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Preparing to move from Ubuntu to Fedora

Hi! I’m seeking some advice and sanity check on hopping from Ubuntu to Fedora on my personal PC. I’ve been using Ubuntu LTS for almost two years now, switched from Windows and never looked back. But I cannot say I know Linux well. I use my PC for browsing, some gaming with Steam (I have AMD GPU), occasional video editing,...

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Oh, that’s neat! Thanks!

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Yeah, looks like migration of flatpaks between OS is easy and makes sense a lot

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Thanks!

Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I’ll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.

I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don’t have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.

I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it “flatpak-only”? If so I’ll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak

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I see your point… I use Debian for my self-hosted environment, so having similar system on desktop may save some cognitive load. My main arguments against Debian are (maybe misinformed though):

  • No btrfs support in installer OK, Debian wiki says it’s there
  • Major annual upgrades to keep up with stable look more scary than more incremental and frequent updates of Fedora. And using Sid as someone suggested sounds too crazy for main PC

So yeah, looks like it’s just upgrades… Gives me something to think about while I’m moving my apps to flatpaks

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Thanks! This is helpful

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I really like GNOME. I know not enough about security of it compared to Cinnamon

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That’s what I mostly do now. But it requires some extra work, as some apps are not available in Ubuntu DEB repository. Also, I don’t like the approach that Canonical takes, pushing snaps so much

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Interesting. It says that the project is in pre-alpha stage… not sure if I would be able to verify the scripts it generates

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Well, my original plan was to copy configuration over after I install apos that are not available as flatpaks. Looks like I can copy configuration for those too, just to another location

Next smartphone I buy, which one do you recommend?

Things that make me angry about my current smartphone Samsung Galaxy S21Ultra on a Verizon plan is the mandatory software updates in which they install WITHOUT MY PERMISSION stupid apps like Netflix and addictive gambling games and stacking block games and Candy crush. God knows what else they install without my permission. I...

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Lots of good advice here, but many might be too extreme. I find such all-or-nothing approach intimidating for people who just started to think about improving their privacy situation.

Let’s see… you are angry about bloatware. It can come from two sources - mobile service carrier and phone manufacturer. How to get rid of it?

  1. Buy only “unlocked” phones. Then the carrier will not be able to push anything to your phone. You will also be free to change the carrier as you wish.
  2. Buy phones from manufacturers that don’t install too much bloatware. Google Pixel has only Google apps, Motorola also is almost vanilla Google. Fairphone is more exotic, but an interesting option. iPhone is OK too if you want Apple ecosystem, but customization is not a thing there.

Now, we are in a privacy focused community and I saw your later comments about Google being an opposite of privacy. I would argue that vanilla Pixel is much better than bloated and locked Samsung already. I see you get recommendations to replace the OS that your new phone might run, and these are valid, but come with significant downsides. There are other ways to improve your privacy stance by changing the way how you use your phone without changing what phone or what OS you run on it.

What should be used for anonymous usernames?

More often than not, the best way to hide is to simply blend in with the crowds – this also encompasses one’s choice for a username. It is relatively simple to make a single throwaway account – just come up with a username, and off you go – however, if one makes throwaway accounts often, the task of thinking of a unique,...

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I use SimpleLogin for email alias, and username usually has to be associated with email address. So I just use whatever SimpleLogin generates for me

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I’m using pi-hole + uBlock origin.

Adblock DNS, Pi-Hole, hBlock - these three do essentially same thing but at different layers - blocking DNS requests based on blacklists. I’m not familiar with hBlock, but I assume blacklists on each of these 3 are very similar. Using all three doesn’t slow down your internet connection much, unless your pihole server is underpowered. You can drop pi-hole from the mix if you are not using it’s other features (statistics, local DNS, etc). hBlock looks nice, and should add zero latency, but works only for local machine. So you still need network-wide blocker. Make sure you set your DNS on router, so all devices would get protection.

uBlock Origin is smarter than simple DNS blocking, but protects only your browser sessions.

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Nah, maybe one more season… but the last few books are not that good.

