mazzilius_marsti

My requirements are simple:

1. I am able to search past emails and view them.

2. Able to "Mark as read" from the notification popup.

3. No ads

My experiences are mixed:

Fairmail, Aquamail (when it was good) , K9, Thunderbird and similar apps **satisfied ** 2) and 3). However, they all failed at 1). The searches either return nothing or take a long time to load. So I have to swap to a browser , go to Gmail then search from there.

Outlook sucks at 3). Sometimes it gives me random ads within my inbox. It does 2) very well. For 1), it can retrieve the searches better than the group above , but not reliable.

The Gmail app excels at 1), it fails at 2) and 3). The ads within the app are not that terrible, but stil very annoying. It's been years and we still couldnt "Mark as read" from the notification. Surprisingly, Gmail works for 1) all the time.

Which one do you use?

As open source as Android is, it is very difficult to find a decent browser, let alone one that is privacy focused and also usable on daily.

• Almost all web searches point to site that shows stuff like : Chrome, Edge, Opera....etc. So this doesnt help.

• Play Store is full of shitty browsers. If you skip the usual DDG, Chrome, Edge, Opera...etc then you will see either:

a) browsers from random Chinese company (Via, UC Browser)

or b) browser that is coupled with other products, e.g. a video downloader with built in browser.

• After the recent fiasco with Firefox and their ToS, I saw a lot of posts saying IronFox / Water Fox is better. I've never heard of these Foxes variants before.

So I tried the following on Android:

• DDG: only good if you do basic search. It lacks a good adblocker. So very annoying if you are on a site with shit tons of popups.

• Brave: not a fan of the in your face AI tools. Overall it works ok though

• The Foxes variants: IronFox seems to be very good on privacy. It has its own DNS and most of the security is on by default. However, same as all Foxes, IronFox just doesnt play well on Android. There is a slight lag when you try to switch tabs.

• TOR: This would be the safest. But the poorest in terms of usability.

• Chrome w/o account or Chrome run from private space. Surprisingly, Chrome is still the one browser that runs the smoothest.....

Any input is appreciated.

Hello folks. I use many distro from Debian to Fedora to OpenSuse and Arch. I also use many window managers like i3, dwm and qtile. On desktop environment, I use XFCE the most. Currently, I am looking to try something new, hence KDE.

I am looking for something with a beautiful UI and works out of the box. So, something on the same spectrum as XFCE but more pretty.

I tried out the distros with preinstalled KDE: Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, Kubuntu.

The good: KDE is beautiful and very easy to use. I actually enjoy using my computer more.

The bad: it crashes.. a lot even when I turn off all the animations. My system is not that slow: AMD 7 Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Some examples:

• Logging in, KDE hangs for 30 seconds. Even when I finally see the desktop, I would need to wait a further 10 seconds to finally able to interact, i.e. click and open stuff.

• After resume suspend, system would hang and there is nothing I can do except for a forced reboot.

• Browsing the web with only 3 tabs opened, KDE also hang.

As much as I hate GNOME, everything just works. I installed the GNOME flavors of above distros and never experience any hiccups.

If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one? How about if you install KDE from scratch, like Arch?

Hi. I recently encounter these random freezes on the Fedora i3 flavor. I tested on 2 different computers with different graphical hardware (Intel and AMD) and different configs (fresh install and my own config). I got the random freeze on all of them. It is very hard to replicate these freezes and journalctl does not show any error. Even with the fresh install version, I still get these freezes.

The freezes are something like:

• Cannot use Mod+key to launch anything. This includes Mod+D for Dmenu or Rofi, I test with both. Further, you also cannot launch things like terminal: Mod + Enter.

• Mod+ number still works. So you can switch workspace but cannoy launch anythint

• Mod + key for mode works. So in my case, I bind Mod+0 to show a mode bar with selections to shutdown, reboot or logout. Pretty similar to how Manjaro i3 handled it. When the freezes occur, this is the only way for me to logout.

• Force reboot or just logout and log back in solves the problem.

Anyone on i3 Fedora has these issues? I am 100% sure it is Fedora specific because I test the same setup on Debian and Arch and never get these freezes.

I'm not talking about not using signal, but instead referring to drivers who turn off the signal so quickly.

Example when changing lane: Flick Signal on - Lane change - Signal off, literally 2 seconds and the car is not even moving fast to change lane.

Another example for when making a turn: 0.5 second to do Signal On - Turn - Signal off...

I swear on both of my nuts that these drivers arent even looking at the mirrors (any mirrors) or looking over their shoulders.

If you happen to do this, no offense but why? Is it to show the cops you did signal? Or there exists a signalphobia , i.e. the tick tock sound can annoy passengers?/

Hi all. I am facing problems with fonts rendering on my 2 different laptops. The only difference is in the OS: one runs Arch and the other runs Fedora. Both run latest i3wm and i3status and use the same config files.

