I've mainly been looking up some good ways to backup my Podman services. I manually copy my volumes every couple or months or so. (Which I was thankful when my hard drive started failing on me). I saw a post about Portabase here last week and figured it's time to look into something less involved.

I also used that as an excuse to start moving my 5 mysql containers that each service ran themselves into a single mariadb container.

The updates from the last CVEs were seamless. Nothing surprising since I have very little installed on my Debian server.

I didn't change my view on anything from the recent CVEs. I always assumed my server can be compromised, so everything sensitive is encrypted anyway, and I update all my systems/software often or automatically. The latter of which comes with its own set of risks I'm willing to take

It's alright. I actually was on a similar, albeit just a month long, phase when I switched to KDE. I used VSCodium before and switched (back?) to VSCode after two weeks.

The main reason was extension support. I didn't notice how much I leaned on those before switching. For example taking notes became more cumbersome and journaling in Typst became impossible (from the editor at least). I have been expecting a lot from my IDE that aren't really its responsibilities.

Actually programming was a perfectly fine experience so I kept trying to make it work. But at some point a project required me to run dev containers. I had VSCode installed for that anyway so that was the end of it. Though by now I have basically completely switched to Neovim.

I recommend trying out Neovim (Maybe Emacs but I personally never tried it). Or if you prefer a GUI, or don't want to learn their system, definitely give VSCodium or VSCode a shot. Those four have a much greater assortment of plugins so it'll be a lot easier to get your editor to behave how you want it to. Though this comes at the cost of a higher memory and cpu footprint.

I'm stoked, thanks for the work you guys put in!

I might be missing something but the paid tiers don't include something like theming either, nor did the developer include theming/branding as part of the list of features he wanted to put behind some enterprise plan in the original post you're commenting on. I'm mentioning this because of the "In Relation to Monetization & Enterprise Plans" section. There seems to be no such instinct you're mentioning there.

From the issues I found on Github I did find some related to what you asked for:

• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/502
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/3590
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/479

The issues seem to be something with Bulma, finding a way to do it cleanly, and it not being a high priority right now. But from the conversations in those issues it does seem like a pull request would be welcome.

After reading the "Developer perspective" section, I also wanted to note that for a lot of projects like this, the developer does the brunt of the work. I know commits aren't always the best metric, but the developer has 819 and the next one on the list (excluding the bots and Claude's 5 commits) has 4 commits to their name. That difference more than makes up for the inaccuracies of counting commits. So sure, some people may have considered contributing, but most don't. Let alone fork the project.

Basically, the reasons the features you want aren't there are because:

1. The developer didn't have time for it/didn't want to spend the time on it (which is fair enough; he is doing free labour from our perspective as self hosters), and
2. nobody else bothered to do it yet. (With an exception to issue 479, because someone injected css from the client a couple of months ago)

I just spun up a container and works well. Same story for the Android app. Are there plans to put the app on an F-droid repository? Currently I keep it updated with Obsidian. Also, are there plans for Kanban support?

Overall I'm a big fan. I might replace my Vikunja container with this in the weekend!

Also to nitpick: the purple top bar looks perfectly at home on the Android app, but it does feel out of place on desktop when accessing the website

I run Silverblue on 2 devices (my main computer and laptop) for half a year. It works and I didn't have any major issues with it. Though as you might have experienced with other immutable distros, some things like configuring gdm might be a bit more work. But for most things there is a flatpak. The only software that couldn't be installed that wat was my vpn.

If you want to try out something new, NixOS or Guix might be more up your alley

That's funny since I didn't even know what Linux was when I started my CS education, nor that there were so many services you could host yourself. I was egged on to try Linux and (eventually) get a small homelab by my uni friends, who were probably more like you

I have my academic bachelors in CS and I'm doing a civil engineering masters on the CS track. So I'm the opposite of your target audience, but I did want to mention something.

Yes there are some fairly technical things like cryptography, natural language processing, and compression algorithms where you will need a good understanding of mathematical subjects like linear algebra, statistics, and group theory.

But apart from subjects like that, you can definitely learn most of what we did at the same pace, or even faster (and even then, something being difficult doesn't mean it's impossible to learn). You can easily find good resources online to learn languages from Haskell to C. Nobody is stopping you from buying books that are used as course material. Same goes for networking.

Saying all that, I never even learned to work with containers or VMs as part of a uni course. Most of the stuff we learn is in the realm of theoretical computer science. So I probably learned a lot about self hosting the same way you did: the internet and some friends.

Oh yeah that makes sense. I completely forgot about cloud saves. I only game on a single device so I didn't think about that.

• Just like czl I do have seperate apps for each type of data I use. For example Ente for photos and Syncthing for keeping the documents folder of my devices synced up.
• It's not something I really think about because my data sources are functionally disjoint. (e.g. I don't have photos from my phone in my documents folder). The only exception is Ente, where I do keep a plaintext copy of the "shared with family" account to display some family photos on our digital photoframe. This also "answers" your next question.
• I don't have anything set up for when an application stops support. I do however do look beforehand whether it's possible to extract my data in a way I can migrate to another platform if need be. For example, some services like Ente offer an easy plaintext way to export/backup your data in directories mirroring your albums. That way I could easily head to Immich
• It hasn't really. I usually do backups by keeping two copies of all my volumes. So running more services doesn't really impact much of anything.

A sidenote on Nextcloud: it does use the same folder structure in its data volume as it presents to the user. So it's fairly easy to manage, but you need to update the folder you made the change within the container for it to show up. When we used to keep photo's synced up with Nextcloud, I could directly access that folder for the photoframe. Since Ente is e2ee I needed to duplicate data in that case

In case it's something you're worried about, noai.duckduckgo.com will be the referral URL when you go to a site that was fetched from there.

Oh that's nice. I'll give beeper a spin then as well, thanks! You too daytonah!

Oh don't you need a Google account to get the apks on Aurora?

Mainly because it's really difficult to make a Google account when they suspect you're a bot.

A fair amount of smaller businesses in Belgium also primarily use Whatsapp.

A VM is difficult for me since I only have a spare quad core laptop from almost a decade ago. So I'm sceptical on whether it will be able to virtualise an OS on top. And the bridges are hosted on a Zimablade. So I have my doubts there as well. Though I can definitely give it a spin in my free time, you never know.

I do have my main computer where I do run VMs often, but I doubt my partner will be fine running that noisy thing overnight though.

Ideally I would be running an iMessage bridge like you're suggesting. Unfortunately I don't have time to get it to work on my iPhone since the maumium docs mention it's possible, but haven't made a guide for it.

I'll definitely keep the VM thing in mind if I ever decide to replace the Zimablade. I doubt my family will let go of their Apple devices any time soon anyway.

Thanks, I've really been appreciating everyones ideas here!

For metric users like me, this beast did 127kg!

Docker was initially only rootful. So I'm assuming for compatibility's sake they kept the default that way?

Yeah I also switched all my docker containers to podman as well. I wasn't making any point for using either above the other

A bit off topic but the way you're writing this post makes me feel old, and I'm in my low 20s