FOSS Is Fun

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My whole infrastructure is designed so that my homeserver is expendable.

Therefore my most important tool is Syncthing. It is decentral, which is awesome for uptime and reducing dependance on a single point of failure. My server is configured as the “introducer” node for convenience.

I try to find file-based applications, such as KeePassXC or Obsidian, whenever I can so that I can sync as much as possible with Syncthing.

Therefore there is (luckily) not much left to host and all of it is less critical:

• Nextcloud AIO: calendar, contacts, RSS, Syncthing files via external storage
• Webserver: Firefox search plugins (Why is this necessary, Mozilla?!), custom uBlock Origin filter list, personal website

So the worst thing that can happen when my server fails is: I need to import my OPML to a cloud provider and I loose syncing for some less important stuff and my homepage is not accessible.

Since I just rebuilt my server, I can confirm that I managed a whole week without it just fine. Thank you very much, Syncthing!

Linux Mint nowadays supports release upgrades, but you have to follow their blog to know when a new major Mint release is out and you have to manually install mintupgrade and do the upgrade.

So it is definitely not caused by technical constraints, as Mint has implemented the difficult part (providing and testing an upgrade path) already. Notifying the user about a new release upgrade shouldn’t be too difficult? E. g. in the most simple form you could probably preinstall a package that does nothing at first, but receives an update once the next Mint release is out to send a notification to the user to inform about a new Mint release.

When it comes to elementary OS, I think they could support in-place upgrades, as they properly use metapackages (unlike Mint, which marks most packages as manually installed and doesn’t really utilise automatically installed packages and metapackages in a way that you would expect on a Ubuntu-based distro), but they probably don’t want to allocate / don’t have the resources to test an official upgrade path.

But again, I don’t understand why it is so difficult for elementary OS to at least provide a simple notification to the user that a new version is out. Even if the users have to reinstall, it is critical to inform them that their OS is about to become end of life. You know, people do things like online banking on their computers …

It’s the first thing I check with every distribution and if it doesn’t have an EOL / upgrade notification, it is immediately out.

It misses one important choice: “I want to get notified of new releases of the operating system and want to have a graphical upgrade path.”

Otherwise people just run their no longer supported OS until something stops working (I’ve seen this countless times …), as very few people follow blog posts or social media feeds of their operating system.

This rules out lots of supposedly “beginner friendly” distributions, such as elementary OS or Linux Mint, as they don’t notify users about the availability of a new distribution release. Elementary OS doesn’t even offer in-place upgrades and requires a reinstallation.

I was in a similar situation not too long ago.

My criteria for another scripting language included that it should be preinstalled on all target systems (i. e. Debian and Fedora), it should be an interpreted language and it needs to have type safety.

Afterall I settled with Python due to its popularity, its syntax and features (type safety since v3.6, etc.) and the fact that it is preinstalled on many Linux distributions. System components often use Python as well, which means that libraries to interact with the system tend to be included by default.

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Have you considered a fixed release in combination with rolling applications (i. e. Flatpak, Snap)?

If you choose Fedora (preferably one of the atomic variants, like Silverblue), you would also get a rolling kernel and rolling KDE Plasma desktop, so overall the experience can be quite close to a rolling release distribution if you install the desktop applications via Flatpak.

Ubuntu “interim” (non-LTS) releases are usually also fairly current and could be a good choice if you don’t mind Snap. There’s also the option of following the Ubuntu “devel” branch, which always refers to the current pre-release version of Ubuntu (e. g. 24.04 at the moment) and is rolling.

Just wanted to give you a different direction to think about. ;)

(Hopefully) obviously /s

Thanks for fixing this issue! I didn’t even know until today that it affected non-Linux systems as well.

Oh no, I thought that was a feature. I came to rely on it to transcribe long tab titles into my text editor. Is there any way to restore the old behaviour in Firefox? Otherwise I’ll have to stick with Firefox 118 or switch web browsers, since Firefox 119 seems to break my longstanding workflow. :(

Any ideas?

As far as I know, companies don’t have to comply yet with the Digital Markets Act. That’s most likely the reason why the WebKit restriction is still in place.

why does it exist

As far as I understand it, it has been created to port the official client over to a newer target SDK and to ship those changes quicker to the end-user before all features of the main client have been ported to the newer target SDK. One of the reasons stated was having an official F-Droid client as quickly as possible that installs without a warning message.

It seems to be unclear if F-Droid Basic as an F-Droid client with a reduced feature set will continue to exist after the main client has been modernised.

also, why not use Droid-ify or similar

Last time I looked only Neo Store supported automatic unattended app updates. As soon as F-Droid Basic came out, I switched to it from Neo Store. I didn’t really like Neo Store’s UI and in general I prefer official apps from projects rather than third-party apps.

it has way more repos built in? Molly, Session, IzzyOnDroid, Newpipe, etc are defaults in droid-ify even if they are not enabled by default

I only use the F-Droid repo, so that’s not a selling point for me. ;)

My recommendation is F-Droid Basic. It’s a more modern official client that supports automatic unattended updates on Android 12 and newer.

Personally I am excited for immutable distributions, so my suggestion would be Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite. It may be a spin of Fedora, but it works completely differently than regular Fedora. I am using it as my daily driver for over a year already and I am quite happy with it (apart from reoccurring breakages caused by kernel updates, e. g. my AMD desktop currently does not work with kernel 6.4 or newer, but this doesn’t have anything to do with Silverblue).

There are other immutable distributions out there, e. g. Vanilla OS or openSUSE microOS, so if you really want to avoid Fedora, you could also choose trying out one of these. In the case of Vanilla OS I would wait until version 2 is out, because version 2 will be radically different from the first release.

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