Thanks for the extensive explanation. I was almost certain you were joking about using Git for that purpose but it seems you are being serious :)

I will stick to my Restic backups for now. :)

Being a Linux newbie that idea did not even cross my mind. MIND BLOWN. In all seriousness, though, are there ever user secrets in ~/.config? It seems like a crazy & genius idea at the same time.

(I keep them in two Restic backups)

As for passwords, well, I wont talk about that. It’s not good but still not worst practices at least.

Paper notebook? ;)

My Bitwarden and Proton Pass also require Yubikey to be present when logging in on a new device.

By “same platform” do you mean keeping them in the same app or the same system (e.g., my Android smartphone)? I used to use Authy, but after I bought the paid subscription for Bitwarden I moved my TOTP codes there (and later to Proton Pass) because it was so convenient.

Thanks for telling me about Betterbird. I see I can run it at the same time as Thunderbird which naturally fits my workflow described above 😅

I am thinking of self-hosting some stuff right now, but that’s mainy OneDrive/Google Drive replacement and Google Photos replacement. I could maybe self-host Bitwarden, too. Email? Nope. I know there’s A LOT of work with that, with the domains (so my emails don’t get rejected by other parties), with spam filters and so on. I will leave that to the professionals, it’s too important. File storage is for me, but email is for communication with others. So congratulations if you got that working :)

I see you’re already getting downvoted and I will probably share that predicament. I get you, I feel alike. I used various distros over 20 years ago but never got really deep into Linux internals and I also forgot a lot.

I think AI can really be useful but not all models are equal (YMMV).

A couple of real world scenarios where I was having problems that were way above my head at this stage.

I encrypt my system disk with LUKS using TPM. I currently run openSUSE which has Snapper deeply integrated with the system. Because I was troubleshooting some issues and installing various packages I made some changes that I wanted to revert. Snapper is the fastest way for me, no manual reversal, no need to edit any config files, no leftovers. Just boot from a snapshot and roll back. I did that a few times. I had TPM auto-unlock set up but it stopped working. I tried re-enrolling but it still didn’t work. Of course I asked Sonnet 4.6 about that and after an AI-supported troubleshooting session the issue was resolved. It analyzed the logs, found the reason for my issue and explained what and why was causing it (in short: because I did not re-enroll the TMP key after each rollback, there were too many boot entries accumulated exceeding the systemd-pcrlock’s limit and causing all TPM predictions to fail silently).

Second thing was OpenVPN not setting up the DNS after connecting. It took me half an hour of troubleshooting with Sonnet 4.6 and it explained what was happening and proposed a few solutions. In the end it turned out that in my scenario I need Dnsmasq which is dead simple and helped me to resolve my particular issue. What’s interesting is that when I asked about the same issue on openSUSE’s sub on Reddit, a SUSE developer told me to use dnsmasq, too :)

Without AI I guess I’d just have to give up because no one was capable of helping me when I asked online (sure, maybe I didn’t ask enough or not in enough places). Without OpenVPN I cannot use this system, it’s mandatory for my job. I could switch to Fedora where OpenVPN 3 works, but I really wanted openSUSE.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator