There were apps out there to help with this when I switched from Spotify to Tidal. I can’t remember the name anymore though. It just sucks up all your saved songs and playlists, matches them in the other service then adds them. Almost everything I had moved over without a problem. I do miss the social aspect of Spotify, being able to share links with friends. No one I know has tidal except the people on my family plan. There are services that will turn your song link into a linktree like page with links for Spotify, tidal, YouTube music, deezer, etc., but that’s clunky.

Also, the worst hemmeroids ever and a special CEO diet consisting of nothing but exlax and habanero peppers.

Nextcloud was somewhat difficult for me the first time I installed it, though I did have a usable system in the end. Then I discovered Nextcloud AIO and haven’t had an issue since.

I’m no expert. I want to include that disclaimer up front.

Nextcloud with block storage on btrfs with snapshots seems like it could work for you. No idea about VFS though. I’ll leave that question for someone more knowledgeable. The “drive” portion of Nextcloud is quite decent. I regularly use it to pass large files between my phone (Android), laptop (Linux) and gaming desktop (Windows).

Ya know, I’ve been saving better than most my age. 401k, savings account, emergency fund, investments, crypto, etc. and I keep being reminded that no matter how much I save, I’ll still never achieve the American dream without help.

Is that the LMG? I like that one too.

Yes, I’m several years into my de-googling process and a solid email client is not something I’m worried about. K9 is great and, as Thunderbird, we can only hope that it gets better.

I bought my first handheld anything, the Palm Zire 31 in high school. Everyone thought I was weird, but I was also organized. :P

And the Tidal app has an amoled dark mode, which I don’t think Spotify has. Sometimes the little quality of life things make a big difference.

I’d be active in there. So many companies hide their pricing and gimmicks so you don’t know until you start using it. There’s few advertisements for useful unshittifying tools like RES or the one that fixes Facebook, tools that let you download Instagram photos, etc. Free alternatives like grrrrmin which can generate strava-likeheatmaps from your Garmin data can also be hard to find. Lemmy has been good for this, as Reddit once was. There are a lot if things that are only usable to me after extensive unshittifying.

I switched from Spotify when they cut my family off of my plan because some of them don’t always live with me. I like Tidal a lot, but wish it was easier for me to share a song with friends who don’t use it. Ironically, I don’t think any family members but my dad actually use my Tidal plan, so basically I just switched out of spite.

Those last 2 lines really sum it up don’t they. If Windows was a family member you would disown them.

I had to do all the same things on my work computer. If MS could stop shitting all over my taskbar that would be an amazing expression of basic decency. I’m about to go to IT and ask for a Linux computer that I can test with my day to day tools to make sure everything works. Typically only a few devs have them and those of us in support roles are on Windows. Microsoft is literally sapping away the time and effort my employer has paid me to put towards their customers. I use Linux at home and it has none of these problems. Actually, the worst problem I’ve had in years was a broken package that I simply uninstalled and re-added from a different source.

I think this is mostly because people who know about it have a mental block that it’s only for nerds. Millions have been using Android on their phones for years, though we’ll limit ourselves to desktop GNU/Linux type distributions for this discussion.

Actual usage of Linux has gotten much easier since 2006ish when I first tried it out. With all the popups and ads in Windows nowadays, its rapidly becoming harder to use than Linux, something I did not expect. I don’t see a combined Linux User Group/ Bingo Club/ Bridge Group forming anytime soon, but Linux Mint isn’t any harder to use than Windows, even for normies with an average level of tech skills.

This appears to be what I’ve been looking for. I can’t wait to try it. Thanks for sharing.

You mean after the price hike they also hiked the number of ads? I canceled when they hiked the price and managed to get it down to the old price a few months later, so I renewed for the personal heatmap. Looks like I’m definitely canceling again. I doubt they’ll give me the price break twice anyway.

Baking ads into a timeline like Strava and some other apps do has to be the worst app trend ever.

You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It’s the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most “reputable” tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.

With MS enshitifying Windows at an ever increasing pace and the hard work of open source developers, volunteers, advocates, to make Linux better and more approachable, I won’t be surprised at all to see that percentage move up.

“You mean its free and doesn’t try to sell me other products the whole time I’m using it?”

First if all, welcome to Linux. I also found it in my high school/college years and am so glad I did. Things will be weird. I remember thinking “what kind of Fisher Price OS is this?” because Ubuntu was so simple looking back then and I was used to the unnecessary clutter of Windows. There is so much to explore, but I think you are on a good path with Mint. I have also run Mint for a few years and love some of the things it does.

A helpful note: If you plan on sharing files between the two OSes, be aware that Windows won’t typically access a Linux file system like ext4 or btrfs and Linux can handle NTFS (windows) in a lot of cases, but if you have bitlocker running you may have additional hurdles.

I highly recommend getting a big external drive ans backing up regularly (like at least once a week). At some point you will screw up and be glad you did it. I only overwrote a disk partition on accident once, and I recovered the data, but I also learned my lesson the hard way. Don’t be like me!

I’ve never been able to fully transition away from the proprietary TickTick tasks. Nothing seems to have the features I’m accustomed too. Then again, I’m on a dysfunctional task non-management spree right now, so maybe when I get my shit together I’ll try again. For context, I use a modified version of the GTD strategy to keep track of my todos.

Before TickTick I used Astrid. When Astrid tasks was bought and killed by Yahoo, I thought they were over, although it seems there is a fork https://github.com/tasks/tasks (GPL 3.0) that also syncs with tasks.org. I haven’t done thorough testing yet to see what kind of issues I would have using this new Astrid and Nextcloud, but this is the best open solution I’ve been able to come up with and its been on my project shelf for over a year waiting to be tested.

For calendar, nextcloud synced with Thunderbird and a proprietary phone app (I know… I know) seems to work well for me. My partner uses icloud and it generally interoperates fine. I even have a raspberry pi in the living room that pulls in everyone’s calendar and overlays them as a “family calendar”