SolidGrue

Man, I got stuff to do. Lol.

I mean…

Steam? Maybe? I dunno, I don’t game but the Steam kids seem to prefer Arch. I’m sure they have their reasons.

Practically? Probably nothing terribly significant.

Termux (on F-droid) is a userland environment that runs on top of your Android device’s kernel. It has Debian/Ubuntu-like package management system that pulls from repos maintained by the termux team. If the package is available for aarch64, its probably available in the termux repos. Its not so much of an app as it is an alternate userland that runs on top of the same kernel, but can interact with Android a couple of different ways.

The main Termux app gets you a basic command line environment with the usual tools included in a headless Linux install. From there you can select your preferred repos, do package updates, installs, etc, just like on a desktop or laptop. You could even install a desktop environment and use RDP to access it.

Then there are some companion apps that are useful:

• Termux:boot is like a primitive rc.d feature that executes upon boot up any scripts found in the termux ~/.termux/boot directory. You could use the feature to launch an SSH server, or perhaps start your syncthing service when the phone starts up.
• Termux:Tasker is a Tasker plugin that allows Tasker to launch scripts in .termux/tasker based on whatever triggers or profiles you define in Tasker. For example, stop or start selected services when connected to your home WiFi
• Termux:API is a set of termux utilities to interact with the Android API, and do things like send messages, interact with the camera or battery, and manipulate system settings.

So you could install the syncthing package in Termux and (after setting up Termux access for your internal storage) configure it to sync folders from your phone to wherever syncthing syncs. You’d set up a start script under Termux:boot to launch it when your phone starts, or Tasker to start/stop the service on your home WiFi.

For the F-droid enabled users, it seems there’s a Syncthing app in the Termux repos:

~ $ apt show syncthing
Package: syncthing
Version: 1.28.0
Maintainer: @termux
Installed-Size: 26.4 MB
Homepage: https://syncthing.net/
Download-Size: 7857 kB
APT-Sources: https://packages.termux.dev/apt/termux-main stable/main aarch64 Packages
Description: Decentralized file synchronization

Plus 1 for a refurb or gently used Dell Latitude series. My daily beater for the last 5 or 6 years has been a pre-2020 Dell Latitude 7390 13". Works really well with the *bian distros I’ve run on it, decent battery life, OK mic and speakers.

I’ve had to replace the battery once, and the keyboard once (which I damaged myself by applying a small amount of Coca Cola).

Refurb ThinkPads are also great, but they have a high resale value.

No worries, the other poster was just wasn’t being helpful. And/or doesn’t understand statistics & databases, but I don’t care to speculate on that or to waste more of my time on them.

The setting above maxes out at 24h in stock builds, but can be extended beyond that if you are willing to recompile the FTL database with different parameters to allow for a deeper look back window for your query log. Even at that point, a second database setting farther down that page sets the max age of all query logs to 1y, so at best you’d get a running tally of up to a year. This would probably at the expense of performance for dashboard page loads since the number is probably computed at page load. The live DB call is intended for relatively short windows vs database lifetime.

If you want an all-time count, you’ll have to track it off box because FTL doesn’t provide an all-time metric, or deep enough data persistence. I was just offering up a methodology that could be an interesting and beneficial project for others with similar needs.

Hey, this was fun. See you around.

Removed by mod

#### MAXLOGAGE=24.0
Up to how many hours of queries should be imported from the database and logs? Values greater than the hard-coded maximum of 24h need a locally compiled `FTL` with a changed compile-time value.

I assume this is the setting you are suggesting can extend the query count period. It still will only give you the last N hours’ worth of queries, which is not what OP asked. I gather OP wants to see the cumulative total of blocked queries over all time, and I doubt the FTL database tracks the data in a usable way to arrive at that number.

Ah, well if you know differently then please do share with the rest of us? I think the phrasing in my post makes it pretty clear I was open to being corrected.

So, like a running sum? No, I don’t think so, not in Pi-hole at least.

Pi-hole does have an API you could scrape, though. A Prometheus stack could track it and present a dashboard that shows the summation you want. There are other stats you could pull as well. This is a quick sample of what my home assistant integration sees

That counter, I believe, for the last 24 hours. It will fluctuate up and down across your active daily periods

Unless I misunderstand your question, draw.io can be downloaded as a standalone Linux application and run locally.

Likewise, the Xfig package should he available in most Linux repos. It’s old, but good enough for a quick sketch.

edit: aha. My mistake. My eyes slid over ‘open source’ in the title*, and even still I hadn’t realized it was an Apache license.

* Whaaat, it was pre-coffee? Let the purest among us cast the first stone.

