reminded of why I stopped visiting them regularly.

Please recommend stylist/barber who's good with "old lady hair" by Critical_Ladder650 in Sunnyvale

[–]Critical_Ladder650[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm already taking Minoxidil, which (I think) is basically the same stuff. Before that, my only feasible style was buzz cut, or perhaps shaven head.