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“Chasm City” by Alastair Reynolds. It’s a standalone novel in a much bigger Revelation Space series. But the plot of this book is quite independent of the series, you don’t need to know the lore to understand it. I think it is very well suited for a movie or a short series.

The setting is hard SciFi, very detailed, but not too crazy.

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It just gets… dumber? It’s pretty subjective though.

Spoiler alert- Creatures from other dimensions with mind control technology spanning entire spacetime cannot squash humanity because of a single human/protomolecule hybrid - Laconia’s absolute compliance with Duarte ruling is so mindless. No conspirators apart from a lone mad scientist… no one even tried to use protomolecule technology to take over the power. - Humanity adopted protomolecule technology and colonized hundreds of worlds all within lifetime of main characters. The power belongs to Laconian empire. But they still cannot get insurgents found and punished. There is a fucking asteroid base, and Laconians cannot find it.

Not a dumb part, but the main characters, being separated for a long time, don’t get their own interesting storylines. It seems like authors got bored with characters and didn’t know what to do with them. New characters are usually boring. Duarte’s daughter, Kamal’s son - they are just background… The only strong character in focus is Tanaka.

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Closest one for lower latency. However, the closest location happens to be in a major metro area and is banned by many financial organizations that I use, so usually I connect to the next closest.

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Why do you think that “ministry of housing” would not discriminate, not invade privacy and charge fair rent? I’m always fascinated how people believe that some government entity would act as a compassionate and just human being, at the same time bashing rich for being assholes.

Power corrupts. In capitalist society capital brings power, and in socialist state it’s bureaucracy. So here you have rich assholes, and when you switch more power to government you’ll get paper shifting assholes. Not much will change for people with no power. Probably it will be worse because rich people and their corporations produce valuable goods and services, while paper shifters usually don’t need to produce anything apart from more papers.

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Oh, that’s a very different discussion… if that housing institution would be elected, preferably on local level, then maybe it could be more accountable.

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Absolutely. Government oversight exists for that.

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OMG that’s the one! Thank you! I need to review the article and discussion though

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Yeah, I see many suggestions to do just that. Might be a good time to go check a local library.

Proton services discussion

I’ll start off by saying everyone’s economic situations are just as varied as their threat models and how people make decisions on which services can be specific to themself and not one that can apply to anyone else. The services one chooses to use for free or to pay for may be based more on what they can afford vs what’s...

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I don’t trust Proton enough to use it exclusively. Personally I use their free email tier as a secondary mailbox.

  • They are not fully open source (I found only web client source code)
  • Their last independent audit was in 2021 and was done for beta version of their email
  • The audit itself was for security, nothing related to privacy
  • They advertise their email service as encrypted: encrypted:

End-to-end encryption Proton Mail is a private email service that uses open source, independently audited end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption to secure your communications. This protects against data breaches and ensures no one (not even Proton) can access your inbox. Only you can read your messages.

Which I see as deceptive: end-to-end encryption is working without user involvement only for emails between Proton mailboxes. In other cases user needs to establish PGP encryption on their own. Inbox may be not accessible by Proton (we actually have no clue because server side code is closed source), but unencrypted incoming messages can be easily intercepted by Proton relays.

I’m not saying that Proton does all this nefarious stuff, but their marketing is questionable.

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Most recent Mastodon version allows users to opt-in for their posts be searchable

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It’s not just a web front end. I would call it a software development lifecycle service. On top of repos for source code management there could be a bunch of services: Issue tracker, CI/CD automation, static pages hosting, flexible permissions system, even pull requests - all this is not Git.

Forge is a nice and easy name, but not sure if many people realize what it means or recognize that meaning.

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Welcome to !privacy - you’ll learn not to share your phone number with strangers.

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Yes, because 5 year old child is not supposed to venture away from school.

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Do I need to have an iPhone to use an AirTag?

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I’ll check that one out, thanks!

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I’ve heard good opinions about Garmin before, but that was in context of navigation and fitness tracking. Would it work for my use case, tracking a family member?

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This looks interesting. But the only pre-built hardware option they have on the list, Nano G1 Explorer, is way too big for a little kid. But I may get it for adult family members for emergency situations.

