FOSS Is Fun

Someone should tell Left Angle that Ubuntu 22 is not a valid Ubuntu release.

It always infuriates me a bit whenever I see that and it immediately tells me that Linux doesn’t seem to be a priority for them. For some reason they get the macOS version numbers right …

Personally I am excited for immutable distributions, so my suggestion would be Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite. It may be a spin of Fedora, but it works completely differently than regular Fedora. I am using it as my daily driver for over a year already and I am quite happy with it (apart from reoccurring breakages caused by kernel updates, e. g. my AMD desktop currently does not work with kernel 6.4 or newer, but this doesn’t have anything to do with Silverblue).

There are other immutable distributions out there, e. g. Vanilla OS or openSUSE microOS, so if you really want to avoid Fedora, you could also choose trying out one of these. In the case of Vanilla OS I would wait until version 2 is out, because version 2 will be radically different from the first release.

My recommendation is F-Droid Basic. It’s a more modern official client that supports automatic unattended updates on Android 12 and newer.

why does it exist

As far as I understand it, it has been created to port the official client over to a newer target SDK and to ship those changes quicker to the end-user before all features of the main client have been ported to the newer target SDK. One of the reasons stated was having an official F-Droid client as quickly as possible that installs without a warning message.

It seems to be unclear if F-Droid Basic as an F-Droid client with a reduced feature set will continue to exist after the main client has been modernised.

also, why not use Droid-ify or similar

Last time I looked only Neo Store supported automatic unattended app updates. As soon as F-Droid Basic came out, I switched to it from Neo Store. I didn’t really like Neo Store’s UI and in general I prefer official apps from projects rather than third-party apps.

it has way more repos built in? Molly, Session, IzzyOnDroid, Newpipe, etc are defaults in droid-ify even if they are not enabled by default

I only use the F-Droid repo, so that’s not a selling point for me. ;)

You don’t need your own server to use Joplin. You can select a local directory to store your notes and sync this directory with Syncthing between devices.

I am not sure if this works with iOS though.

You can select a local folder in Obsidian for Android and sync the folder with Syncthing. You can even revoke network permissions for Obsidian and it all works completely offline (Flatpak override: --unshare=network / GrapheneOS: don’t allow the network permission).

This is my current setup, even though Obsidian is not FOSS. I like that it stores standard Markdown files in a traditional filesystem hierarchy, instead of what Joplin does with using Markdown files as a database. This means that with Obsidian I can use any text editor or any other Markdown app to access and edit my notes, whereas with Joplin I would have to export them first to standard Markdown and then potentially rename and reorganise all the files and their attachments.

I didn’t know about Logseq! Looks really interesting and since there’s a Flatpak available, I’ll give it a try. Thanks for mentioning it!

Joplin has export options itself, but I just don’t like how Joplin manages notes on a filesystem. If it can be done nicely (see Obsidian), why bother with something needlessly complex (file structure, need to sync with the filesystem, etc.)?

But everyone has different requirements and for the right person, Joplin can certainly be a good solution. ;)