Yeah OK, that’s fair. It’s really a shame how dependent notifications are on Google. ALl the other things - Mail, Photos, Drive,… - are a lot easier to replace.

At this point, package management is the main differentiating factor between distro (families). Personally, I’m vehemently opposed to erasing those differences.

The “just use flatpak!” crowd is kind of correct when we’re talking solely about Linux newcomers, but if you are at all comfortable with light troubleshooting if/when something breaks, each package manager has something unique und useful to offer. Pacman and the AUR a a good example, but personally, you can wring nixpkgs Fron my cold dead hands.

And so you will never get people to agree on one “standard” way of packaging, because doing your own thing is kind of the spirit of open source software.

But even more importantly, this should not matter to developers. It’s not really their job to package the software, for reasons including that it’s just not reasonable to expect them to cater to all package managers. Let distro maintainers take care of that.

Android without a Google account is great though

As a fellow Futo user: it’s not great out of the box. My biggest recommendations are:

• under Languages and models, download all the voice models (if you use those), transformers, and wordlists you can for your languages
• if you use multiple languages, set the check on “multilingual typing” for ALL of those languages
• this is probably the biggest one: in text prediction -> Advanced Parameters, DRASTICALLY change the values. The original ones are 3.4 and 4.0 for LLM strength and autocorrect threshold, mine are currently set at 28.5 and 0.8, respectively. This takes the autocorrect from “occasionally working” to “as good as SwiftKey” for me.
• Keyboard and Typing -> Long Press -> Show hints. Could not find that for ages so thought I’d add it here.

Also, two super useful shortcuts: you can press the space-bar and move your finger around to move the pointer; and the same for backspace to fine-control what to delete.

Hope this helps, but if not… What additional gripes do you have with it?

Will do! Thank you!

That sounds great. I think I’ve given it more than a month overall, but probably never longer than a week at a time. Guess I’ll have to have my SO hide my normal keyboard lol

I built and configured an Arkenswoop some time in 2023. It’s really nice. However… I have gotten quite fast on a conventional keyboard just by using it over the years, and re-learning that is just so tedious. Every time I try, something with a deadline comes up, and I switch back “temporarily”.

Anyone have experience overcoming this?

Fair… Sorry, I always forget how prominent Apple devices are in the US.

Thunderbird for mobile is great! And in contrast to the gmail app, search actually works, lol

Now if Eelco Doolstra wasn’t fucking around, we could have had a super LTS NixOS - but NOOOO.

My exact thoughts lol

They blamed it on the communist party, yes. There were 8 parties represented in the Reichstag at the time though.

Yep, this is the answer. Set it, forget it, accidentally have your hard drive destroyed irrecoverably, and re-set everything up to the exact working state you were used to in under 15min.

It’s a fair bit of initial setup and learning, but afterwards, the word “stable” takes on a new meaning.

I have one big frustration with that: Your voice input has to be understood PERFECTLY by TTS.

If you have a “To Do” list, and speak “Add cooking to my To Do list”, it will do it! But if the TTS system understood:

• Todo
• To-do
• to do
• ToDo
• To-Do
• …

The system will say it couldn’t find that list. Same for the names of your lights, asking for the time,… and you have very little control over this.

HA Voice Assistant either needs to find a PERFECT match, or you need to be running a full-blown LLM as the backend, which honestly works even worse in many ways.

They recently added the option to use LLM as fallback only, but for most people’s hardware, that means that a big chunk of requests take a suuuuuuuper long time to get a response.

I do not understand why there’s no option to just use the most similar command upon an imperfect matching, through something like the Levenshtein Distance.

I’m sorry, but have you never had actual Cheddar?

skill issue

Is it? If it wasn’t printed on the bottom, would you really be able to guess Ctrl+X, Y, Enter any easier than colon, q, Enter?

No

Nano is easier to get into, but far more limited.

Is this some peasant meme I am too NixOS to understand?

(Joking, joking. A good system settings center is important for graphically managed distros.)

Meh. Each service in its isolated VM and subnet. Plus just generally a good firewall setup. Currently hosting ~10 services plubicly, never had any issue.

Did all that, minus the no ssh root login (only key, obviously) plus one failed attempt, fail2ban permaban.

Have not had any issues, ever