The dell xps 13 9300 (2020 edition) hyper-detailed Fedora linux review

by on 2020/04/24 at 6:06 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

First a bit of background before we get into reviewing. I’ve used a laptop as my primary computer for 20+ years, and since I do things on-line most of my waking life, this means I spend a lot of time in front of my laptop typing or reading away. So, it’s pretty important to me that my laptop works well, is nice to use and is under support in case anything happens.

For the last 3.5 years or so, my laptop has been a Lenovo Yoga 920. It’s been a great laptop and I have enjoyed using it. Unfortunately, it’s support is going to be up in a few months and I really don’t like my primary laptop to be out of support. In the last 3.5 years, Lenovo has: replaced the LCD panel when it fell off a table and broke, Replaced the motherboard when a sound connector became loose, replaced the keyboard when it became mushy, and most recently replaced the battery because it started to swell up. So, warentee is pretty important to me.

I was starting to worry that none of the current crop of laptops would really be any better than my 3.5+ year old yoga 920, but dell managed to announce their xps 13 9300 and it had some better stats, so I decided I would jump to it and see how things went. One kind of anoying thing was that dell announced the new laptop in January, but the model with the good specs I wanted wasn’t available to order until April, and the “developer” edition still isn’t available with the high end specs (I got the normal windows one).

On to specs. My old yoga 920:

  • 16GB memory
  • 512GB nvme ‘disk’
  • 13.9″ 3840×2160 display
  • ~3lbs
  • 2 usb-c ports, 1 usb-2 port
  • intel i7 8th gen cpu (8 “threads”)
  • intel UHD graphics

The new dell xps 13 9300:

  • 32GB memory
  • 2TB nvme ‘disk’
  • 13.3″ 3840×2400 display
  • ~2.8 lbs
  • 2 usb-c ports
  • intel i7 10th gen cpu (8 “threads”)
  • intel Iris plus graphics

So, you can see, the specs are all a little bit better (except for number of usb ports). Ordering on dells site was fine, and it took almost exactly 2 weeks from order to arrival, which isn’t too bad overall. Unboxing was fine. I don’t really understand why people spend a lot of time talking about that, you only do it once. 🙂

In order to install linux, you have to go into the firmware (power on and hit f2) and set the disk interface to AHCI from intel raid. Doing so will of course make windows unbootable, but in my case I had no reason to keep windows around so I just wiped it out. If you need to preserve windows, you may want to look at how to boot it in safe mode so it can boot with AHCI or come up with some other solution. I switched that and then booted the latest Fedora 32 RC that I had already laying around. Wiping windows and installing went fine with no issues. After booting up on the install, I then upgraded to to rawhide with ‘dnf -y install fedora-repos-rawhide; dnf -y –releasever 33 –disablerepo=\* –enablerepo=rawhide distro-sync’. No problems with that either and a quick reboot later I was on rawhide. A check in gnome-software and I see a firmware update ready to go. Applied and the laptop rebooted, updated firmware and rebooted back to rawhide. Everything went very smoothly and the upgrade lookd great (progress bar, explained what it was doing, etc). Next was a copy of /home from my old laptop and then I could switch over to using the new dell day to day.

Here’s that disk pref in the firmware
The system specs screen. There’s lots of crazy firmware options

I’ve only run into 3 linux related issues so far, and one of those is now solved:

  • Doing a shutdown/power off doesn’t fully work. systemd gets everything shut down and the screen goes blank, but you can see it’s still on and the fans usually come on. This is being tracked in: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1825298
  • I wasn’t able to get bluetooth headsets ‘headset’ profile to work. I have 3 bluetooth headsets here and they were all doing it. a2dp worked fine, but ‘headset’ would appear to switch the profile, but no sound would come out or input. I looked around on this one for a while until I noticed:

