ntnsndr

Poster said huge overlap, not huge audience:)

But I agree with the overlap. I use e/OS partly because I can run it on a Fairphone. I'd love to try Graphene.

Laurie is great. Back when I was a reporter I got to see here at work a few times and it was a blast.

Ironically, I now do more old fashioned handwriting than ever because of two new-ish pieces of tech: a PineNote e-ink tablet running Xournal++ and an image-friendly LLM to transcribe the text into Markdown. Those make it super easy to store and convert handwriting into an email, a draft, etc.

But part of the benefit is probably the editing round that comes from hand-copying the handwriting into typing.

I have come to be a daily KOReader user on my PineNote, and I love it, but dang it took me ages to figure out how to use it, so I am feeling a great deal of gratitude to this thread for making me feel less alone.

I've been daily driving on Fairphones for a few years as a tester for Murena. It's painless, and fits my threat model of trying to mitigate corporate tracking. My elderly mother uses it too. I really like the app store. No purchases, FDroid integrated. I don't use the Murena cloud stuff but it works well with my own nextcloud. I recommend it.

I now use Nextcloud both for a family server and an academic lab. It has become such a daily part of my life, and I am really grateful for it. I just wish the network effects were stronger so I could benefit more from the federated features, and people didn't think it is so weird to get a Nextcloud link.

Lab use: https://git.medlab.host/MEDLab/Handbook/src/branch/main/docs...

Personal use: https://nathanschneider.info/2026/06/toward-a-durable-writin...

I have been relying on pandoc for many years and had no idea I could use templates like this, which I suppose is pathetic but also indicates just how powerful the defaults are on their own.

I recently got a FW12 and, for a random data point, my kids love it: the color, the ability to do art on the touchscreen, the foldability. And I love all those things too, in addition to getting to play with various flavors of Linux on it. (Now running Fedora with Cosmic, but keeping GNOME for the handful of things Cosmic glitches out on.) It is just a fun computer, and I appreciate that playfulness about it every day.

It is strange to me that tiling windows have never become a norm. I really don't understand how people live with all these windows piled on top of each other!

System76's COSMIC DE has been a real life-changer for me in making tiling accessible.

My parish priest told me he uses AI to edit newsletter posts. He didn't say he used it to write. And he mentioned using Magesterium.ai, which is a chatbot trained on a pretty conservative Catholic corpus (eg, it knows almost nothing about the Catholic Worker movement).

One thing I appreciate in our diocese is that the priests are encouraged to deliver their homilies without a written script. I think that is very wise, as it forces them to preach from instinct and heart, not from a script, either AI or human written.

I've been using Vim only about a year, and just finished drafting an academic-trade crossover book with extensive endnotes in it. I've tried Pencil and Goyo, but ended up finding that a pretty tiny vimrc file was all I needed. No plugins.

https://gitlab.com/ntnsndr/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.vimrc

I launch with `vim -O [2-3 working files]` and am good to go. Learning vim itself is hard enough, and rewarding enough, that plugins feel extreme, especially for prose writing.

For me, too late, because my workflow is already full of little pandoc scripts that do document conversion wherever I need it!

But I wonder if the killer app might be a browser plugin, not a website. Highlight text on any webpage, convert it to whatever. Saves the copy-paste, and hopefully stays on the local machine.

Except that 6 is far and away the best

For example, the Colorado Sun has labels on every story for the nature of reporting that went into it: https://coloradosun.com/

Some may find it surprising that this is left over from the Sun's early support from the crypto journalism project Civil.

That was my first thought too!

I'm not sure I agree. It takes getting used to, and the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need. The settings feel like you're almost in a config file. Except for on old computers, Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.

I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best approach to bring people into the ecosystem.

Remove all the xfce design elements you don't like. Ytou can even use a borderless theme, eg https://github.com/ushioichi/borderless-xfwm-theme

I added i3 so everything is on the keyboard.

XFCE is great because it lets you put it in the background. The GUIs are there when you need them, but it is just as happy if you don't.

Funny that he didn't use the .md extension. Maybe because he started doing it before he expected his markup would merit its own filetype?

Amen. Not only do they make hardware in the US (though not laptops yet), they contribute great Linux software.

I use CC regularly for editing large text files (especially turning interview transcripts into something readable) and have found it works much better than web chat interfaces because of filesystem access and ability to work with large files.

I was speaking at a conference recently and was asked to chair the session at the last minute. It was hybrid, so all the speakers needed to share their slides on Zoom. I have been daily driving Linux for 14 years, and this has almost never been a problem (there was a moment with i3 but it seems better). But I hadn't bothered to test this since installing (and generally loving!) PopOS COSMIC.

The problem, at root, is Wayland. Zoom has some kind of workaround it seems, but it's not working yet in COSMIC.

The result was sad: speakers having to speak with their slides being run by one of the remote speakers, and anyone who recognized the computer running Zoom as Linux surely strengthened their conviction never to try that.

+1. I have tried a bunch of local models (albeit the smaller end, b/c hardware limits), and I can't get handwriting recognition yet. But online Gemini and Claude do great. Hoping the local models catch up soon, as this is a wonderful LLM use case.

UPDATE: I just tried this with the default model on handwriting, and IT WORKED. Took about 5-10 minutes on my laptop, but it worked. I am so thrilled not to have to send my personal jottings into the cloud!

Same experience, but ending up with .md, sync-ed on Nextcloud.

A use case for a blockchain?

I find this is an extraordinary tool for 90% of needs, and I love that it can interact with multiple models. It is a great example of how to productize the ecosystem in a user-loyal way.

Same story here. 4 is running strong, with ongoing updates from e/OS.

I love Rest of World! Great work!

My understanding is accessibility features are in the works before the full release

I love this app! I recently went shopping for Linux readers and came right back to Foliate for its common sense and feature-richness beneath a clean UX.

Agreed. In addition to its incredible reliability and capacity for customization, you can justifiably pretend that its name is actually Fairymail.

I do the same except in Emacs. If it is useful, see the pandoc command I've created in .emacs to enable output to multiple formats.