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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: May 1st, 2025

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  • Came in here to mention Incus if no one had.

    I love it. I have three “home production” servers running Proxmox, but mostly because Proxmox is one of very few LTS/comercially-supported ways to run Linux in a supported way with root (and everything else on ZFS). And while its web UI is still a bit clunky in places, it comes in handy some times.

    However, Incus automation is just… superior. incus launch --vm images:debian/13 foo, wait a few seconds then incus exec foo -- bash and I’m root on a console of a ready-to-go Debian VM. Without --vm, it’s a lightweight LXC container. And Ansible supports running commands through incus exec, so you can provision stuff WITHOUT BOTHERING TO SET UP ANYTHING.

    AND, it works remotely without fuss, so I can set up an Incus remote on a beefy server and spawn VMs nearly transparently. + incus file pull|push to transfer files.

    I’m kinda pondering scripting removal of the Proxmox bits from a Proxmox install, so that I just keep their ZFS support and run Incus on top.


  • The problem with the standard Gboard non-ASCII method is that you have to use the touchscreen.

    What the article mentions is that on iOS, you can hold E, then press 2 on the physical keyboard to enter É.

    When I used a Blackberry, I could type out longish messages without even looking at the phone, but I had to rely on autocorrect for the accents (which worked pretty well for Spanish). If this method works, I could do the same, but not relying on autocorrect.


  • Do you, by some chance, write in any language that requires non-ASCII characters? (Such as ñ in Spanish.)

    You can apparently touch-type non-ASCII characters with Clicks on IOS, I’m wondering if it works similarly on Android.

    My phone died last week, and I was very tempted by the Razr with Clicks, but I haven’t seen much about using it outside English. In the end I went cheap and bought a Pixel 9A :(

    Touch keyboards suck, but double so if you type in multiple languages, need non-ASCII, and on top of that you want to use shells. GBoard is not bad at detecting the three languages I regularly type in, but my BlackBerries were superior.



  • Yup, came here to mention PaperWM. I used xmonad in the past, but I executed it on top of Mate to have an “easy” desktop environment.

    Nowadays Gnome extensions providing tiling is the equivalent “easy” method. Gnome is not for everyone, but it works out of the box- then you add the fancy tiling window management on top.

    For people who have bounced off systems that require much more set up, I think they are a good option.




  • IMHO, it really depends on the specific services you want to run. I guess you are most familiar with Docker and everything that you want to run has a first-class-citizen Docker container for it. It also depends on whether the services you want to run are suitable for Internet exposure or not (and how comfortable you are with the convenience tradeoff).

    LXC is very different. Although you can run Docker nested within LXC, you gotta be careful because IIRC, there are setups that used to not work so well (maybe it works better now, but Docker nested within LXC on a ZFS file system used to be a problem).

    I like that Proxmox + LXC + ZFS means that it’s all ZFS file systems, which gives you a ton of flexibility; if you have VMs and volumes, you need to assign sizes to them, resize if needed, etc.; with ZFS file systems you can set quotas, but changing them is much less fuss. But that would likely require much more effort for you. This is what I use, but I think it’s not for everyone.



  • I assume you basically want protection against disasters, but not high uptime.

    (E.g. you likely can live with a week of unavailability if after a week you can recover the data.)

    The key is about proper backups. For example, my Nextcloud server is running in a datacenter. Every night I replicate the data to a computer running at home. Every week I run a backup to a USB drive that I keep in a third location. Every month I run a backup to a USB drive on the computer I mentioned at home.

    So I could lose two locations and still have my data.

    There is much written about backup strategies, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-2-1_backup_rule … Just start with your configuration, think what can go wrong and what would happen, and add redundancy until you are OK with the risks.





  • I dunno, I still have a soft spot for Proxmox. I want ZFS, so it’s about the only game in town with support.

    (TrueNAS Scale looks good, but it would increase too much my Hetzner costs, because of their requirement of having a dedicated root pool. And I don’t want an LTS distro that supports root-on-ZFS “oficially”. That narrows the field quite a bit.)

    (For work and for my workstations, I’m very pleased with Incus on top of Debian… but that’s because I don’t need ZFS on those.)




  • I discovered Open Food Facts very recently. I was supersurprised because the mobile app is very neat, and I didn’t expect there would be so many products (edit: in Spain). I’ve sent two contributions so far.

    Also, you can download their database. If I had some time, I’d try to run some queries on it. (I’m on a low sodium diet and sometimes you find the most unexpected products with little salt, but it’s time consuming.)

    edit: also, I forgot, the app is on F-Droid, another nice touch.