I'm a happy user of the Joplin note-taking app on Linux and mobile devices. Although I tend to run the Flatpak version, today I decided to check and see if there is a native DEB package that I could install, and came across a little known feature called extrepo. Although the repos that you can configure using the app are all external to the Debian project, the package itself is included with the official repos. {link to this entry}

I recently had to install Zscaler on my laptop at work if I wanted to continue using Linux. I must say, although I'm glad the overall state of third-party apps on Linux has improved compared to what it was like 20 years ago, the fact remains that most packaging is awful. In the case of Zscaler, I had to jump through a few hoops before getting it to work. That was problem number one. But then, once the application was working, I found out it's not up to date, and it still relies on old libraries. Due to this, it's unable to show a system tray icon, and the main window is constantly open, even though the app is just meant to sit in the background without prompting any user interaction whatsoever. Anyways, the way to fix it is to install the AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support GNOME extension. {link to this entry}