76 karma · joined July 25, 2023
that said, i haven't managed to set it up for my android phone yet - it's not available in termux and i have NO idea where to start if i'd like to package it myself. probably has to be done by someone who knows ocaml, since termux' environment is so different from normal linux.
unless... maybe i should give proot a shot (chroot in termux, lets you run something closer to linux). but it's another layer of complexity on top of everything....
most important thing for my homelab i ever did was starting to mess around with VMs. first with virt-manager to have a gui, then just plain kvm (actually probably qemu) on the commandline using scripts to auto-install vms, and now a combination of Proxmox and Ansible to make a vm with just a few keystrokes. The freedom of messing around as much as i want without danger of breaking my system is the best.
next most important was setting up dns and dhcp automation - whenever the ansible playbook makes a vm, it immediately reserves a static ip for that mac and makes a DNS entry for that vm's name pointing to it's ip - so i can easily reach all my vm's by name without having to go through the effort of setting that up. great for when a test vm becomes permanent and needs to be accessible. this combined with using ansible to automatically create my user and put my ssh pubkey into it's authorized-hosts file makes everything SO smooth, no friction at all to work on different vm's and experiment.
also, when the ssd proxmox was installed on died, it was super easy to restore all the vm's.
next step is probably automating public dns, port forwarding and reverse proxy settings - so far i am doing that manually, but i just got a new phone and refuse to log into google on it, so i've had to set up a bunch of services, kinda running my own cloud, and they all need port forwards and reverse proxy entries. speaking of reverse proxy... it's a wonderful tool, set up ssl/https ONCE on it and use certbot to manage certs in one place, and you can test any service by just forwarding it to the vm without ssl, no hassle. for critical things i guess i'd still recommend setting up ssl for your internal network too, defense in depth like.
i keep thinking about how we don't actually need 95% of the code running at my job to actually accomplish my company's goals. it's insane how we just kept going with the flow while features and maintenance effort exploded.
that said, anyone know how well the BSD's work as a desktop operating system? mostly worried about hardware i guess, since it's already an issue on linux from time to time. but man the linux ecosystem, while wonderful, suffers from massive complexity too, or at least it looks more and more like it the longer i use it.
it's really crazy how wasteful we're being with electronics in general. my old work laptop became unusable with windows 10, just extremely sluggish for even simple tasks. putting linux on it, its working great again (in fact writing this comment on it right now.) I wish we could put more focus on performance in the more mainstream products, but at least there's FOSS for people like me. can't wait until i can put an alpine linux on my phone someday.
i'd love some service where i can put in $20 a month, and it gets split up among the sites i've visited, with options to give bigger shares or exclude sites completely. probably not gonna happen for a while though, having to set up something to receive payments with is just too much trouble for the small personal blogs etc. that have the most interesting content.
there's more, of course. but it's plenty for me to decide that i have no problem paying my $10 a month to not get 8/10 results that are ads.
I use it in private browsing mode so i can still use the nice search without having to log in every time.
alternatively, I don't know how deeply embedded the LLM stuff is in kagi, but I really do not need that, so maybe a plan without that, since that is the stuff that requires a lot of expensive compute.
Found that there is a Krita on liberapay, which i much prefer as platform, but who knows if that's official or not, since it's not linked on this thread's link.
What does work perfectly though is displayport through usb-c. I use this for docking stations at work and at home, it works perfectly for me. Hopefully we won't need displaylink much longer. but i do know good docks and good displays are expensive.
My biggest advice: Look into software that supports wayland natively. Xwayland still has plenty of issues, but apps built with Wayland in mind (or at least using frameworks that support it) work flawlessly.
Yes if you've been using your tools for years it might not be worth it (yet). But since I chose to build a completely new system the way I want it, it's been worth putting effort into researching tools that work better - for example terminal emulators, Kitty had some weird issues for me so i switched to Foot and it's great for what i need it to do. Electron apps were still hit or miss last i checked, so I try to find non-Electron alternatives (usually way better for resource usage too) or at least find apps that use up-to-date electron that works on wayland without having to figure out which of 5 flags or config files you need to fiddle with.
Also, at least Sway did not work well on Nvidia last i tried, period. You can get it to work but weird issues will always pop up - i don't use my gaming pc much anymore anway and on a mini-pc with amdgpu (integrated in cpu) it works flawlessly.