Yesterday I did something I have been putting off doing for a long time: my digital spring cleaning.
First, I decided to finally fix my cloud storage situation. For the longest time, I didn't use any cloud syncing services. Back in the day I had Dropbox like most people did, but during the Snowden leaks I decided to drop Dropbox together with many services. I didn't really consider going back to cloud storage, because I guess I always viewed them with substantial suspicion.
And for the longest time, you simply didn't have any good alternatives to the large proprietary, data mining service providers. But now, looking through what's on offer, I was actually surprised by how many offer E2EE in their standard plans, which in my mind is essential if you're going to be putting your files on someone else's computer.
Since a month or so back, I was running Nextcloud on my VPS. It was a nice solution, I guess, but honestly I'm too lazy to maintain my own cloud. Yesterday I moved my stuff to Filen, a German cloud storage provider. I've just used them for a day, but I quite like them. They're cheap, they offer more than enough storage, they have E2EE but they still let you map to a local drive meaning it's nicely integrated into your file manager.
Secondly, I upgraded my VPS. I've been running Ubuntu for well over a year, but I'm not the biggest fan of Canonical (or Debian based systems in general for that matter). I'm running Fedora on my personal workstation, and I wanted something similar on my server. I went with Rocky Linux, which seems to be what people go for since Red Hat did away with CentOS. It's good, it feels familiar, and I feel at home in it.
I also took steps to secure this server to a higher degree than I did when I was running Ubuntu. I wouldn't say this place is subject to any threats per se, but it was nice putting some extra time into making sure everything is locked down.
At the same time I also migrated this website from Apache to Nginx. I don't really have a preference for either, I've just heard that Nginx is faster and more resource efficient. Given how small my website is, the benefits of using one over the other is probably neglectable, but I felt like trying something new. I do prefer how Nginx handles configurations, it's neat and tidy compared to Apache.
When Fedora 42 dropped a few weeks ago I decided to finally give KDE a shot, after not having used it since the original Plasma 5 release. I thought I would dislike it more, but it's actually gotten quite nice with the years. While it does look more or less the same as when I tried it last, it doesn't feel at all as buggy as before.
So, I've got a nice clean workstation and a nice clean server. Next up is having a nice clean apartment, I guess.