Sudden culture shock from a Norwegian:

Still open is the transition of heat and cars to electricity…

Almost all electricity used by Norwegian homes goes towards heating (including cooking and hot water), and charging cars. So counting heating separate from electricity suddenly makes the electric transition sound less impressive. (And the transition away from nuclear more baffling). It’s still impressive to see Germany really follow through on renewables though. 60% renewable electricity is still a lot

Is there a plan to transition away from burning fossil fuels for heating?

“10ft away from the screen”. I.e. sitting in a sofa playing on a TV, compared to sitting at a desk close to a monitor

Maybe you can install Arch in Distrobox, then install Merkuro in your arch container?

Zim really is amazing, its the perfect balance with its simple plain text files in folders data structure, but powerful search and back linking. And I love linking to other files on the local file system.

How do you do the LUKS volume upload to cloud? Is it for syncing between devices or just backup? Personally I use (self hosted) NextCloud to sync my Zim between devices.

FlowLauncher looks neat, like KRunner for Windows. Thanks for sharing

Yeah the nodered flow on the target device is for handling shutdown(sleep) and status reporting back to HomeAssistant, so in HA the computer is a simple switch with on/off states

Oh neat!

I made a custom solution for WOL and remote shutdown using nodered and MQTT, but this is so cleaner than maintaining a custom solution

No they’re not, in fact Cosmic is almost ready for Alpha release (Sorry, couldn’t help myself)

You make a valid point.

One counterpoint does come to mind: Cost. The hardware to run it on ain’t cheap

(Im not up to date on the used market and the cut off point where old macs become unsupported and stop receiving software updates)

Had great success on Kubuntu. Set up the desktop to have two giant icons only: Firefox, and shutdown.

On Windows the constant popups for updating various components were causing much confusion Java, flash (back in the day), printer “drivers”, and of course windows itself would throw popups about updates requiring clicking buttons every time they used the computer, which was very infrequently, and cause them much confusion (“what does update mean” ?")

Meanwhile on Kubuntu all updates go “shhhh” in the background, and no more confusing “To shutdown, press Start”

This happens when a small project has 12 developers each scratching their own itch in their own time, not a team of 120 developers getting paid to work on the same itch 8 hours a day.

In the case of FreeCAD they’re actually starting to reign in and focus more now, and there are more contributors.

I hope a previously suggested goal of improving KDE for organizations makes a comeback. It was basically all about all the things a business/organisation would need to roll out a fleet of KDE computers, mainly tools for remote / centralised management by an IT department.

In the wake of Windows’s recent and continued trend, more and more public institutions, universities, government etc should be looking at switching away from Windows. There’s also EUs recent Digital Sovereignty Initiative.

German state Schleswig-Holstein is already swapping 30k computers to Linux

*Happy noises* :)

And I see there’s a plugin for cross-linking between documents! More happy noises :)

And a nightly flatpak build :) Thanks for making it so easy to try out!

directly reflected on your system in the hierarchy of your KleverNotes storage folders.

This is a big deal. Joplin is great, but its database structure is horrible for interoperability.

Hopefully Klevernotes will also be more snappy and “native feeling”. Joplin being Electron can be a bit sluggish sometimes ( which is mildly infuriating given that the database structure was chosen over plain files due to “performance”).

That said, it be nice if Klevernotes was a WYSIWIG editor. There really are a lot of dual-view markdown editors with a preview. For generel notes / productivity I find the dual view distracting, but need the preview for images etc

Instead of one super chunky battery, how about a laptop with replaceable batteries, in combination with a UPS?

UPS is so you can actually replace the laptop battery with a spare one , even during a power outage. Just run the laptop on AC from the UPS while changing batteries. Or see if you can find a UPS with a long lasting battery. Entry level ones only have like 15-30 minutes of battery life though, since they’re more intended for safe shutdowns or brownouts.

You might want to look up SMR vs CMR, and why it matters for NASes. The gist is that cheaper drives are SMR, which work fine mostly, but can time out during certain operations, like a ZFS rebuild after a drive failure.

Sorry don’t remember the details, just the conclusion that’s it’s safer to stay away from SMR for any kind of software RAID

EDIT: also, there was the SMR scandal a few years ago where WD quietly changed their bigger volume WD Red (“NAS”) drives to SMR without mentioning it anywhere in the speccs. Obviously a lot of people were not happy to find that their “NAS” branded hard drives were made with a technology that was not suitable for NAS workload. From memory i think it was discovered when someone investigated why their ZFS rebuild kept failing on their new drive.

Another option is subpaths: xyz.ddns.net/portainer

Just one open port, to your reverse proxy (nginx or other).

The client updating no-ip with your dynamic IP is independent of the reverse proxy software.

This sounds like a FOSS utopian future :)

There’s a few projects that have started towards this path with single-click deployable apps, you could even say HomeAssistant OS does this to some extent my managing the services for you.

I believe one of the biggest hurdle for a “self hosting appliance” is resilience to hardware failure. Noone wants to loose decades of family photos or legal documents due to a SSD going bad , or the cat spilling water on their “hosting box”. So automated reliable off-site backups and recovery procedures for both data and configs is key.

Databox from BBC / Nottingham University is also a very interesting concept worth looking in to:

A platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner authenticated control and accountability.

Not Op, just want to chime in that sadly these days a lot of keyboards and laptops come without the context-menu button.

There were even some Logitech keyboard that would use the “context menu” button to trigger a right-click (where the mouse cursor was) instead of opening the context menu (of the currently focused item)

(Shift+F10 works as context-menu on some windows computers, but not all. Not sure if it comes down to Windows versions or different hardware)

Good explanation! And thanks for the CoreHunt suggestion :)