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I’m probably being overprotective. However, teachers have a lot of kids to watch over. My kid would probably not go adventuring on their own, but we cannot rule out a kidnapper or some natural emergency situation.

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Some stuff is in Joplin, some stuff is in wiki.js. Joplin lacks organization features. Wiki.js stores stuff in database and has problems with search, both are possible to fix, I believe…

Occasionally I remember about problems with this setup, but I’m too lazy to fix or replace it

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Depends on what you want exactly. Easy and self-hosted are not usually go well together unless you’ve got enough experience.

Easiest way for blog - use a platform. WordPress.com is great and has free tier.

More involved, but still relatively easy - static site generator. I use Hugo myself, there is Jakyll that is popular too. Host it for free on GitHub or GitLab pages.

I would not self-host a public web site for security reasons. But you can run a static site on some cloud service. A personal blog with small audience should be fine on Oracle free tier.

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Does this method allow to pick what you need to backup or it’s the entire filesystem?

[Rant] I hate the modern internet

I am fucking scared of the mass surveilence nightmare direction that the internet and the world as a whole is going towards… C2PA, france hacking itself into citizen phones, the UK anti encryption law, EU’s chat control, etc. Im also sick of and hate the “you will own nothing and be happy” mentality that corpos try to...

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It’s like governments and corporations are competing at control over information flows. In EU bureaucracy wins more often, and in US corpo lobbyists win more often.

Can’t say I find this competition healthy…

What is your machine naming scheme?

I’ve ended up with a number of machines on my network, and a need to name them all in a somewhat logical way. For several years I had them named after the planets, which worked well until the PCs for myself, my girlfriend, servers and Raspberry Pi’s quickly summed up to more than the eight planets. I’ve broadened it...

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I used to invent “funny” names, but at some point it became a chore and I also found I’m forgetting some names or spelling when I need it.

Call me boring, but doing enterprise system admin jobs for years I recently started to adopt functional naming convention.

This is what I have now: [location code][OS code][type vm/ct][environment code][workload][index]

So the first production DB linux VM in my primary Los Angeles location will be named LA1LVMPDB1 And my second test Nextcloud container hosted in the same location will be named LA2LCTTNC2.

I still have to invent short names for workload, which is harder for specialized containers, but overall this makes it all more manageable.

What are you using for photo storage and organization?

Hey, I’m wondering what everyone’s solution is for self hosted “cloud” storage of photos? I’ve been running a PhotoPrism server on my Synology for a while but it’s missing some features I’d like to have. While we’ve set up auto-uploading from different phones to the web server, I haven’t found an easy way to...

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Test driving NextCloud Memories. Looks nice, works inside Nextcloud (no need to set up and maintain one more service).

Main con so far - no mobile app

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No, you can’t

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Yeah, that’s what I’m using too

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I can’t say I’m following all release notes, but development is active. You can take a look yourself github.com/pulsejet/memories

What is you backup tool of choice?

I don’t mean system files, but your personal and work files. I have been using Mint for a few years, I use Timeshift for system backups, but archived my personal files by hand. This got me curious to see what other people use. When you daily drive Linux what are your preferred tools to keep backups? I have thousands of...

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At this moment I use too many tools.

For user data on my PC and on home server I mostly use Duplicacy. It is fast and efficient. All data backed up locally on NAS box over SFTP, and a subset of that data is backed up to S3 cloud storage.

I have a Mac, this one is using TimeMachine, storing data on NAS, then it’s synced to S3 cloud storage one a day.

And on top of that VMs and containers from home server are backed up by Proxmox built in tool to NAS. These mostly exclude user data.

Has anyone used or contributed to OpenStreetMap?

I’ve tried using it over the years but I never liked it because there was no information. So last night I looked at my local city and there is almost no information at all. I spent a few hours last night adding buildings and restaurants and removing incorrect items. It was actually kind of fun and therapeutic and I plan to do...

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Oh, that’s nice, thank you for this!

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This is really cool! Thanks for posting this. I wonder if Jeff is on Fediverse so I could thank him personally - I have no Twitter account anymore.

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