Apr 20 05:45:20 mandor.scrye.com kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: Found Intel DDC parameters: intel/ibt-19-32-4.ddc
Apr 20 05:45:20 mandor.scrye.com kernel: Bluetooth: hci0: Failed to send Intel_Write_DDC (-22)

Turns out it was a firmware file issue, a check upstream found a commit that fixed it: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/commit/intel/ibt-19-32-4.ddc?id=677930a7d7422930df71adace36f17e996658f45https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/commit/intel/ibt-19-32-4.ddc?id=677930a7d7422930df71adace36f17e996658f45

Copying that ddc file in and all my headsets started working in headset mode. 🙂 The Fedora linux-firmware package has an update with that fix in it now in rawhide/testing for stable branches.

  • Finally there’s a fingerprint reader on the power button, but there’s no linux driver (yet). Dell has promised that there would be something later this year (I guess they are leaning on the vendor). I sure hope it’s upstreamed / usable on Fedora and not just some binary only Ubuntu driver/application. 🙁
yoga 920 on left, dell xps 13 9300 on right

So, overall so far I am pretty happy with it. In the happy list:

  • The screen is lovely! Its smaller than the one in the yoga and higher resolution. I find myself switching between 150% and 175% in gnome scaling, it’s a bit easier when my eyes are tired at the lower resolution, but it’s really nice to have more things on screen at the higher.
  • Firmware updates with no windows! fwupd is awesome. I had to keep a windows install on my yoga for firmware updates. It’s really nice to not have to do that now.
  • The keyboard is pretty large and easy to type on. It might take a small adjustment time to get used to, but it’s not a bad keyboard at all. It’s actually a bit bigger than the yoga one since it goes almost from edge to edge.
  • It’s fast! Things are quite zippy with the 10th gen cpu and better intel graphics.
  • The wireless seems quite nice and fast. The yoga came with a really crappy atheros wireless card that I had to replace with an intel. This dell just has a good card out of the box. It’s a “Killer(R) Wi-Fi 6 AX1650i 160MHz Wireless Network Adapter (201NGW)”
  • Battery life seems ok. I ran it for about 3-4 hours on battery doing normal stuff (ssh sessions, reading news feeds, irc, etc) and it dropped down about 1/2, so 6-8 hours actually doing work seems not too bad considering the 4k display. The estimates did jump around a lot while I was using it, so I took the ‘real world’ measurement to mean more than whatever estimates it came up with.
  • There is a micro-sd card reader on the left side. It seems to work just fine out of the box. I am not sure what I would use it for normally, but I suppose its a little bit of extra storage and perhaps some use making cards to boot arm devices or something.
The stock dell charger seems to let it charge at 20V / ~0.5A (at least when it’s mostly full)
You can see the microsd card sitting right down from the usb-c connection.

Advantage yoga (or at least things that seem better in yoga land):

  • The dell xps 13 is a regular laptop, not a 2-in-1/convertable like my yoga was. To be fair however, I almost never used this on the yoga. It’s gigantic and unwieldy as a tablet. I did from time to time tilt the screen way back, which perhaps I will miss a little. I do wish the xps did tilt back more than 45 degrees or so.
  • Also related to 2-in-1 vs regular, the yoga had sensors so it could rotate the display if you rotated the laptop. The xps doesn’t have those. You can however do it manually, and I didn’t really rotate the yoga much anyhow, so no big loss there.
  • The “home” and “end” keys are on f11/f12 on the dell. This is going to take some getting used to, as the yoga sanely had them on the right and left arrow keys. This made sense to me since the up and down arrows are up and down a page. Perhaps I can remap those.
  • There doesn’t seem to be any way to monitor the fans. They aren’t too anoying, but sometimes I wonder if they are on or not and it’s hard to tell.
The xps 13 9300 on top of the yoga 920. It’s about 1.5″ smaller in either direction.

