The bit of information you’re missing is that du aggregates the size of all subfolders, so when you say du /, you’re saying: “how much stuff is in / and everything under it?”

If you’re sticking with du, then you’ll need to traverse your folders, working downward until you find the culprit folder:

$ du /*
(Note which folder looks the biggest)
$ du /home/*
(If /home looks the biggest)

… and so on.

The trouble with this method however is that * won’t include folders with a . in front, which is often the culprit: .cache, .local/share, etc. For that, you can do:

$ du /home/.*

Which should do the job I think.

If you’ve got a GUI though, things get a lot easier 'cause you have access to GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer which will draw you a fancy tree graph of your filesystem state all the way down to the smallest folder. It’s pretty handy.

Plus the FF extension is really full-featured. I can clip in different formats or even take a screenshot if the webpage makes clipping hard.

I didn’t even know there was a Firefox extension! I might give it a look.

I’m afraid I have no idea what an RCS is, but maybe that’s a network/region specific thing? I’m in the UK using GiffGaff (O₂) and the phone, SMS, and data works exactly as well as everyone else’s… which is to say perfectly in most places and sporadically on the train due to the dead zones on the route.

I’m using a Fairphone 4, which is 4 years old at this point (October 2021) and I’m still quite happy with it, but I owned the Fairphone 1 and 2 as well.

In terms of software atrophy, they do offer support for your device for 5 years, which is better than most, and because of its open nature, it’s generally well supported by alternatives like Lineage or Calyx, but yeah, I’m still on Android 13. While I still get regular security patches and haven’t really had a need for an upgrade, there’s no denying that the FP4 is behind.

Of course, it’s also easily repairable, supports an SD card and replaceable battery, so that’s a tradeoff I’m happy with.

I’d rather see a stable OS and ecosystem for good, Free apps that we can flash onto existing devices. I’m quite happy with my Fairphone (repairable! modular! ethical!) and we know that building and marketing a device is painfully expensive.

Let’s make Debian or Arch just work on most phones instead of trying to compete in a saturated market.

I was a Windows user as a kid in the 80s & 90s doing pirate installs of 3.11 and later 95 for friends and family. I got into “computers” early and was pretty dedicated to the “Windows is the best!” camp from a young age. I had a friend who was a dedicated Mac user though, and she was bringing me around. The idea of a more-stable, virus-free desktop experience was pretty compelling.

That all changed when I went to school and had access to a proper “Mac lab” though. Those motherfuckers crashed multiple times an hour, and took the whole OS with them when they did it. What really got to me though was the little “DAAAAAAAAAAA!” noise it would make when you had to hard reboot it. It was as if it was celebrating its inadequacy and expected you to participate… every time it fucked you over and erased your work.

So yeah, Macs were out.

I hadn’t even heard of Linux in 2000 when I first discovered the GPL, which (for some reason) I conflated with GNOME. I guess I thought that GNOME was a new OS based on what I could only describe as communist licensing. I loved the idea, but was intimidated by the “ix” in the name. “Ix” meant “Unix” to me, and Unix was using Pine to check email, so not a real computer as far as I was concerned.

It wasn’t until 2000 that I joined a video game company called “Moshpit Entertainment” that I tried it. You see, the CEO, CTO, and majority of tech people at Moshpit were huge Linux nerds and they indoctrinated me into their cult. I started with SuSe (their favourite), then RedHat, then used Gentoo for 10 years before switching to Arch for another 10+.

TL;DR: Anticapitalism and FOSS cultists lead me into the light.

What exactly is an external drive case? Are you just talking about a USB enclosure for a single drive or something that can somehow hold multiple drives and interface over something more stable than USB?

Joplin will do this for you. It comes ready to sync with all sorts of cloud options, as well as “local folder” which works well with Syncthing. It’s offline-first, cross-platform, and FOSS.

I hadn’t considered Syncthing. One could for example bake the syncthing protocol into an SSB-based app such that whenever a paired device comes online it automatically syncs data over so to the user things are seemingly centralised. The only risk I can see there is a case where Device A is turned off before Device B is turned on, so the sync wouldn’t carry over. That’s a small price to pay though I think, and something people could learn to work around.

It’s funny, I do exactly what you describe, but with Joplin, though it never occurred to me to reach for Syncthing in this case. Thanks!

No, I was wanting to go the step further and target “offline first” to avoid the need for too many “always on” services. From a philosophical perspective, I think our internet should be able to function without the resources required to run something 24hrs/day.

You can absolutely build a LinkedIn clone on top of something like ActivityPub for example, but I’m not sure how one might do that from an “offline first” perspective though.

Edit: I just remembered my primary objection to this argument: most people aren’t nerds. You can’t have a properly distributed web if federating requires access to (a) an always on server, and (b) the skills to maintain it yourself. I’d argue that this is precisely why the fediverse is so dominated by Free software nerds like me. No, it has to be easy: install an app on my phone, start writing. Let the app figure out how to connect everything, and if I get on a boat/plane/train or my phone runs out of battery, connectivity should Just Work™. This is what I love about SSB: whatever we build on top of it, the protocol was already designed on this assumption.

I had exactly this thought just over a month ago. After mulling it over for a few days, I decided that the only reasonable way to build it would be on top of Scuttlebutt. Alice shares her CV, makes it available via a pub, Bob shares a job description at the same pub, and the two can connect through there, etc.

The advantage of SSB is the absence of the need for an always-on, big data cloud service. The project instead is managed by a swarm of phones all connecting intermittently. It’s very solarpunk.

The big problem for me was the multiple device question. If Alice wants to interact with “FreeLinkedIn” both on her phone and her laptop sporadically over many days, you still need a cloud device to hold state, negating all the benefits granted from SSB. I couldn’t figure a way around this, and then got distracted.

…or contribute to Mozilla’s work while getting something in return.

That’s exactly the reasoning Google has followed with its development and promotion of webp. Unfortunately, whether the website cares or not, CO₂ emissions are markedly higher due to increased client energy consumption, and that does directly affect you, so it’s worth considering the implications of using webp in a popular site.

Webp is pretty great actually. Supporting a 32bit alpha channel means I’ve actually managed to reduce file sizes of what were formerly PNGs by something like 80%, which drastically improved performance (and the size of my project). I don’t get where the complaint of image quality came from either, as it seems to perform better than JPEG at the same file size.

The worst part is that you missed the real problem with the format: the CPU overhead (and therefore the energy cost) of handling the file. A high-traffic site can dramatically increase the energy required for the images processed by the thousands/millions of clients in a single day, which places a drain on the grid and emits more CO₂ (yes, this is really a thing that people measure now).

Basically Google invented the format to externalise their costs. Now, rather than footing the bill for bigger datacentres and greater bandwidth, they made everyone else pay for decompression.

Serious question: could we not just fork the project under the GPL and use that?

I will never understand the Free software developers that go to bat for GitHub.

Microsoft hates you and everything you spend countless hours building for free. They steal your work and sell shittier versions of it for exorbitant profit that they do not share with the community. They contract with ICE. They sell AI tools to Israel to help them commit genocide, and their CI offering is a total fucking mess.

Ooh, I’ll steal that!

deleted by creator

has shifted from an MIT open source license

This is what happens when you contribute to MIT-licenced projects. They steal your work out from under you.

There’s a GNOME extension called “Just Perfection” that may be exactly what you’re looking for. It let’s you hide/disable pretty much any visual thing you can think of.