Yes, the main thing is you don't have to pay for nice!nanos which are $25 each as I remember. XIAOs are only $10 each. The price I put on tarneo.fr is only as I remember it, might be a bit more depending on location and the shipping options you choose. But yeah I guess even with that it's cheap.

Thanks! Looks like I've reached my goal ;-)

DIE

Yeah, at first it seemed quite alright to do with a smaller angle (from 3 to 6 degrees depending on the battery), but now I think it would make the board too complicated. Right now I am trying to get used to sticky mod keys on home row combos (colemak A+S for LGUI, N+I for LCTL) and it seems like I'll be able to remove the inner thumb key in the end.

Wow, great it could be so helpful!

Yeah, a dactyl kinda defeats the point of having a small keyboard. Soon I'll try to make a 36-key split with some way to link the two parts to make it usable on laptops for example (rn it's comically large when using a laptop: I need to put the two halves on the side plus a mouse if I don't want to use the touchpad). I'll also use sockets for everything (switches & XIAO controllers) so that the next one I make doesn't cost as much.

what is the reason you shy away from ubuntu? Canonical. Snaps. Ubuntu is the first server OS I used, and while it was quite good I think I prefer using a base distrobox instead of a derivative. If I'm going to use Debian, I'll use Debian. Not Debian with corporate stuff on top.

As for SELinux: I've tried around a year ago. But as soon as I started doing stuff with users and tweaking docker permissions things went wrong and I just set it to permissive. Maybe I'll try that again soon, because other parts of managing servers have become much easier over time as I learned. I agree that having a server without SELinux is quite dumb and not very professional.

You convinced me for immutable fedora. Maybe I'll try it out sometime on our backup/testing server and maybe it will make its way to production if I'm happy with it.

As for distrobox I'll see.

The main reason I used Gentoo is because of being able to reduce the attack surface with USE flags. But as it seems the tradeoffs with it are greater than the advantages (the mastodon issue I mentioned). If I don't switch the server to immutable fedora, I'll just use something like plain fedora or debian I think.

2 row cluster

I could cut it off. The 5 innermost keys aren't even used, and the one left over is just for (rarely) pressing alt, and that's only on the left half. As for the top matrix row, it's the same situation: I only use it for function keys which I only use for switching tty's, and I know I would always ask myself "wait, how do I press f1/f2?" The outer keys are used for the enter key and print screen, which leaves 4 unused keys. That's:

• 5 useless keys for the left thumb
• 6 for the right thumb
• 6 on each half for the top row which could be moved yo another layer, making the keeb smaller while only having to remember 12 logically placed f keys
• 4 outer keys on the 3 bottom rows

= 27 keys that could be removed. Yikes.

Now onto the xmodmap stuff: when I need to use the keyboard on a new computer, it will almost always be on an X11 Linux one, as that's what my high school computers for IT use (the one specific to the classes I'm taking), and also what I managed to get my family to use. This means I'll always be able to add the xmodmap stuff, plus it poses no problem to other users of the same account (if applicable) as it uses f13+ keys which nobody else would use (most people don't even know these keys exist). I also like not having to change my keymap from us especially when doing work on server hardware (I sometimes physically access a think centre used for backups at renn.es, shameless plug). The configurator is not even really my thing anymore, I only ever change the config through the file nowadays.

To me, this is only one of the few advantages of immutability. I have already used nixOS on a server and I really didn't like having to learn how to do everything the right way. As for distrobox, to me it sounds quite like an additional failure point: it is an abstraction over the containers concept that hides the actual way it is done from you. I'd say if you run an app in a container, go all the way: make the container yourself. To me it just sounds like a bad idea, and I didn't really like distrobox when I tried it. I just want to say that both of these concepts (immutability, distrobox) would be great if it was perfectly done. But the learning curve of nixos and the wackiness of distrobox drove me away.

I totally agree. But I just wouldn't necessarily say gentoo is a bleeding edge distro: it's kinda up to the user. They are free to configure the package manager (portage) however they want and can even do updates manually. I just like the idea of having newer packages at the cost of stability, because I also use the server as a shell account host (with an isolated user ;-)) and need things like the latest neovim. These days I would know if an update failed because I would literally be in front of the process and test services are working after the updates, so I'd know if I have to rollback. This makes it basically like a stable distro IMO (even though the packages aren't battle tested before being pushed as updates).

What mail client is that?