Trying Borg backups. @aaron kinda made me curious. MegaSync is still failing so it is unreliable. Borg is more complicated to backup and restore with it from my first impression. You need to generate these ssh keys and all that, and repositories, etc. :D . It is not as bad as it sounds, but definitely not install and run sort of thing. The great aspect is that I can backup my computer files + servers with it. Both. So far I am testing the computer via Vorta. Seems to work well. Compression and Deduplication made my first 240GB batch of files as low as 165GB. Now backing up some 2.5TB to test. Lots of videos for TROM 2.

The downside is that it is more expensive. Mega was 300 Euros for 16TB a year. Borg is 750 Euros for the same storage space. More than 3 times. But maybe with compression and deduplication I may only need 8TB, which is some 400 Euros a year. I need to test it.

All of them are tons more expensive than doing local backups but doing local backups means you are stuck in the same place, physically, since you need the drives and the internet connection. And I may not have those in the near future (1-2 years who knows). I may even end up with buying a Borg backup for 150$ a year only for the servers and try to use a cheaper Mega for other files...idk...let's see...

#tromlive

Trying to find a fix for the flatpaks nonsense of "not respecting the system's theme" thing, is difficult. It is a mess it seems. Unless there is a trick somewhere that can do it easily. I managed to make it so that GTK flatpak apps respect the theme, unless they use the awful libadwaita. But the rest I cannot. And even for the gtk ones is quite a hack... Is it worth it? We have flatpaks enabled by default in tromjaro so I'd like to see some consistency there, but then idk if it is worth to find a hacky solution to then be rendered invalid by whatever these people push into these "cool" packaging and design systems.

I am baffled as to why respecting the system's theme is not a must for any of these developers. How in the world you want me to function when I may have 10 apps that have 10 different styles, from buttons and the number of them, to the position of them, to dark/light mode, color schemes, fonts....are these people who come up with such systems even use computers much?

So yeah let's see if I can find a fix for the qt part of flatpaks or not....but maybe is not worth it. I enabled flatpaks for TROMjaro just in case you can't find some apps in manjaro's repos or AUR.

#tromlive

I want to push myself a lot with the documentary for these next 2 or so months. Ideally I should not, but we run out of money soon and for sure I'll get very stressed in 3-4 months about it. So maybe I can focus these next 2 months on the documentary a lot. Let's see how the second part will go....

You know, I've said this before but it is 100% true. My life is the perfect scientific example for me, that this society is fucked up. I am a human being who all it does is to do free stuff. Books, videos, lots of online services, documentaries, and more. My input helped/helps/will help thousands upon thousands of other humans. I do not trick people, scam them, lie to them. I am honest and do trade-free things.

I am also curious about the world and society, and I want to know how it works, what problems we as a species face, how we can fix them. So I try to keep myself educated in a scientific manner.

In any sane society all of these should be celebrated. In ours they are punished. I am struggling to keep myself alive in this shit hole. If it weren't for my family and a few awesome people donating to TROM, I would have been long gone. Our society offers no safety-net, no "default" life for anyone. You either trade, or you are fucked. End of the story.

I see myself as a tiny scientist proving the primitiveness of our society. If I struggle and cannot make it, then to me this is the perfect proof that this society is insane.

This society wants me to better go and trade whatever, just to make some money. Lie, deceive, restrict access to the stuff I am creating, keep myself busy with buying and so forth. That's the kind of human that has value in our society.

Sad.

#tromlive

Updates:

I managed to make Kdenlive behave well. Kdenlive has a few confusing features. Say you add a video to Kdenlive to edit it. You do it, and that's it. But it is not. Depends what settings you have in place. If the video is in 4k then it is crazy to start and edit it in 4k. So you need proxy clips. Kdenlive can create a lower res video whenever you add them to a project. So you need to carefully choose that. I didn't and I ended up with still high quality proxy videos. And so the editing was painful.

Second Kdenlive let's you render parts of your project for smooth preview. And you again have to carefully choose what profile to use for that. Since my proxy clips were high quality and I could not preview the work very much, I ended up rendering many many parts of the project. Till I ended up with a massive project that took 20h to open. Turns out there's also a bug with Kdnelive when there are many rendered timeline previews.

Third, you have to choose a profile and resolution for the timeline preview. Not the rendering process....but the preview itself. Confusing.

Anyway, now I re-rendered ALL of the thousands of proxy clips from my project and because the work is very smooth now, I rarely need to render parts of the project. So no more tons of timeline previews. I can now work in such a smooth way in Kndelive + it opens up on like a minute. So great. I then also cleaned up the first TROM II part + started a new project for part 2. Already working on part 2.

In other news:

Mega refunded me all of the money for the account and toady I will try another approach. Already moved millions of files from one drive to another on my system. Maybe I will find a way to do again the online backups. Will keep you posted.

At times our Searx instance was not working. No results. Managed to make it autorestart every 40 or so minutes. This seems to fix it for good. Let's see...

So yeah, now I am working on the second part of TROM II. Let's see how it goes! #tromlive

People who review Linux distros....here's what I think is important for a linux distro:

• Look and Feel. How flexible the desktop is and if it is consistent. PoP OS for example, looks great. Same is Deepin. Or Elementary. Even Plasma. But start installing QT/GTK apps and you'll see that they do not respect the theme at all. So they are very inconsistent. Gnome is also not flexible out of the box, so this is a minus. Plasma is too complex and can be overwhelming. So theme dark/light mode, and accent colors, are cool, and yet pointless when they can't change the theme for half of all apps...
• Apps installation and availability. Can this OS provide me with an easy way of installing apps? Do I have access to most Linux apps via the "software center"? Again, Ubuntu and the like, provide a nice "software center" but you won't find that many apps there. So that's a big minus.
• Dealing with files. People wanna click their videos, documents, photos and the like, and have them open with the proper app. How are these managing it?
• How's the internet experience. Like what browser do they use and such. Because the internet will be the most used part of a computer, most likely. And the internet is full of ads and trackers. Is the browser protecting the users from these!?
• Backups and stability. How stable is a system and how are they dealing with the backups. Is it easy to backup your system and files, then restore? With linux you kinda need a good backup and restore system.

So yah, Linux distros should showcase more than how pretty they are and that on the surface with their default apps. People who make such linux videos should look deeper.

I challenge them to look at TROMjaro - tromjaro.com. All criticism is very much welcomed. We are trying to make TROMjaro score very high on many such relevant points.

TROMjaro's theme and theme switcher works with like 95% of all apps, so it is super consistent. We have 6 layouts for the layout switch. We run XFCE so it is very fast. Speaking of that, Gnome may feel fast at first in a VM and looking at the RAM consumption will not tell you much anyway, but use Gnome for months and you'll see your computer slows down. I have done that.

Back to TROMjaro we also have flatpaks + aur enabled by default, alongside manjaro's repos. So apps' availability is as good as you can get. 1 place to install/remove stuff. No need to use a terminal.

We've also tested TROMjaro with a lot of files: video, audio, text, to make sure they open with relevant apps. And our browser blocks all ads, trackers and sponsored youtube content. Plus more!

Lastly we create automatic system backups before any important system updates.

:P

Enough with bragging haha. But yah we try to make TROMjaro very good. #tromlive