Misc things:

  • There’s a nice light at the front of the laptop where you open it to indicate when it’s charging. It also can blink to show various hardware faults (no idea what that looks like yet, thank goodness). The light goes completely off when it’s fully charged, white when it’s charging and battery level is about 5% and amber if the battery is down to 5%.
  • I don’t have any thunderbolt-3 devices, but 2 usb-c docks I have seem to work fine (ethernet, various display adapters, usb, etc).
  • The intel “i7 10th gen” sticker is easy to remove. 🙂 Does anyone who uses their laptop at all keep those around?

Finally there’s a few minor ways dell could improve things (IMHO):

  • home and end should be on the Fn right/left arrows. 🙂
  • more usb-c/thunderbolt 3 ports. Even one more would have been nice.
  • A way to get fan speeds would be nice.
  • A brightness level even lower than the minimum one they offer would be nice. (For dark rooms, etc)

So, to sum up: I hope this will be a nice, reliable laptop for me to run for the next 3-4 years. 🙂

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Onlykey review

by on 2020/04/03 at 6:22 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

I’ve been busy and remiss in blogging and this is something I was hoping to publish a while ago, so I give you… a review of the onlykey.

The onlykey is a USB2 connectable hardware security key. Many of you may know yubikeys, this is a competitor to those, with some advantages and disadvantages.

Ordering was simple, I just ordered one via amazon and had it 2 days later. You can also order directly from the onlykey website.

Right away you will note that this doesn’t have just one key like the yubikeys do, but instead has 6 of them. Additionally, it’s got a colored LED underneath, which shines green when it’s unlocked, flashes red when you enter an incorrect pin, etc. The idea here is that the key will be completely locked and useless to others until its plugged in and a correct pin is entered (yes, there’s more than one correct pin 🙂 This key only comes in USB2 form as they say USBC would be too fragile. You can of course use a USB2 -> USBC adapter.

There’s Several ways to manage the key:

  • A chrom(imum) “app”. (Although chrome is discontinuing these)
  • A “snap”
  • A debian .deb package

So, thats not great for Fedora. I tried to get the snap working, but it failed. I tried to use the chrome app, but thats how I found that they are dropping those, so I went with the debian package unpacked and just using the application from there. The app is open source if anyone wants to package it up: https://github.com/trustcrypto/OnlyKey-App (It’s npm based)

Right off the bat I hit an issue. My onlykey had old firmware and it was old enough that the app was unable to update it, so I had to monkey around with “Teensy loader” to upgrade the firmware. At one point the key stopped even lighting up and I asked for help on the onlykey discussion group. They had someone answer me pretty quickly and I found that I wasn’t properly shorting the two contacts on each end of the key to put it in ‘upload firmware mode’. After I did that I managed to update to the new firmware and everything was smooth sailing after that. I really hope they have all their existing stock updated now so no one else should have to go through this. 🙂 Just look at these little contacts you have to short together while pressing the upload button on Teensy Loader! I managed to do it with a hanger from a xmas tree ornament finally:

There’s a sort of soft rubber case around the key, you can get all kinds of colors (I just stuck with black). It also comes with the handy little carribeener to attach it to your keychain or whatever.

So, once you have the firmware somewhat up to date, you can run the app. It will also update firmware as long as it’s not too old. The firmware is open source: https://github.com/trustcrypto/OnlyKey-Firmware

On your first run (or if you factory wipe it), you have to do a bit of setup. You can enter 2 profile pins (sequences of buttons). They suggest that this might be ‘work’ and ‘home’, but you could use them for whatever you like. You can also enter a ‘self destruct’ profile pin, which wipes back to factory settings if you enter it. You can also tell it to do this if someone enters the wrong pin 10 times, but it will flash red and stop taking input after 3 failed pins. So to wipe it this way you have to enter 3 wrong pins, remove, insert, 3 more wrong pins, remove, insert 3 more wrong pins, remove, insert, 1 more wrong pin. You can also load a firmware called the “International Travel Edition” that has no encryption at all (it’s only protected by the pin).

