I’m on KDE 🥲 That Gnome app has been almost enough to get me to switch though. There’s a few Gnome apps that KDE doesn’t have a comparable parallel to.

I haven’t heard of 2fas before, they seem pretty interesting. I’m inclined to keep my password and 2fa vaults out of the cloud (thus Aegis and Keepass) so I’m interested in how the browser extension syncs data with a phone. If it uses a shared network or ephemeral data transfers that would be pretty nice.

I have a few codes duplicated in my keepass vault for the services I log in to often on desktop. The autotype is super nice in those cases. Other than that I do generally prefer having a separation between password manager and 2fa data though. Probably only a theoretical safeguard in my case, but simple enough to keep in place for the time being.

I second that. It’s been brutal trying to find a good FOSS 2FA app for desktop.

Whoops, didn’t notice the /c this was posted to 🤦‍♂️

EDIT: realized this was for desktop, so removed the original list of mostly android apps. Here’s my go to desktop apps:

Lollypop - music player
Invoiceninja - open source invoicing service
Meld - file/folder comparison
Librewolf - hardened Firefox
Joplin - notes
QEMU/Virt-Manager - virtualization for that one windows app you still need
KeepassXC - password management
Element-desktop - Matrix client
Gparted - no fuss partition management
Lutris - game launcher that works with epic games (among many others)
PDFarranger - best PDF management I’ve found on Linux Soundconverter - easy to use file converter
Restic - backups
Fdupes - duplicate file finder
Freetube - privacy respecting YouTube client
Paperless-ngx - very well built electronic document storage. Must be run as a server.

Just another recommendation for QEMU + Virtmanager. I’ve been using that setup for some time now and its a smooth and responsive experience.

I did have some issues getting USB redirection on EndeavourOS, the virtualization entry on the Arch wiki helped. Check out section 8, SPICE. I didn’t have the same problem in Manjaro, so it appears to be just a missing package/configuration issue with more minimalist Arch-based distros.

Just gonna leave this here for anyone who wants a laugh. It wasn’t a Linux based desktop, but it was hilarious. Buying a PC with Dell: my journey into hell

I thought this was a really good point regarding situations where a github issue or other channel of communication is being used to pester or make demands of a maintainer. I hadn’t thought about it from this perspective.

Let the maintainer deal with it publicly, and reach out privately if you are concerned about the situation. Otherwise, even if you are concerned about burnout or the maintainer overworking, you may wind up advocating for a threat actor to become a maintainer of something.

I hate that so much but you’re probably right 😅

I initially started out with that, it worked fairly well but I did notice a significant speed increase when syncing after getting the Joplin server set up. The downside is having another service publicly exposed though, a more minimal set up does have its benefits.

Yeah, I hear you there. I usually get overwhelmed by the time I get to the “B” section.

I think (looking back at your post) the most important thing that helped me was learning how to use docker-compose. All of my services are in docker containers and are much more manageable then trying to do a bare metal install.

With that comes the struggle of security though, as docker containers use their own set of firewall rules distinct from the main firewall rules you might have setup on your server. If you end up using docker, do a few searches on how to secure those firewall rules for the containers themselves.

I have definitely benefited from other peoples current set up lists, I’ll leave mine here in case it sparks some interesting directions for you.

• Diun - notification service for when new images are released for any running docker apps I have up.

• Immich - self-hosted photos backup. Incredible app, its extremely refined and feature complete.

• Jellyfin (Linuxserver.io image) - personal media streaming service. The Linuxserver.io version was much easier to set up than the stock jellyfin version.

• Joplin server - self-hosted back end for Joplin notes sync. Much faster and more reliable than the 3rd party sync targets like one drive or Dropbox.

• Mealie - recipe management.

• Nextcloud - so many things. Calendar, files, kanban, contacts, etc… Personally I find Nextcloud’s documentation hard to follow, so I’ve linked the video tutorial I used to set mine up.

