I would love to see an ostree-based (immutable) Debian for both stable and unstable.

Aside from that, my nitpicks aren’t distro-oriented.

Perhaps more importantly, websites can determine which fonts are installed on your system (regardless of which you’re enforcing), making fingerprinting much easier.

A better alternative would be to separate the core open source app from any premium, proprietary add-on features, as the developer hinted at here.

As someone else pointed out, it’s difficult to agree that this app follows an open source model when the open source portion of it is essentially non-functional and requires the closed source components to be of any practical use. Until that separation occurs, this isn’t really open source; you’re trusting a stranger on the internet with your (or your client’s) network credentials.

Barring any similar apps, I’ll stick to my password manager and terminal.

The deal breaker for me is that it seems the low-level component that would interface with the shells (presumably managing credentials in some way) is closed source and off-repo. That’s a big red flag for me, no matter how benign the intention.

I appreciate the writeup and that you’ve taken the time to post about it here, however I am 100% leery of managing remote access or credentials using closed source software. I’ll definitely keep an eye on the project, but it’s a hard pass for me until the app is fully open source.

I hear Anna’s Archives is great for ebooks. I don’t do audiobooks, and can’t stand podcasts, but it sounds like a lot of good suggestions were made for those already.

Simple SMS, obtained from F-Droid, is probably the best universal option until the Fossify project adds the fork to their suite (assuming they do).

If you have the ability to toggle network access for your apps (GrapheneOS, etc.), Google Messages is a very solid SMS app that receives regular updates. I would normally only recommend FOSS apps, but many of those options are limited and/or dangerously outdated for SMS.

Relevant topics also missing from the survey:

• Choice of desktop operating system
• Choice of mobile platform and OS
• Use of email encryption
• Use of cloud storage
• Use and method of disk encryption

I too like to review changes between images, but I’m just as content to run rpm-ostree status and/or rpm-ostree db diff to see what exactly has changed.

You should be forced to reboot though? And if you don’t want to reboot, can’t you just do an --apply-live?

I’m hoping to eliminate the extra reboot each day that is usually necessary to activate the latest image. I know that a lot of this will depend on exactly when the image drops from the repos (versus when I shutdown a host), which is why I was looking for some general feedback from others who might have done the same thing…I didn’t know if it’d be worthwhile in the long run, but I guess there’s only one way to find out. As for the --apply-live, I use it on occasion but I don’t want to rely on it for system updates (if that’s even possible).

Thanks, yeah I’ve found a few articles already on running scripts at shutdown…something like this should do it (using Tony Walker’s update script), though I’ve not tested it yet:

/etc/systemd/system/silverblue-update-at-shutdown.service:

[Unit]
Description=Fedora Silverblue Update at Shutdown 
ConditionPathExists=/run/ostree-booted
DefaultDependencies=no
Before=shutdown.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/silverblue-update
TimeoutStartSec=0

[Install]
WantedBy=shutdown.target

I haven’t had time to check out the forks from Tibor’s apps, but I recall there were issues with the original Simple Calendar Pro which is why I had settled on Etar at the time. I’ll definitely keep an eye on Naveen’s repos though.

I was an rxvt/urxvt fan for nearly 20 years, then Alacritty for a while. Nowadays, I just use gnome-terminal and I’ve been happy with it. Looking forward to trying Prompt though.

5 days later: Prompt is the bee’s knees! Highly recommend for anyone wanting a snappy, feature-rich GTK4 terminal, especially if you work with containers.

I can’t deny that the name’s connotation in internet culture is what turned me away from Fedora for many, many years. It is an unfortunate coincidence.

My vote is Fedora. It offers fresh yet stable packaging, and a polished experience that you can rely on. You can then use flatpaks for even newer apps, or opt to run Arch in a container with distrobox/toolbox and play with as many cutting edge apps as you want, all as if they were installed on the host.

Finally, if you like what you see in Fedora, consider trying Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite, or any of their other immutable distros.

Thanks for sharing these links! I’m glad to see so much consideration being put into a better solution.

The best and most official explanation I’ve read is the 2017 GNOME blog post, Status Icons and GNOME.

Essentially, tray icons are a throwback to the days before designated notification and media playback APIs, and they now create some ambiguity for app developers, in addition to being ripe for abuse.

It’s a worthwhile read and the writer makes several valid points, but doesn’t address as much as I’d like in terms of actual solutions for things like instant messengers.

Personally, I would be happy if most traditional tray apps could be displayed in the dash, with status indicators, and started in a minimized state, but I still see the benefit of having some always-visible panel icons, such as instant messengers and VPN indicators.

That’s good to know, thanks! I’m quite content with vanilla Silverblue, but I’ll take a look at their build files and see how they’re pulling it off.

Thanks for the info. Davx5 has worked well for me, but it’s still nice to have alternatives.

My challenge has been finding a decent open source calendar app for Android, which unfortunately excludes Calengoo. I’m just not interested in using closed source network-capable apps to manage my personal information.

Radicale, and I only sync when at home on the LAN. Super simple to setup, requires minimal maintenance and very few resources.

Thunderbird on our workstations syncs directly to Radicale, and it’s an overall good experience.

I use DAVx⁵ to sync on Android/GrapheneOS, but not overly thrilled with the calendaring options there…Etar works “okay”.

I don’t think you’ll be able to build anything with €100, but you might be able to buy an old PC or laptop locally and use it as is. I’ve never run nextcloud myself, but from I’ve read it’ll be the most taxing service on your list. Everything seems pretty minimal, though I don’t know anything about Photoprism.