That sounds promising then, thanks for the insight!

Question since you seem to know more than the average, is Podman not harder to set up? It’s part of what has held me off from it, because I’ve heard it’s more difficult to achieve things with it than Docker. Is that wrong?

The first and most obvious is that (last I checked on Lemmy) per-user instance blocks only block posts, not comments. This means that for truly spammy instances (cough Hexbear cough) it requires an instance-wide block to achieve.

Secondly, I would argue it is the same as any other reason to choose an instance. That being, I have to generally like the vibe and agree with the way it’s run. For example, I have to agree with the instance rules and trust the admins to moderate them. This is an extension of that.

In the case of lemmy.ca specifically, I would say every major defederation I know of has been cast to a community vote and has had solid reasoning behind it. It comes back to trust and matching opinions: I (currently) trust the admin team to have reasonable defederations as they have matched or been similar to my opinions in the past.

I enjoy not having to self-moderate my experience outside of individual users or rare cases. Choosing an instance that generally aligns with your views allows your admin team to do some moderation for you.

Giving away? As in free? Luckyyy

The best thing I did was probably set up Obsidian Live Sync after hearing about it in selfh.st weekly. Compared to the Syncthing setup I had before it is so much quicker, much easier to catch sync errors, and won’t drain my damn phone battery as much! The more things I can move away from Syncthing the better so I will probably be looking at Immich for my photos soon as well.

On the management side, I’ve had my Docker stacks split across Dockhand and Komodo ever since a poorly executed move away from Dockge a few months ago. I finally thought about it and had the time to decide to give up on them both. I like some of the concepts of compose in a git repo and the fancier interfaces, but I just realised it was all over the top for what I need. I missed being able to simply SSH into a damn machine and docker compose up -d in an emergency. Compared to the constant deploy errors of Dockhand and the potential of scrounging application databases for in-DB compose data or attempting to deploy stacks from forgejo when forgejo itself is a stack deployed via git… going back to basic files is a blessing. Lesson learned!

What that culminated in is all my stacks are now in Sencho (which clearly uses a lot of AI code sadly), but it was that or Dockge and I knew Dockge lacked a few things I wanted. The nice thing about Sencho (and Dockge) is that I don’t need either of them because they are based around file-on-disk simple operation. I can cut it out of my setup entirely at any moment and not shed a tear. So much peace of mind leaving Dockhand. Now I just need to find a builder image or write a script to replace Komodo’s build feature because I don’t want to keep using it.

While suggestions like these are good, I don’t feel that we’ll ever have full account portability on ActivityPub. By nature of the applications, the only way to keep your data and your account under your own control is to run your own instance. This is something AT Proto got much better (on paper) with their separate identity servers. Being able to host your own data without the bloat of running an entire (for e.g) Lemmy instance is huge.

Yeah there’s a fair bit outside of home people don’t mention. Basically any system-level stuff: fstab mounts, all your system packages, /opt installs, config tweaks you had to do. It tales some time to get set back up after a while on the same install.

After having to reinstall a couple times myself I now don’t touch anything outside of /home by hand. It’s all scripted so that I can copy /home, run the script, and be back up and running. Well, theoretically, there’s usually a hiccup or two. But the peace of mind knowing it’s all (self) documenting is quite nice. Not for everybody of course.

Framework also has used soldered RAM in the past. Getting their newest model to use modular RAM was quite the boast.

Not quite, no. Their DIY edition displays the options as you show, but if you select prebuilt then the options include Ubuntu.

I assume with DIY they offer Windows only as a quick way to acquire a license, it may not even be installed. Not sure if anyone can confirm if they just throw in a Windows USB.

My dynamic IP rarely changes. When it does, it gets updated by a Docker favonia/cloudflare-ddns image. I have yet to notice downtime.

Link layers? Alright GIMP, you’ve finally convinced me. This is 99% of smart objects from Photoshop and I think it’s finally time for me to seriously learn this program. No more dual booting for Photoshop.

Nah, having a useful tool built in is a good user experience, provided you can remove it. Windows fails on the second part. But I think OS’s should aim to have simple tasks covered by default apps such as Paint on Windows or Libre Office on most Linux distros, and an anti virus is probably a necessary install for many Windows users.

While true, I found myself mildly irked by the KDE emoji picker at times. On Windows, you focus an input, press Super+., and then can click any character and it immediately inputs so I can type out 🫵🍽️🤔 easily. On KDE it only copies the character, so the flow is (if I remember right) Super+., click a character, focus the input, paste, Super+., click a character, focus the input, paste…

I’ve found most Linux clipboard managers share the same issue of having to leave the text flow to copy an input and paste it again. Basically they are treated as separate apps rather than popups.

I would love to see alternatives/replacements to them that are less opinionated. If you aren’t ready to consign your entire library to destructive edits and file replacements then it really is hard to fit any arr program into your workflow. Because I have a few files I want to keep pristine and a few opinions on what gets downloaded, I’ve hit a snag every time I try to set up any arr program. Lidarr, for example, simply refuses to allow a root dir to be read only. I still have yet to get any up and running.

So no one else has to look it up, 120°F is 49°C

I would disagree. Almost every Windows tutorial I found for problems told me how to go through the UI. It was even hard to find tutorials for CLI at times because Windows doesn’t provide good CLI tools for things like switching audio devices.

This is the closest local app I’ve found yet, thank you! The UI is different from what I am used to, but it has support for all tags in both the editor and the browser including support for adding custom tags. I thought dynamic playlists don’t exist and was technically right, because they are accomplished with saved searches. I realised that after checking docs. Thanks for the recommendation!

It’s the closest we’ve got, but it does not have multiple tag support that I can see. :( I am not surprised that it lacks multi-artist, that is niche, but even the genre only supports basic strings. So to create an auto playlist that only matches the “Rock” genre, you have to use contains which then matches Hard Rock, Alternative Rock, etc etc. I know I’m picky lol, but worth documenting this to save time for anyone else as picky as me.

Rhythmbox unfortunately does not support multiple tags, that I can see. It combines genres into one and any artist tag beyond the first is completely ignored and unsearchable.

Amarok is a similar story, artists and genres are combined into one string. You can search them via “contains” but that is very imprecise.

Great recommendation on Feishin. Navidrome alone works for most of what I want as it does respect multiple artist tags, but the default web UI is subjectively bad and lacks any way to add smart playlists. Feishin solves both of those issues. I’ll be testing this further, it may just solve my browsing problems! I knew about Beets from a long time ago but never checked it out, I’ll have to see how that goes for my back-end needs. I have a feeling the disconnect between front-end and back-end will likely annoy me for a while as I try adding new files, but we’ll see.

I assume this is what you are trying to achieve by using a visual artist tag?

The display artist (a MusicBee-specific feature) is just an easy way to keep multiple artists in the artist tag while retaining a nice readable tag. For instance that artist tag would be Apashe; Wasiu but the display would be Apashe feat. Wasiu. MusicBrainz does something similar but uses artists instead of artist and artist instead of displayartist. Feishin displays the raw data nice enough I don’t mind losing the display though (it’s all in the tags anyway, no actual data loss there).