It’s not just debatable, it’s beside the point. NixOS is declarative, trivially reproducible and natively container-ready, that’s what makes it so great.

I think you’re spot on: Markdown files with SyncThing. That’s my setup as well, you just can’t beat markdown files as a back-end for flexibility and future-safety in my opinion.

Some things to consider:

• Editor: The obvious no-nos are editors with built-in AI support or cloud storage. FOSS editors are highly recommended. If you find a good offline FOSS WYSIWYG-style markdown editor, let us know. I use Neovim myself, but I’m often asked for recommendations by non-geeks.
• Operating system: You should be fine on MacOS (for now), but Linux is a great option for desktop. Windows is a loose canon with their AI snapshot approach, definitely avoid. What are you syncing to? Mobile devices are a lot more difficult to keep control of.
• Encrypted devices: Make sure you have full disk encryption on all devices and on all your backups.

Be careful with that stuff! I know somebody who contracted severe isomorphism

The way I understand it, ufw is a frontend for iptables. So no.

This is a helpful blogpost on disabling input devices in Wayland

You don’t. Even if you’re happy to support the developers of the software you use (which is great!), I think it makes more sense to download and give it the spin first, then donate later.

Where indexing and searching mails is concerned, notmuch is the best I’ve seen. Do note that this is not an e-mail client, it only indexes, tags and searches (following the “UNIX philosophy” of doing one job well).

I personally use it with neomutt as a mail user agent, which is almost certainly not what you want. Notmuch supports other clients but they’re all pretty arcane.

So this is not a recommendation, just a glimpse into advanced e-mail setups I guess.

Nice, I didn’t know about the all selector

No need for external programs:

for_window [class="^.*"] inhibit_idle fullscreen
for_window [app_id="^.*"] inhibit_idle fullscreen 

I don’t think downgrading the curl library is promising here. curlftpfs seems to be unmaintained. I recommend looking for alternatives or alternative workflows.

Fixed in curl, but not in a curlftpfs, apparently. Look at the comments on the accepted answer.

Seems to be a known bug: https://github.com/curl/curl/discussions/14299

Error setting curl:

That doesn’t seem like a complete error message to me. Is there any more information? Maybe with the -d (debug) flag?

It really depends on your approach to learning things. If you’re looking for a systematic approach, I really like No Starch Press books for that sort of thing: How Linux Works or Your Linux Toolbox (for a more playful approach).

But in the end there’s really no substitute for installing Debian on bare metal and tinkering with it. I would really recommend Debian, because it’s the archetype of how Linux systems have been working for the last 30 years or so. Arguably, this is currently changing, but come to grips with Debian before you dabble in more modern approaches to system management.

Same! This works really well.