I get this one. Many years ago a former wife tried to convert me. I started going to chruch, bible studies etc. and after a while I realised that none of the people I was with actually believed anything - they were just going through the motions doing the stuff you need to do to stay in the club.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. I have god, not God. I know because I was typing on my phone and it autocorrected to God three times and I had to go back and fix it.

33% have a college degree yet only 3% are atheist. That’s batshit crazy. I can’t imagine having the critical thinking skills needed for a degree and not using those skills to figure out that god is a fairy tale.

Yes I know lots of educated people are religious - I had several christian professors when I was studying mathematics / computer science. That doesn’t make it any less crazy to me.

I have a STEM background myself and spent a good bit of my career writing (relatively poorly in my opinion) technical documentation. I understand what you’re saying and I guess I didn’t make my point very well.

I was hoping people would understand that I was referring to the enshitification of internet search results - where every search leads to pages of results of entire articles about very simple topics that say basically nothing. It seems obvious to be, though I admit I’m making an assumption, that the vast majority of these articles are LLM generated fluff attempting to lure people to pages to generate ad revenue.

I get what you’re saying, but I’ll just clarify that my 16 paragraphs vs 16 words was about wordiness, not layout.

For me the most obvious tell is using 16 paragraphs to say something that could have been said with 16 words.

I’m sure I’ve used some software that’s auto corrected hyphens to em-dashes too, but I can’t remember what.

I hate organised religion too, and I get what you’re saying but, like it or not, the pope is a world leader with a lot of influence - if he can use that influence to reduce the fighting (even if with selfish motives) then that’s a good thing.

I’m not sure how long ago “not that long ago” is for you - I just had a look through the history of KDE and, based on my familiarity with the various screen images posted there, I think is about 20 years since I last tried it :-)

I’ll have a look at cinnamon and cosmic - thanks.

I’ve thought about trying a tiling window manager, but I don’t think I’d get the benefit. I don’t really do a lot these days and normally just have one or two things going concurrently and with two screens that’s trivial to layout.

The main thing I struggle with (with my old eyes) is things like Firefox that override the normal window manager decorations - I find the edges get lost and they blend into each other. A tiling window manager would help with this, but I just turned off Firefox’s ability to do that.

Oh damn what were your reasons for moving from freebsd back to Linux?

My work was AIX, HP/UX and a bit of Solaris. Linux development was starting to get to the stage where our customers were looking at using it for “real” workloads and I figured I should get comfortable with it again so I’d be in a position to take on production servers at work.

I don’t think I’m concerned about being on older (stable) stuff - I really only use Firefox (I dumped the Debian release and added the Firefox repository) and a few utilities like a music player etc.

I was also considering openSUSE Tumbleweed and didn’t really decide not to do it - it’s just that a USB with Debian was sitting on my desk when I decided to do it, so that’s what I used. A big part of my anxiety about switching from Windows was getting my data under control - now that I’ve done that it won’t be an issue to switch distros so I might give it a go. I may even try Slackware again now that you’ve got me thinking about it.

I thought about that, and we have space available because my wife is still paying for office for her machine, but I just want nothing to do with Microsoft any more.

Because I only used it for a few months and it was a while ago! It was ony mentioned to age me. Not long after I installed it we got nice new RS/6000 860 laptops and I ran an AIX desktop for a couple of years. Then we got Intel laptops and Windows.

I went with Debian because I’ve been running Ubuntu servers at home for years (since zfs on Linux became solid enough that I could switch from FreeBSD) so I’m comfortable with apt package management and wanted to stick with that. I didn’t want to stay with Ubuntu because of the commercialisation creeping in.

simple webdav server that’s compatible with the Nextcloud sync clients

Now THAT is interesting - when I was last experimenting with Nextcloud I learned that the files part is just a webdav server. Unfortunately I also learned that they have a bit of a handshake before the webdav so the client wouldn’t work with my apache2 webdav server. Thanks!

That seems to be the case. Really sucks that the documentation at nextcloud.com directs people to the AIO. I guess they hope that if you have a bad time trying to install your own server you might buy their cloud service.

Yeah, I can see how someone that has “grown up with it” could be happy. But as and experienced sysadmin coming at it for the first time - the documentation is a bit lacking.

Because an android client is one of my requirements. I can get files from SMB on Android using any number of file managers, but I can’t map a SMB share to a filesystem so files are available for an app to use.

Yes! There used to be a little utility that could map a SMB share in Android, but that got killed years ago.

So, use something else

That’s why I’m here - looking for suggestions

like Seafile.

I’ll have another look - you’re not the only person to suggest it. My recollection is that it seemed to be old and not really maintained.

I’ve never used the AIO image. I’ve heard it’s weird.

It does seem to be. So, I find it weird that the “core” documentation leads a new user to installing AIO.

You could also try OpenCloud, which is a Go rewrite of ownCloud.

Sounds interesting - thanks.