Once you have your profiles setup you can configure what you want in the slots. There’s actually 12 slots because (just like yubikeys) there is long press and short press on each button. You can assign whatever you like to those 24 slots (12 for each profile). You can do TOTP, U2F, Yubikey HOTP, username/password, tabs or returns, all kinds of things:

You can do encrypted backups of the contents of the key and of course restore them. There’s also some misc settings like how bright the LED is or how fast the keyboard types or what keyboard layout it uses. There’s some integration with keybase.io to do encrypted files/messages transfer.

Finally, there’s some advanced prefs about yubikeys and U2F tokens. I was confused by these at devconf, but the manual explains: https://docs.crp.to/usersguide.html#Yubico-one-time-password basically you have to run yubikey-personalize and have it generate “Public Identify, Private Identity, and Secret Key” which you then enter into the onlykey app. I can only assume they couldn’t just do this due to legal concerns. The U2F prefs are there because:

For the attestation certificates OnlyKey comes with a default attestation certificate and signing key and also allows users or enterprises to import their own attestation certificate/key. This feature allows organizations to only permit FIDO2 keys issued by the organization to be used. Importing attestation certificates and signing keys can be done in the OnlyKey app.

The manual is pretty easy to read and covers all this better than I can probibly. So, on to the actual reviewing:

First the good:

  • Open source firmware and app!
  • Nice to know that if someone stole it, they would not be able to access anything using it.
  • Seems to work fine for U2F/webauthn, TOTP, HOTP and user/pass.
  • The LED light is nice to know what state it’s in.
  • I like being able to do encrypted backups.
  • Having a bunch more slots is nice (If you forget which is which, you can press and hold down the 2 button for 5+ seconds and it will print out the labels you gave the slots).

Now the not so good:

  • You can set a timeout where the key will lock after X minutes. It works and the LED goes off but the application if you have it open will happily think it’s still talking to the unlocked key (until you try and do something then it errors).
  • You can sort of use it for keeping your ssh private key, but not easily. You have to import a key (using only very specific ecc curves) and then use a ‘onlykey-agent’ instead of normal ssh agent. This is a fork of another project and hasn’t been updated from that fork for like 4 years, which is really not encouraging. 🙁
  • It’s a bit odd trying to type in your pin at say a coffee shop or table with a bunch of co-workers around. It seems like you can’t really hide what you are pressing. Still it is more secure than just any unlocked always token.

For me personally, the lack of a nice way to use it for storing my ssh private key is somewhat of a deal breaker. I really really don’t want that key to get out (even though it is passphrase protected). My current yubikey was able to generate it on key and keep it always stored there. If I didn’t care so much about ssh keys I might well move to using the onlykey day to day. If I traveled much I definitely would look at using it while traveling.

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Devconf.cz 2020

by on 2020/02/12 at 6:12 pm
Posted In: fedora

This year again I had the honor of being able to attend devconf.cz. Many thanks to Red Hat (My employer) for sending me to the conference (it also allowed me to attend some work meetings after the conference).

The trip out to Brno was much as it has been for me in the past, except this time it was even longer since the Portland to Amsterdam flight I used to take is no longer offered, so I had to go from Portland to Seattle and then Amsterdam. Due to various scheduling issues I also went to Vienna this time instead of Prague. No particular problems on the trip, just a long haul. The train in Vienna was nice and clean and fast and comfortable.

Devconf.cz runs over 3 days (friday/saturday/sunday) and is jam packed with talks and people to talk to. A number of talks I wanted to attend this year were full and I couldn’t get in. 🙁 Tickets also “sold” out really fast this year (in days) after they were available. I was amazed in the opening session how many people raised their hands that they were attending for the first time (seemed like >50%?). Thats really a great sign for the health of open source to have that many new people coming in and so many in general.

