This is a good option for most of it, as the bridges seem quite solid. Sadly it won’t make up for calls (some courses have extra content in the form of “Discord Stages” which is like a big video call).

I can echo the frustrations expressed about social media becoming a necessity as it becomes the primary channel for communication by an institution. Both my university and student dorm use exclusively Discord to communicate events, exams, and general announcements. I don’t run Discord on my phone and due to this I have come close to missing several important things, if not for a friend letting me know. I’m not sure what if anything could be done to change this…

Awesome news! Really miss the tab groups from Chrome, really the only thing haha

Thanks for the recommendation! Using it now, works great. Do you know whether development ia continued anywhere? It doesn’t look to have been updated in many years, but F-Droid doesn’t mark it as unmaintained.

Something I can use to browse GitHub repositories, reply to and create issues, and get notifications for issues on my own repos.

Do you mean Obtainium? I use it to download apps not available on F-Droid, but I can’t use it to actually browse/use GitHub. I will clarify in my OP :)

I do too. Envision has an option to install “WiVRn” which I found worked way better than ALVR.

I play VR on Linux, it works surprisingly well, especially via Wayland. There’s an app called Envision that sets up basically everything you need for you. Unlike a few years ago, I had to do no fiddling, it just works.

What does a hosted RSS provider give you over a normal client? I use Nextcloud News (self hosted) but I don’t really know the benefit over just using an RSS app on my phone (besides syncing my list I guess).

Thank you so much :D I had a lot of fun with that one; happy you liked it.

Yep! You can just paste the URL of the blog into your reader (or try https://blog.allpurposem.at/feed/ if that doesn’t work).

I’m using a reMarkable Linux tablet and it’s been awesome. There’s a bunch of apps ported to it if you’re okay with using an older software release, and they give you full root access. Not FOSS or open hardware like Pine64 but really good experience and does not feel too limited.

Can’t hurt to do a little self-promotion ey? I recently started writing https://blog.allpurposem.at/minecraft-qr about FOSS stuff I work on and ways I’ve managed to survive my gamedev degree on Linux. Aiming for one post per month, though my next one is taking a bit longer.

I set up Arch manually, following the ArchWiki guide. Over time using it though, I must have made some customizations that were incorrect and caused it to break.

I ran my own Mastodon for a while. While it does work, it takes up a ton of storage (every image and video you see is cached by your own server). It also doesn’t work great for viewing stuff like replies and older posts, since backfilling is still not a thing. I ended up just browsing on remote servers instead. A great blog post about this: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/

I use this and love it! I can’t remember whether it was a “FairEmail Pro” feature though (one-time donation to unlock pro features). Regardless it works great.

I really, really hope this leads to development of data portability/server migration options. When I set my homeserver up, I chose Synapse as I didn’t know about the other servers. Now that I do, and would like to switch away because of Synapse’s performance problems and the new CLA stuff, I realize I and all my users are fully locked in, and would have to start from scratch (lose all chats, profiles, etc) to migrate.

I held on to my Time Steel for so long, but I finally switched to AsteroidOS on a Huawei Watch. No AOD, way too bright with lights off and unreadable in the sun, and have to charge it every night (barely lasts a day). I’m heavily considering going back.

I self host Whoogle and it’s a really nice interface. However, recently is has started to take longer and longer to load, sometimes giving up and returning a 502 error. If you don’t run into that however, it’s super nice!

I use Bitwarden and, though all the features are very nice (self hosted Vaultwarden), the clients are really bad. The autofill is super inconsistent on Android. The app takes 20s+ to load on my Pixel 3a. You can’t trigger a sync from the quick autofill menu, you have to open the full app. The “desktop app” is just an embedded browser. I really want to like it, but it doesn’t make it easy.