technonaturalist

It’s been a good while since I wrote about the baby steps of my very slow transition to as much open source as I can manage.

quick recap

• early twenteens: apparently (I searched my own blog XD) I was using linux on a small rig (laptop, the desktop is the “big rig”), and apparently it was Ubuntu/Kubuntu or some other derivative and I had a lot of problems with it (mostly because I wanted updates faster than I was getting them and getting what I wanted broke things) and went to Ubuntu Studio which was less of a problem enough to make a difference but still a problem
• 2016: acquired the big rig (fondly referred to as “the frankenbox”) with its current case and original parts, installed Ubuntu Studio, problems persisted
• 2017: so many problems that I fully cracked it after yet another dist-upgrade explosion requiring a reinstall, an online friend recommended Manjaro (and stayed up really late for him to make sure I got through the install process fine)
• mid-late twenteens: started using ownCloud, and at some point after that switched to Nextcloud (purely on principle as I wasn’t sure I liked the direction ownCloud was going, it still functioned fine at the time)
• late twenteens: broke away from the open source trend briefly with the acquisition of my current iPhone (reasonably certain I was replacing an Android which was doing my head in, I apparently hate Android a lot more than iOS) and much later a Macbook Air (both phones and Manjaro or the photo apps I was trying refused to play nice and my media was infinitely more important than my stupid principles)
• 2020: acquired a NUC and started properly self-hosting my websites (of which I’m down to just this one now) and Nextcloud
• 2023: the frankenbox got a lot of new hardware (basically all components except the case, drives and the gpu got replaced), switched to Arch for what ended up being no other reason than I’d mentally prepared for and committed to it (originally we thought I’d have to reinstall because Manjaro wouldn’t recognise all the new hardware but it didn’t care and just worked)

the watch

In much more recent history I’d told JJ I was going to have to switch away from Fitbit really soon partly because my Charge 4 was starting to die anyway (screen wouldn’t always turn back on with wrist turn or taps and then was never bright enough even if I explicitly set the brightness higher and the battery life had gotten noticably shorter but it was still going a few days between charges so that wasn’t a massive issue) and also Google had gone from being naggy (some crap about how it would somehow be so much better if you just use the Google account) to coercive (if you want to keep using this thing you have to use a Google account). J said the strap on his watch (some random cheap thing he’d gotten off ebay or something) had broken and he needed a new one too and told me to send him the one I’d been looking at.