I’ve mainly been looking up some good ways to backup my Podman services. I manually copy my volumes every couple or months or so. (Which I was thankful when my hard drive started failing on me). I saw a post about Portabase here last week and figured it’s time to look into something less involved.

I also used that as an excuse to start moving my 5 mysql containers that each service ran themselves into a single mariadb container.

The updates from the last CVEs were seamless. Nothing surprising since I have very little installed on my Debian server.

I didn’t change my view on anything from the recent CVEs. I always assumed my server can be compromised, so everything sensitive is encrypted anyway, and I update all my systems/software often or automatically. The latter of which comes with its own set of risks I’m willing to take

I’m stoked, thanks for the work you guys put in!

I might be missing something but the paid tiers don’t include something like theming either, nor did the developer include theming/branding as part of the list of features he wanted to put behind some enterprise plan in the original post you’re commenting on. I’m mentioning this because of the “In Relation to Monetization & Enterprise Plans” section. There seems to be no such instinct you’re mentioning there.

From the issues I found on Github I did find some related to what you asked for:

• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/502
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/3590
• https://github.com/go-vikunja/vikunja/issues/479

The issues seem to be something with Bulma, finding a way to do it cleanly, and it not being a high priority right now. But from the conversations in those issues it does seem like a pull request would be welcome.

After reading the “Developer perspective” section, I also wanted to note that for a lot of projects like this, the developer does the brunt of the work. I know commits aren’t always the best metric, but the developer has 819 and the next one on the list (excluding the bots and Claude’s 5 commits) has 4 commits to their name. That difference more than makes up for the inaccuracies of counting commits. So sure, some people may have considered contributing, but most don’t. Let alone fork the project.

Basically, the reasons the features you want aren’t there are because:

1. The developer didn’t have time for it/didn’t want to spend the time on it (which is fair enough; he is doing free labour from our perspective as self hosters), and
2. nobody else bothered to do it yet. (With an exception to issue 479, because someone injected css from the client a couple of months ago)

I just spun up a container and works well. Same story for the Android app. Are there plans to put the app on an F-droid repository? Currently I keep it updated with Obsidian. Also, are there plans for Kanban support?

Overall I’m a big fan. I might replace my Vikunja container with this in the weekend!

Also to nitpick: the purple top bar looks perfectly at home on the Android app, but it does feel out of place on desktop when accessing the website

That’s funny since I didn’t even know what Linux was when I started my CS education, nor that there were so many services you could host yourself. I was egged on to try Linux and (eventually) get a small homelab by my uni friends, who were probably more like you

I have my academic bachelors in CS and I’m doing a civil engineering masters on the CS track. So I’m the opposite of your target audience, but I did want to mention something.

Yes there are some fairly technical things like cryptography, natural language processing, and compression algorithms where you will need a good understanding of mathematical subjects like linear algebra, statistics, and group theory.

But apart from subjects like that, you can definitely learn most of what we did at the same pace, or even faster (and even then, something being difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible to learn). You can easily find good resources online to learn languages from Haskell to C. Nobody is stopping you from buying books that are used as course material. Same goes for networking.

Saying all that, I never even learned to work with containers or VMs as part of a uni course. Most of the stuff we learn is in the realm of theoretical computer science. So I probably learned a lot about self hosting the same way you did: the internet and some friends.

• Just like czl I do have seperate apps for each type of data I use. For example Ente for photos and Syncthing for keeping the documents folder of my devices synced up.
• It’s not something I really think about because my data sources are functionally disjoint. (e.g. I don’t have photos from my phone in my documents folder). The only exception is Ente, where I do keep a plaintext copy of the “shared with family” account to display some family photos on our digital photoframe. This also “answers” your next question.
• I don’t have anything set up for when an application stops support. I do however do look beforehand whether it’s possible to extract my data in a way I can migrate to another platform if need be. For example, some services like Ente offer an easy plaintext way to export/backup your data in directories mirroring your albums. That way I could easily head to Immich
• It hasn’t really. I usually do backups by keeping two copies of all my volumes. So running more services doesn’t really impact much of anything.

A sidenote on Nextcloud: it does use the same folder structure in its data volume as it presents to the user. So it’s fairly easy to manage, but you need to update the folder you made the change within the container for it to show up. When we used to keep photo’s synced up with Nextcloud, I could directly access that folder for the photoframe. Since Ente is e2ee I needed to duplicate data in that case

Oh that’s nice. I’ll give beeper a spin then as well, thanks! You too daytonah!

Oh don’t you need a Google account to get the apks on Aurora?

Mainly because it’s really difficult to make a Google account when they suspect you’re a bot.

A fair amount of smaller businesses in Belgium also primarily use Whatsapp.

A VM is difficult for me since I only have a spare quad core laptop from almost a decade ago. So I’m sceptical on whether it will be able to virtualise an OS on top. And the bridges are hosted on a Zimablade. So I have my doubts there as well. Though I can definitely give it a spin in my free time, you never know.

I do have my main computer where I do run VMs often, but I doubt my partner will be fine running that noisy thing overnight though.

Ideally I would be running an iMessage bridge like you’re suggesting. Unfortunately I don’t have time to get it to work on my iPhone since the maumium docs mention it’s possible, but haven’t made a guide for it.

I’ll definitely keep the VM thing in mind if I ever decide to replace the Zimablade. I doubt my family will let go of their Apple devices any time soon anyway.

Thanks, I’ve really been appreciating everyones ideas here!

Actually our setup isn’t that different. I do have everything running behind Mullvad, including my server with the bridge on it. I also have a seperate, rarely used phone number. I don’t have Whatsapp on my GOS device though

Yes, my family sent me important messages on Signal for the couple of months we used it, but that was it. The issue lied with the other kinds of messages that I just didn’t receive anymore. I’m happy enough we got on a platform that is at the very least e2ee and where those other kinds chats still continue. Though I’m aware that metadata is being shared that wouldn’t be if we used Signal.

Haha. Yeah we have a seperate “memechat” for non-serious stuff (which went to iMessage in that Signal period) so I just have that one automatically muted on select hours of the day.

I do have a tablet I use as a glorified recipe book. So that might just do it. Thanks, you’ve been a huge help!

I actually mostly use Signal. I got my family to use Signal for a while, but they just ended up sending texts I did not strictly need to see on iMessage. Hence why we eventually settled on Whatsapp

By keeping it open 24/7 do you mean that the app is actively taking screen space or is an unclosed app in the background? I hadn’t actually thought of not swiping the app away after refreshing the timer. And yeah I was looking at OpenWA as well but that’s for businesses.

Yeah I thought about using it too. The two bridges are also developed by them. I wouldn’t have minded using their app instead, but I don’t have the Play Store on my phone (I’m on GOS). They don’t offer a regularly updated apk on their site like Whatsapp does either.

Still thanks for the suggestion though!

Fair enough considering Windows also doesn’t respect you. My worst experiences were the times I accidentally clicked on “update and restart” so I just had to wait there after a long night of getting a presentation or homework done. That happened a few too many times in high school.

But I barely handle updates myself these days. I have set it to automatically* apply them live for my year on Silverblue. I have something similar for my phone updating every weekend at night considering I sleep in anyway. This post did remind me how nice it is to not have to worry (or even think) about updates.

*I do manually update between major Fedora releases. But those happen twice per year so yeah.

To to honest my Fedora install used to hang indefinitely 20% of the time I tried to shut it down. So I also became well acquainted with that solution