The big one seems to be the inability to buy a mainstream device with a Linux distribution preinstalled. The few options I know of are niche devices or sometimes single models usually marketed as dev devices. It is also near impossible to even find something without any os installed. Even manufacturer like Framework doesn't offer Linux preinstalled laptops or even just fully assembled ones but without os.

Lacking third party software and hardware support. This is a very real problem and something that can make Linux unviable for specific use cases but also something that will never resolve without higher adoption in personal computing, my guess is at tenth of marketshare we would start seeing it being treated as a serious option. It is amazing that something like wine exists and how well it works but it still can't do everything and it is worse than native support. Similarly not many people are willing to even consider VMs or dual booting for specific workflows that need Windows.

Fragmentation of distros and ways to do things but with standard recommended beginner distros this seems to me more of a perception then a clear problem for most use cases for majority users who would theoretically migrate.

A fallacy where people value a thing perceived to be free less also seems to play a role along with public perception of Linux and its users. Slogans such as Linux is only free if you don't value your time which is ironically IMO more true of Windows these days with the cost usually part of the price of the device and not really perceived or considered by the average buyer.

This seems similar to the usual jokes about vegans and other ill formed perceptions. My guess is that it is the result of people plain ignoring things that have potentional to be uncomfortable along with those with niche opinions being more likely to have considered them and to have strong reasons to hold them along with wanting to at least tell people what they are.

I am just plain ignoring Mac here to be more concise and because I have zero experience with them.

I recently moved to a place and unearthed an old Pixel 3. I updated it to the last official update (October 2021) but not sure what to do with it. It’s not worth any money (or at least I don’t think so) and I have a dedicated Android gaming device (Retroid Pocket 5).

What could I do with this device?

I was trying to think of a way to use it. Was thinking of setting it up facing my backyard to film squirrels/possums/birds, but it would likely fill the storage up in less than one day of continuous recording. I’m probably getting way ahead of myself but would there be a way to use it like an IP cam or Ring doorbell that records everything not on the device?

Any other unrelated ideas are welcome too. I just don’t want to throw it away since it’s functioning quite well.

We had this topic a couple of months ago where Framework was mentioned in a few response threads, but the overarching discussion was across a wider subject.

My 2016 (I think? It was snagged from e waste) era thinkpad is struggling to keep up with my usage of it. The screen is small, the keyboard sucks, the touchpad is not quite right, it is beyond its useful life.

I like the idea of a Framework laptop. I am leaning toward getting one on principal. It seems like this company is going to survive for a while. I think the last thing I am looking for is anecdotes.

If you use or have used a Framework as a daily driver, what are the pros and cons that you have with them compared to a similar less-modular system? How is support?

This is just a random thought I had. I don't do gardening currently and not looking for advice per se. Just thinking about how the physical world feels far behind in terms of automation compared to the digital world, and wondering what kind of possibilities are out there. I was wondering how close we are to having consumer-form-factor robots to help with various things, and growing food is a natural starting place.

I was imagining what kind of robots are needed to deal with a garden—assuming a house with a plot of land suitable for a large garden—with tasks like:

• Fetching water, either from plumbed water or a natural water source
• Getting seeds from somewhere. Maybe online shopping and then the robot knowing how to open the box. (Probably not by identifying existing plants and picking/stealing them.)
• Planting the seeds in the right place
• Watering the plants regularly
• Maintaining temperature and sun exposure
• Digging up the plant and bringing it indoors so I can inspect or smell it without having to go outside. Then replanting it safely.
• Determining when food is ripe, picking it, reusing the seeds
• Washing and cooking it

It feels like a lot of these are already available off-the-shelf today. I searched and there is a project which I hadn't heard of before called FarmBot which seems neat and geared toward enthusiasts ("prosumers") and education, and includes open source hardware and software. To be clear I'm not affiliated with them in any way.

FarmBot probably handles a lot of the important parts of gardening, but I'm sure it doesn't handle everything on my list. How far are we from a 100% automated experience?

Other than that there was some recent marketing around cheap robots like LeRobot by HuggingFace (the company where basically all the open-weight AI models are hosted). It has nothing to do with farming except that they have one shaped like a hand, so it could probably be programmed to grasp and move things around.

Sorry for the rambling post. Really curious to hear if anyone else has gone into robotics and interested in hearing your experiences and also other resources on what state-of-the-art looks like. Also I bet a lot of this is solved in proprietary solutions and by Big Agriculture, but right now I'm more curious on the consumer-grade level.

Hi all,

I've got (probably) a few thousand family photographs that I plan on scanning/digitizing. These photographs are organized into dozens or hundreds of envelopes with month/year and sometimes event description written on them. I'm on the fence between using a service to do it or DIYing it with a scanning machine.

The way I see it is -

Service pros:

1. I don't have to do it myself

Service cons:

1. I may have no control over how the digitized photos are tagged or organized (date tagged, filename)
2. Risk of photographs being lost/damaged
3. $$$$

DIY pros:

1. I can tag and organize the photos exactly how I want
2. Much less expensive

DIY cons:

1. I have little spare time and this project could be extremely time consuming.

I would love to hear if anyone here has experience doing this and what techniques or pitfalls you may have discovered along the way.

