The Field Blog

There is a version of me that uses Proton for everything. That version of me has made the clean break, pays the money for it, and sleeps a little better knowing his data is not being quietly turned into something useful for someone else.

That version of me does not yet fully exist.

What does exist: a ThinkPad running Bluefin, a Pixel 8A on Android 17 Beta, a Kobo e-reader and a family storage plan on Google that makes the math on leaving genuinely hard to argue with. The privacy case is airtight. The financial case keeps winning anyway.

The Nextcloud setup went well. That felt strange to write. I have been scared to do this for as many years as it has been since I first heard about Nextcloud.

A file server, calendar, contacts, notes, music server, tasks, RSS, podcasts, bookmarks, all running on the laptop, syncing to the phone over the home network. And over the internet through Tailscale when need be. The kind of thing that sounds like a weekend of breakage. It was a single fun day, and everything worked out at the end.

Unlike the last time I poked around, I read before I ran. Not everything. Enough. There is something to be said for tools built to be used as intended; they tend to work.

So, the system is still running. There has been no need for a reinstall, no crisis of confidence. The addendum writes itself.

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes just before things go wrong. It is a confidence like that of someone eager to skip to the interesting part, without reading what comes before.

I tried installing Omarchy inside a Distrobox container. Seemed reasonable enough, or at least I had not done enough digging to know it was not. The installer reached outside the container and overwrote home directory configuration files, messing up my Bluefin install. The fun stuff layered on top by default, especially the dinosaurs in my terminal, was gone.

The funny thing is that my system was fine. Bluefin is immutable. Nothing was actually broken. I removed these new configuration files and recovered my old ones. Despite that, I reinstalled anyway, just because the feeling of not trusting my own machine was worse than the hour it took to start clean.

Sometimes the damage is not to the system. It is to your confidence in it.