Friday opened with a keynote about Open Source SRE (Site reliability Engineering) in several Red Hat OpenShift teams. They did a good job explaining how they divided things up and how they tried to find issues before their customers even knew about them.

I then took the hallway track for a few sessions. So many people I work with over IRC/email there to talk to face to face. Lots of new folks as well.

The next session I hit was “Ansible by pull request: a gitops story”. Some good practical story of using git and ansible and ansible tower to manage and deploy things. A good introductory talk on the concept of ‘gitops’ (using git for operations settings.

I then ran out for a lovely lunch at a local pizza place. Was a great chance to catch up with teammates. Unfortunately it took a while and I missed the talk on Rawhide gating that I was hoping to go to. I hear it went really well however. 🙂

More sessions and hallway meetings and then off to a lovely team dinner. Had a great time there and then some of us went out for more beers after dinner and had an even more amusing time.

Saturday I missed the keynote talking to various people, then off to a talk by Ben Cotton: “We won. Now what?”. He talked about things going on in the open source movement these days and what they might mean or not for the future. I had actually heard of all these events, but hadn’t really thought much about what they might mean, so it was some good thought provoking fodder.

I managed to miss the coffee lovers meetup sadly, but then did manage to get into the packit talk. Great stuff there: automating your package builds and tests in Fedora from upstream projects. Lots of nice questions too, which they actually had answers for! 🙂

Tim Burke, long time Red Hatter gave a very fun talk called “Teamwork lessions learned in 3500km hiking” about his hiking the Appalachian Trail. There were really a lot of great things in this talk, I recommend watching the video of it. Some highlights: Try and do some random act of ‘trail magic’ kindness each week. Don’t worry about things away, just live in the moment. Lots of great life advice.

Then it was time for slideshow karioke. Always a ton of laughs. The premise: You get a set of random, advancing slides and you have to come up with some coherent talk using them. I think people are learning that it’s best to come with some idea what you want to talk about, tie it into the first slide and then try and let the audience figure out how the other slides fit in. Some of them were pretty well done this time.

This year there was a group of us that wasn’t too interested in the devconf party, so we just went for a nice quiet dinner and more relaxing evening.

Sunday I once again missed most of the keynote by getting stopped talking with folks and getting coffee, etc. But I managed to make the “Alternatives to modularity” talk. This was basically the same proposals as were floated on the devel list, with more detail. There unfortunately wasn’t much Q&A time and the time that they did have seemed pretty harsh feedback to me. I personally think the hardest part of their alternative is getting packages to be parallel installable, sometimes thats really really not easy. Aside from that though, I think their proposal would work and be much more simple. I do hope they try and persue the approach and convince module maintainers to switch. If we see after a while there’s no one using modules they will have won.

All in all another fun time at devconf. Lots of people, great talks, great area/venue. I recommend it. Of course get your tickets as soon as they go on sale as I am sure 2021 devconf.cz will sell out as quick as this year did. The number of new people really encouraged me, open source is contuing off to the next generation, really great to see!

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EPEL8 packages

by on 2019/10/09 at 12:31 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

With the opening up of EPEL8, there’s a lot of folks looking and seeing packages they formerly used in EPEL6/7 not being available and wondering why. The reason is simple: EPEL is not a fixed exact list of packages, it’s a framework that allows interested parties to build and provide the packages they are interested in providing to the community.

This means for a package to be in EPEL8, it requires a maintainer to step forward and explicitly ask “I’d like to maintain this in EPEL8” and then build, test and do all the other things needed to provide that package.

The reason for this is simple: We want a high quality, maintained collection of packages. Simply building things once and never again doesn’t allow for someone fixing bugs, updating the package or adjusting it for other changes. We need a active maintainer there willing and able to do the work.

So, if you do see some package missing that you would really like, how do you get it added to the collection? First, open a bug in bugzilla.redhat.com against the package. If it has a Fedora EPEL product version, use that, otherwise use Fedora. Explain that you would really like the current Fedora/EPEL6/7 maintainers to also maintain it for EPEL8. If they are willing, they will answer in the bug. If no answer after a few weeks, you could consider maintaining the package yourself. Consult with the epel-devel list or #epel-devel on IRC for further options.

