This gotten written mid-way through the Thoughts section, so it's a little redundant.

Our most recent activities have mainly been based around settling in on our new OS and customizing it to our liking. We're not entirely new to Linux thanks to our Raspberry Pi and a few virtual machines, but that's not the same as using Linux every day for nearly all tasks. We realized how many of the things we do every day on a computer don't have to necessarily be done the way we've learned to do them. Some of the technicalities of Linux, like navigating the file system through the command line and installing from repositories were things we got used to but they didn't really affect our daily computer usage back when we were still using Windows. We just found something that seemed to work well for whatever we were doing and moved on from it. It wasn't until we started using a Linux OS on a daily basis that we realized how much choice there is in how someone uses a computer. We knew in general that there are many options within Linux-based operating systems but it was the first time we fully realized that "if you don't like it, try something else" can apply to so much. "Are we using this because we like it, or because it's 'good enough'?" became a common point of discussion on many topics.

Naturally, all of that questioning spilled over into random other things we do or interact with on a regular basis. Some of it was simple, like getting around to cleaning something or organizing some papers. We went back over some to-do lists as we brought them onto our new operating system and decided which tasks we should prioritize. The three biggest things we considered were: what kind of digital journal/wiki/whatever we want to keep, what kind of creative projects we do, and what social media sites we use.

We finally decided to stop using Obsidian since we weren't getting much use out of it. It felt like we were using it more to rewrite things we already had in other places instead of using it to help us. Writing in the simple Markdown format feels nice but Obsidian itself wasn't really providing anything we needed. Besides, it's proprietary and we've been using much more open source software (although Logseq is a possible open source alternative). We still use our TiddlyWikis but those aren't "daily use" tools. Trilium is used for daily task management plus reminders. If we have a thought we want to keep we can write it down in Trilium and then move it to a TiddlyWiki as a resource if it turns out to be something we want to keep. If we really want the Markdown format for things like notes, we can try something like Neorg out instead. We got Syncthing and we typically only work on one device at a time, so syncing Neorg files would probably be just as easy as syncing our TiddlyWikis has been. The main reason we would use something with simple Markdown files instead of TiddlyWiki or Trilium is if we have a much longer file, like for long-form writing, that could cause lag. Trilium turns off "load in edit mode" by default for longer notes and TiddlyWiki just slows down. Editing "plain text" also just feels fun, though. We still use Neovim (and before that, Ghostwriter) for other writing largely because of that.

We've gotten a lot more lax with our creative projects. At the moment we're mainly focusing on filling out our sketchbook and figuring out what we enjoy drawing. At some point we'd like to try getting back into messing around with music software but our sights are still set on OpenMPT which requires Wine to run on Linux. We have seen packages for MilkyTracker and Schism Tracker in the Fedora repositories, though. Otherwise, we've been experimenting with things as we come across the idea and haven't been focusing on making anything "complete."

The change in social media usage came from the fact that when we first set up our OS, we didn't log into much for about a week or two. We realized that the things we kept thinking about weren't the same as what we had been regularly interacting with. Not only did we not log into Tumblr as we usually do, but we ended up actively avoiding it. Our RSS feed reader was checked semi-regularly, and when we did open it we would focus primarily on Dreamwidth journals. We only wanted Youtube to show us what we were looking for in the moment and stayed signed out of it entirely unless we needed to grab a link from a playlist if we didn't remember the exact video we wanted. For the most part, we navigated the web by remembering something we felt like checking up on and then picking some new links on it to look around. Any tab for a webpage that was likely to change while we weren't looking at it typically got closed eventually. We gradually shifted towards a new browsing routine where our first priority became whatever tabs we had open and RSS feeds became our second go-to. Dreamwidth is now our main place to lurk for new stuff to see, and browsing Are.na channels is how we find miscellaneous sketching ideas. We still use Youtube fairly often but it's mostly just for background noise. Tumblr is for occasionally checking out what people are up to and to be used as a last resort for extreme boredom. We might look at a specific thread or profile on Twitter or Mastodon/Pleroma from a link but we avoid browsing there.

Going from being on Tumblr regularly to relying on slowly-updating sites (or just using sites very slowly) feels very odd so far but it also feels much better. We feel like we have time for other things without worrying about comparing ourselves to others or getting caught up in intracommunity social disasters. This definitely isn't the first time we've stepped back from social media or the internet in general but this is probably the biggest change in thinking that we've had around it since we feel much more in control of our experiences now.

Thoughts

Things

Most at what we've been looking at lately is for setting up our new OS, so those things are linked on the project page for it but here are some more links: