During the 5 or so years I’ve had Nextcloud, I’ve always been quite happy with the web client, but the device clients… need some work. I recently figured out how to resolve one of my biggest pain points on the Linux desktop client, and am recording it here, mostly so I don’t forget next time I setup a new computer, and to save others with the same problem from endless forum post and GitHub issue crawling. ...

In the past 2 years or so, I have been using my caps lock key as a separate ctrl key on my desktop keyboard. This is very easy to do in X11 with a setxkmap command. However, with my laptop, I try to run without X as much as possible. (I’ve found it make a nice, distraction free environment, and it seems to be pretty good for battery life) Obviously, without X, we cannot use setxkmap. In order to do this without the tools in setxkbmap, we will have to edit the keymap used by the virtual console and set it as the keymap using localectl. ...

I’ve been using Arch Linux for several years now. Of course, my first installs were… blunderous, as i wanted to do full disk encryption from the get-go, and I didn’t know what I was doing. After those first one or two installs, I generally settled on LVM on LUKS with a GRUB bootloader and my swap on an LVM volume, mostly because it makes it much easier to setup hibernation/suspend to disk vs, say, a swap file. (with a swap file, you have to deal with file offsets, and I have never gotten a satisfactory answer as to whether its possible for the filesystem to just move a file to a different disk sector in the process of, say, defragging with a very full hard drive.) ...