Do note that mailing maintainer(s) directly isn’t nearly as good as just filing a bug. They would get the bug info anyhow in email, Other users might see that and add that they too want the package, the maintainer might hand off the package and the new packager could see the bug request but have no idea about private emails, some other packager might see the bug and offer to maintain it. All wins for a bug over private emails.

As the collection grows, these sorts of questions will likely die down, but it’s important to remember that every package needs (at least) one maintainer.

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MUA++ (or on to neomutt)

by on 2019/09/29 at 1:59 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

About 18 months ago or so, I posted about switching my Mail User Agent / mail client from claws-mail to thunderbird: https://www.scrye.com/wordpress/nirik/2017/03/24/mua-or-on-to-thunderbird/ last week, I moved on to a new setup.

First let em talk a bit about why I am moving on from thunderbird. Since moving to it thunderbird seems to have gotten slower and slower (no matter how much I compacted mail folders). They made some, IMHO, anoying changes (like in thunderbird 52: “”When replying to a mailing list, reply will be sent to address in From header ignoring Reply-to header”, which is just dead WRONG). Recent thunderbird versions had taken to pausing randomly and just not doing anything at all for like 20-30seconds. I had become annoyed more than once because thunderbird handled all my filtering, so if I was offline for a while and reconnected, it would take a long time for thunderbird to filter my emails and during that time I couldn’t really do anything else. The final straw was thunderbird 68’s changes to add-ons. Since they were moving to the newer engine, all add-ons have to be reworked to be “webextensions”. Firefox went through this last year. However, thunderbird seems to have not handled it well. I didn’t see any press or announcement, just updated and suddenly all my add-ons were gone. Additionally, going to the thunderbird addons site, there’s a filter for version, but at the time, it didn’t even have 68 listed! Pretty much non of my addons were ready for this change.

So, finally I decided I would look at mutt. I had avoided it in the past for a few reasons: I wanted to be able to see html emails easily in the same application I was using to read the rest of my emails, and I just liked the idea of a application that didn’t depend on a terminal. With no real GUI MUA’s left, I decided to get over those and look at mutt.

Doing some reading and pondering, I ran into a number of places talking about patches to mutt (“If you want to use this, you need patch X…”) which lead me to neomutt. I don’t know the details, but my understanding is that mutt development slowed way down for a number of years, and a lot of patches piled up. neomutt is a fork of mutt with all those patchsets applied, with the goal of cleaning them up and getting them into the mainstream mutt package. They already got the sidebar patches in, and hopefully they will get others in over time. Since I like living on the edge, I went with neomutt, which has a handy copr made by the main developer.

Thinking about the filtering annoyance I looked at a number of possible process changes, but finally just went with an easy one: procmail on my mail server. It’s pretty old school, but it was already setup a long time ago, can filter things as they arrive and is easy to add rules to.

neomutt/mutt can of course use imap, but I like to have my laptop setup so I can read and answer emails even when off line (although that state is increasingly rare). So, I looked at syncing my imap store to my laptop. Many people seem to prefer offlineimap, but it seems it’s on life support now and the developers have moved on to a newer tool that isn’t really ready yet to be used. Additionally, offlineimap in rawhide (what my laptop runs) is currently broken because it uses python2 and a module it needs has been retired. So, I settled on mbsync. This is a fast, written in C program to sync between local folders and imap server (both ways). It took just a few minutes to configure and then a bit to sync all my imap folders down.