I noticed today that there are a large number of devices on my home network, all claiming to be ethernet connections. They kind of claimed all free IP addresses from x.x.x.63-253. They are not all on from what I have seen (and they are currently almost all off). Normally, my network should have only a handful of ethernet devices, which are my Fedora desktop, my Proxmox host, my OpenMediaVault VM on Proxmox machine running 24/7, and then the occassional VM I boot up as needed. I searched the occasional MAC address of one of these devices, and nothing came up. Does anyone know what the culprit of this would be or what I could use to diagnose it?

Screenshot of some of the weird devices listed (I blacked out my known devices)

Edit: It appears to be solved. I believe my OpenMediaVault VM was acting up/having issues and was gobbling up IP addresses. The issue has not occurred since restarting my Proxmox host.

Hey y’all,

YouTube recently decided to put a feature into the app which zooms in to fill the screen more and reduce the dark space. There’s apparently settings for the android app, but I can’t seem to find any way to disable if for iOS. Does anyone have any suggestions? It’s incredibly annoying and distracting when watching videos.

I joined their waitlist last month and still didn't get an invite, now they even have mobile apps but still invite-only... so any chance I can get an invite code from someone here 👉👈. I just want to try and see what it's like

Edit: I didn't expect so many comments, I hope everyone gets an invite! but I just want to say, it seems it doesn't work the same way as tildes and from what I can tell, you need to be a "Groundbreaker" to create invites and only 2 invites can be created? (would appreciate if someone can clarify that in the comments) and I'm personally not able to create invites from my account unfortunately, otherwise I would've sent an invite to everyone who commented. :(

Hey there Tildes, hopefully someone could help me with this. I'm having problems importing all my emails I exported from ProtonMail into macOS Mail app/iCloud.

Recently decided to move my custom domain email addresses to iCloud so I could just use the built-in Mail app on my Mac and iPhone. I backed up all of my emails with ProtonMail's own export tool. It exported every email (or maybe email thread?) as a .eml file and .json file (metadata I believe). After exporting, I switch the domain names over to iCloud. It was pretty easy. I guess I assumed all of my emails would somehow come with me? Seems silly thinking about it now. But I have a backup of all my emails!

All seemed fine until I tried to import them into macOS Mail. Mail wants a mailbox format (.mbox I believe), but I only have .eml files. It let me select all of the .eml files and import them anyway but it's taking about 10 seconds or more per email and I have like ~17,000 emails. ChatGPT says thats 47 hours 13 minutes 20 seconds. It's also freezing the mail app during this insane import process. It would be great if I didn't have to wait that long and that's assuming something doesn't go wrong/the app crashes.

No, I don't need all of those emails (I actually deleted about 10,000 over the past month) but now I'm kind of screwed. I guess for security reasons, when you delete the domain from ProtonMail, it deletes all the emails (as far as I can tell, at least). I'm mentioning this because I was thinking I could have tried to find a way to export it in .mbox format or even delete more emails but it's too late for that.

The way the emails were exported, the filenames are jumbles of letters and numbers so I cant even use Finder to search for specific emails when I need them. I can open each individual email in Mail, so it's not like the files are encrypted, I don't think.

One thing I thought of -- I once used Mail with ProtonBridge that would allow you to use ProtonMail with the Mail app, but still use Proton servers and it synced all my emails with my computer. I disabled that account some time ago (didn't delete it or remove it completely from the list of accounts, just unchecked it). Do you think that directory of emails is still on my computer somewhere? And would it be useable in my situation?

I do realize this is completely of my own doing and should have been more thoughtful but I'm here now and would love any help y'all could give. Thanks everyone!

Edit_1: Oh no... I found the directory for Mail in Application Support and it looks like the Mail importer is making a mailbox for every single email. I tried importing these emails earlier today and it looks like it might have imported everything? Here's a screenshot. 🪦

I wonder if I could try and import them into another app and then export in a better format? Thunderbird? Ugh, I really do need a lot of these emails…

Edit_2: So the export tool mentioned above has a restore feature so currently trying that. It will just import these emails back into ProtonMail and I’ll have to figure out the export part again. Hopefully this works!

My understanding is that Android emulators primarily exist for mobile development and app testing and such-like, and maybe secondarily, to play mobile games.

I want to explore the possibility of using them as a, basically, full-time replacement for installing apps on my phone. More and more apps and services have no "desktop/laptop" version, and no website version. Installing the app on your phone is starting to become a non-negotiable requirement ... one that I'd like to find a work-around to.

So, yeah ... I guess that's the question. Is this a 'thing'? Has anyone experimented with--or flat-out used--an emulator on a desktop/laptop to run their banking app and the like? Is this even possible? Can you connect an emulator to an app-store and just start downloading/installing stuff?

Thanks.