• Nginx proxy manager - reverse proxy with basic protections built in. I’m on the fence on suggesting this one and have been considering switching to something else, as it rarely gets updates these days. It is the only one I’ve been able to wrap my head around though. Zoraxy, Traefic and Swag are all other options. You mentioned having Nginx set up already, so this might not even be an issue for you.

• Paperless-NGX - document server and archive. All you need is the docker-compose.env and docker-compose.postgres.yml from the linked directory. Tweak the compose and env values as you see fit and remove the “postgres” from the file name before firing it up.

• Portainer - basically just a GUI for viewing docker services. You can manage docker images and stacks with portainer, but I would recommend just learning the docker-compose method in general.

If you ever run into instructions for setting something up with a regular docker command but want to convert it to a docker-compose.yml file instead, this site is super useful: composerize.com

Definitely check DB Tech’s videos put on YouTube. He covers a ton of self-hosted apps and how to set them up. You’ll have to sift through a bit, not all the apps he talks about are really necessary, but I basically learned self-hosting through his channel.

Look for stuff on authelia, crowdsec or fail2ban with regards security for your server and decide what direction you want to go there.

Christian Lempa’s channel is also good, though can be more technically oriented.

EDIT: also, this github repo has an amazing (though overwhelming) list if self-hosted services. Awesome Self-hosted.

That’s a bummer, sorry man. That is super rare though, I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone else in my 10+ years of Linux life. Don’t let it keep you from trying it again. I guess that is a testimony to the importance of backups, especially when working with partitions.

OP, the most trouble I’ve ever heard of or experienced myself was some GRUB issues, which are just a matter of the bootloader recognizing that there is a windows or Linux partition alongside whatever is being booted up. There are a ton of tutorials on how to address that type of issue though, it’s usually a matter of one or two commands in a terminal or command prompt.

Yes, it’s super easy to do as well. Most distro installers give you the option to automatically install for dual-boot without any manual partitioning.

Definitely try Mint, I was on it for years and it is very thoughtfully designed for stability and ease if use.

The hardest part will be getting the liveUSB made for the Linux ISO. You can find some simple tools like Balena Etcher that make it easy though.

Interesting, I’ll look in to that

I know it’s not super helpful, but I’ll add that this happens to me periodically on my EndeavourOS, Intel based desktop as well. Not even all of the time, just sometimes when it suspends. It seemed to get better when I changed my settings to hybrid sleep, but it just happened again yesterday, so I’m back to square one. Bookmarking to check for possible solutions later.

Oh yeah, I get what you mean. There were a few tweaks like that in the KDE file manager too. Dolphin would open with a lot of extra features running like a terminal at the bottom of the window and extra information panes on the sides. They were all normal dolphin features that were just toggled on by default, so I was able to get back to a cleaner experience with a few clicks, but it sounds like that may be their MO: turn on ‘helpful’ features in the user space by default. That was the only app that had non - default settings in KDE that I found, it sounds like it’s not as customized as i3.

Do they customize it too heavily away from its defaults? I use KDE so I don’t bump in to that issue myself.

The just dang works part of Mint is so nice. I do like learning and tinkering, but I have to say setting up my printer in endeavourOS was brutal! I had all the right software installed, but it ended up needing a single line of code pasted in to a file I never would have guessed on my own. I’ll paste the info here on the slight chance it will save anyone else from the trauma I went through 😅

Reference article: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi

2.1 Hostname resolution
Avahi provides local hostname resolution using a “hostname.local” naming scheme. To enable it, install the nss-mdns package and start/enable avahi-daemon.service. use sudo instead of doas if that’s the tool you prefer.

doas systemctl start avahi-daemon.service

Then, edit the file /etc/nsswitch.conf and change the hosts line to include mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] before resolve and dns. It should look like:

hosts: mymachines mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] resolve [!UNAVAIL=return] files myhostname dns