It’s possible I’m mistaken on Flatpack vs. Snap. I don’t use either of them, myself.

Functionally they’re no different. LMDE draws its packages from Debian (probably stable) repos while mainline Mint draws from Ubuntu’s. So yes, Mint will have overall newer packages than LMDE but it’s generally rare for that to affect your ability to get work done unless some new feature you were waiting for gets introduced.

Ubuntu is the Enterprise fork of Debian backed by Canonical, and as such have contributed some controversy into the ecosystem.

Ubuntu leverages Snap packages which are considered ‘bloaty’ and ‘slow’ by a plurality of people with opinions on these matters. They work. Mint incorporates the Snap store into their package management. You might just need to turn it on in the settings.

With mainline Mint you get new base OS packages with Ububtu’s release cycle, and the Snap store.

In the case of LMDE then, you can run a stable base OS on Debian’s rock-solid foundation, their release cycle, and still get your fresh software from the Snap store.

IMO, they’re the same for like 85% of use cases. I find I end up going to extra measures to disable certain Ubuntu-isms on my own systems that run it, effectively reverting it to Debian by another name.

As a student and occasional gamer, the trade off is having a stable base for your learning needs, and still be able to get the latest user desktop apps from Snap.

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a solid pick. All the perks and integration of Mint, without Ubuntu.

…Ubuntu which, yes, is a Debian downstream. People have their opinions on it. It works. It has its nuisances, but it works.

Oh, shoot. If you’re gonna roll your own then that’s probably the better play because at least then the firmware won’t be all locked down and you can pick known-compatible parts. Get it with no OS and sort it out later if you need to.

It’s easy enough to buy a Windows license key later on if you need it. The school night even make it available you at a student discount. Boot it from a USB drive, even.

Heck, I ran Linux on my college computers back in the 90s. It was just a thing you did. Ah, memories…

Anyhoo, it largely depends on the school but for most intents and purposes Windows, Mac and Linux are interoperable. By that I mean they can generally open, manipulate and share all of the common document formats natively, with some minor caveats.

Many schools also have access to Microsoft O365, which makes the MS Office online suite available as well. All you really need to use that is a web browser.

I work in an office environment these days where Windows, Mac and Linux are all well supported and are in broad use. I use Linux (Debian) exclusively, my one coworker is all-windows and a third is all-mac. Our boss uses Windows on the desktop, but also uses a Macbook. We are able to collaborate and exchange data without many problems.

I would say the two main challenges you’re liable to face will be when Word files include forms or other uncommon formatting structures. LibreOffice is generally able to deal with them, but may mangle some fonts & formatting. Its not common but it does happen.

The other main challenge could be required courseware-- specialized software used in a curriculum for teaching-- and proctor software for when you’re taking exams online. Those might require Windows or Mac

If it ever comes up, Windows will run in a Virtual Machine (VM) just fine. VirtualBox by Oracle is generally free for individual use, and is relatively easy to start up. Your laptop will probably come with Windows pre-installed, so you could just nuke it, install Linux, install VirtualBox, and then install Windows as a VM using the license that came with your laptop. You’d need to ask an academic advisor at the school if that’s acceptable for whatever proctor software they use.

I recommend against dual-booting a Windows environment if you can avoid it. Linux & Windows are uneasy roommates, and will occasionally wipe out the other’s boot loader. It’s not terribly difficult to recover, but there is a risk that could (will) happen at the WORST possible moment. However, it might be unavoidable if they use proctor software that requires windows on bare metal. Again, you’d have to ask the school.

Good luck!

This just in, scientists unveil “a loop of wire”

I keed, I keed. Glad to see materials science improving technologies we have for new applications.

Secure file transfers frequently trade off some performance for their crypto. You can’t have it both ways. (Well, you can but you’d need hardware crypto offload or end to end MACSEC, where both are more exotic use cases)

rsync is basically a copy command with a lot of knobs and stream optimization. It also happens to be able to invoke SSH to pipeline encrypted data over the network at the cost of using ssh for encrypting the stream.

Your other two options are faster because of write-behind caching in to protocol and transfer in the clear-- you don’t bog down the stream with crypto overhead, but you’re also exposing your payload

File managers are probably the slowest of your options because they’re a feature of the DE, and there are more layers of calls between your client and the data stream. Plus, it’s probably leveraging one of NFS, Samba or SSHFS anyway.

I believe “rsync -e ssh” is going to be your best over all case for secure, fast, and xattrs. SCP might be a close second. SSHFS is a userland application, and might suffer some penalties for it

I do this. A Debian Live image and an encrypted LVM for home. Came in handy a few times for the odd system rescue