On Fedora, the fonts are rendered beautifully with colors. On Arch, it is just black and white line. You can see them clearly here: https://imgur.com/a/QtJyRiJ. Top image is Arch and the bottom one is Fedora's.

How do I get Arch to render just like the polybar on Fedora? For the font, on Arch , I installed ttf-font-awesome. In LX Appearance, I would then have: Font Awesome 6, Font Awesome 6 Brands and Font Awesome 4 Compatibility.

On Fedora, I installed a bunch of stuff like fontawesome-6-free-fonts, fontawesome-6-brand-fonts and fontawesome-fonts-all. Here, LX Appearance shows Font Awesome 6 and Font Awesome 4

In i3 config, I just have:

font pango:Font Awesome 12

to set the fonts. But the results are so much difference as you can see from the link.

I use i3wm, and to map cap lock to escape, I run:

setxkbmap -option caps:swapescape

This works fine, but sometimes while hitting the F1 key, my pinky can accidentally hit the Escape key, which turns on CapsLock.

Gnome has a very nice way to do this, where Shift + Escape = CapsLock. Hitting Escape on its own will do nothing.

I have an x220, yes it is old but I prefer the keyboard and the repairability. Anyway, it has 1 x msata SSD (2TB Orico) and 1 x 2.5 inch SSD (2TB Samsung).

What I want:

• to take advantage of 2 drives.
• no windows. I go full Linux now.
• some forms of backup if system fails.

What I managed to do:

• /, swap and all system directories on the msata

• /home is dedicated to the entire 2.5 ssd.

• fully encrypted. I.e the msata has a LUKS partition that mounts /, swap and others. The 2.5 inch also has a LUKS partiton for /home. My /home is on its own, so if system fails or I need to distro hop, I can keep all of my data.

System runs fine but is this a good idea in the long run?

Should I have it the other way? Root and swap and systems on faster 2.5inch SSD. Home in the smaller msata?

What about everything on the faster 2.5 drive, then use the slower msata for backups? Since I have 2TB, I'm thinking partition the msata into 2 so I can do: Timeshift backup on one, and Borg backup for my personal files on the other?

I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it's Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)...etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.

Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the "Flagship Manjaro version". I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.

After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.

What about you guys?

I'm talking about this patch:

https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/autostart/

Now, the notes seem simple: after apply the patch, dwm will look for the autostart script in ~/.dwm/autostart.sh.

But if you read it carefully, the file is:

~/.dwm/autostart.sh &

Wth does a "&" have to do with file name? I tried to just use the normal file: autostart.sh with exec dunst. It doesnt work..

I tried to create in the Thunar this weird file name, "autostop.sh &". The system does not recognize it as sh script anymore. .

Any help is welcome.

Any distro would do, but for my case, it is Arch because I have more control over the partitions. I would like the OS, so root, swap and others on 1 drive. The /home should be on a separate drive. The tricky thing is to have everything encrypted, except /boot and /efi of course.

Now, here is what I can do

1. FDE on 1 drive. This is easy: you create /efi, /boot and then create a large LUKS partition. From there, you create LVM on that LUKS partition and get your: /, /home and swap. Then mount everything correctly and install.

In the grub config, you only need to set it so it knows the LUKS partitom and where the root is. For eg, if your LUKs partition is /dev/sda3, you do:

• cryptdevice=UUID=<uuid of the /dev/sda3>: cryptlvm rootfs=/dev/vg/root.

2. Unencrypted /home on another drive. This is like 1) but /home is mounted on a separate drive. Still need to do the grub config, but nothing is needed for /home. It is automatically mounted when you login.

Now for my case: Encrypt /home

The encryption and mount part is easy. But how to get the OS to recognize it? The Arch wiki has this weird thing where you create an encryption key, they called it home.key, using cryptsetup. You then store the key in /etc and then in your /etc/crypttab, you specifiy the drive with /home and location of the key. No need for any passphrase.

The problem I have with this is that keys are stored in root. So if my root system is corrupted, I cant even decrypt home....

Any advice is welcome..

Hey folks. I recently got an old X220 with an mSATA SSD. I plan to to install Linux on there. It doesnt matter which OS: Debian, Ubuntu or Arch. The machine is so old that all distros play nice with it.

Anyway, the speed on the mSATA is slower than the 2.5 SSD. So I want to know if is it possible to have your /boot, /efi, swap on the mSATA. Then, the /home on the 2.5 SSD? Any problems with this setup and if anyone tried it before?

Now, for the reasons why I use mSATA instead of just putting Linux on 2.5 SSD:

1. the mSATA is Samsung, pretty rare nowadays. The health is still very excellent. I checked with CrystalDiskInfo. So might as well use it.

2. My X220 has a problem finding out grub if installed on the 2.5 SSD. It's literally a 50/50 chance it can find grub properly. So:

a) you installed Linux on 2.5 SSD, reboot.

b) grub error screen

c) restart

d) boot into Linux well

Note at d) if I do anything to restart/shutdown the computer, you are back at step b) and require another reboot to reach Linux.

Any advice is welcome.