The final part of the new setup was searching. I really liked the ability in thunderbird to search everything, find threads if I just had one email, etc. The winner here is ‘notmuch’, a xiapan database for emails. After installing the package a simple ‘notmuch new’ and answering a few questions and away it went. After the initial indexing, it can (and should) be run after each mbsync invocation. You can then search from the command line or (if using neomutt) virtual folders and search queries. It much faster to come back than thunderbirds virtual folders. As a bonus all the emailed I had ‘flagged’ in thunderbird were still flagged to mutt, so I can continue to flag things I want to reply to and search for and reply to them later.

neomutt (and now mutt too apparently) has a sidebar setup, which is much like thunderbirds accounts/folders setup. I set mine to show any folder that has unread mail (and how many) and any folder that has flagged messages (and how many). Using that I can decide which one(s) I want to deal with. If I just want to crunch through them all, doing c (change folder) will default to the next folder with unread messages.

I of course have multiple accounts, but thats not a problem for neomutt or mbsync. Just need to define the local and remote folders and tell neomutt to read in those folders when you change to them. One issue that I was stuck on for a bit was how to filter the gmail accounts I have. (Since there’s no way to use procmail on those). Luckily it seems you can get google to do it. Just need to go to the account on the web interface, select the message(s), click on the little 3 dots “more actions” at the top, filter messages like these, set it to archive automatically (skip mbox) and set a label (which makes google put it in a imap folder with that label).

So, it’s been about a week with this setup so far, and I have to say, I really like it. I was off power for about 5 hours last week (power outage) and was impressed how much more battery life my laptop had without thunderbird spinning up fans and taking up CPU. Re setting up all my filters allowed me to find some things that need to be dealt with, which is nice. I think it’s made me more caught up/responsive to emails than before. It’s definitely more responsive/faster than thunderbird and I never really find myself waiting on the client.

There are a few things I miss from the old/previous setups:

  • Calendaring. Thunderbird had calendaring built in, and now I have to just pull up a web version. I did try gnome-calendar for a bit, but it doesn’t allow you to see who attendees are or answer yes or no or maybe on going to the meeting. So, web interface it is for now.
  • Thunderbird could display annoying html only emails well in the interface, but… I always prefer the text/plain part, and turn off remote image loading, so many of the most broken emails werent that pretty anyhow. Additionally, mutt can easily open those parts in a browser or the like.
  • When you are composing an email in neomutt, you can’t super easily just go and look at other emails. Thunderbird having a seperate window for this was nice. You can start another neomutt -R (read only), but that seems like a hassle. You can of course postpone your email, go look at whatever else, then resume it, but still a bit of a pain.
  • My old setup used spamassassin on the mail server to detect spam, but in addition I was using thunderbirds bogofilter support as a ‘second line’. Without this I have been getting more spams to my inbox (mostly to list moderator addresses).

And there’s a number of TODOs left:

  • I’m trying to decide if there is any point in keeping old email list posts or bug tracker emails. I was going to archive them, but then I wondered: why? I can get them from the list archives or the bug tracker application. Is there any great point in having more than say 90days of them around? Still pondering on that…
  • Right now I am running ‘mbsync; notmuch new’ manually (I bound it to f1 in neomutt) when I want. I wonder if it’s worth setting up a cron job? Right now it takes about 90 seconds to run (mostly because gmail is slow), but not sure any interval matters. I’m likely to pull before I start answering emails.
  • There’s still some weirdness around switching accounts. It seems like if I start neomutt and never go to an accounts folders, I never see new emails for that account until I do. Should figure out what I might be doing wrong and file a bug if it seems like it’s not my fault. 🙂
  • A full mbsync takes like 90 seconds. If I nuke a bunch of old emails (see point 1 above), I think I can reduce that time. Also, I looked at doing clever things like moving a bunch of old things to archive and not syncing them all the time, but that requires a lot of manual work, which I would like to avoid.
  • Look at setting up a local bogofilter or second line spam handler to reduce spam even more.

So, all in all, I am pretty happy with this setup. Happy to share any config or help others setup the same mail workflow. We will see in a year or two how well it sticks.

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