Trying apps built MauiKit

So, I was watching Distrotube’s latest video, where he talks about Nitrux, a pretty new distro, that has some really interesting concepts, one of which caught my attention inmediately.

Nitrux uses some really unique programs as default, Index, their file manager, Nota (notes), Station (terminal), Vvave (music player) and others,which are built with a framework named MauiKit. This tool is similar to GTK or Qt, but it seems to be quite faster to work with, but I am not expert. But I found out that they have android versions for some of their applications, and I decided to give them a try just for fun.

I was really weirded out by these apps, they look so different from the apps following the Material Design used by Android. They are not available on F-Droid nor Google Play. I was only able to find them in some KDE’s random repo.

The apps are still quite broken sometimes, the music app was unable to detect most of the album art on my songs, and for some reason was unable to display “Daft Punk” correctly (only showed “Da”).

There were some nice transitions and animations. But simple stuff, like hitting play and pause, invoking the weird bottom hamburger menu, or switching directories looked pretty plain. However, I am not going to complain, I have never heard of these apps before, so I think that they are still quite new, and I hope they improve and get noticed a lot more in the future. Its nice to see more alternatives to the default applications, I have always enjoyed to test them out.

Utterly failing an exam, at least everyone else did too!

Today I got an exam to complete. I was getting ready for it for days. And I was quite confident on being able to figure it out. However, right after I opened the file containing the questions, I realized it wouldnt be as easy as I thought.

The first 5 questions where problems that required using Inverse Laplace transforms and using the partial fractions method to solve differential equations. This might sound complicated to some, but it really isn’t that hard. However, it takes a lot of time to solve the problems. And while I understood the concepts and studied them, I didn’t actually solved any proper problems myself, and I got stuck for a while solving some basic things. I ended up taking an hour to solve the first 2 problems.

Thankfully, the last three were easier now that I found myself in the flow state. The problems were more complex, but it took me less time to solve them. The problem was. By the end I still had 5 more problems to solve. These problems were about Block Diagram reduction. Which is a technique used for the design of Controllers, System Dynamics and stuff like that.

Once again, I found myself in trouble, I had to show every step of the reduction process, and I would lose more time drawing the diagrams rather than actually solving them.

With 15 minutes left, I managed to solve the easiest of the bunch, after drawing and solving the couple steps to get the Transfer function. The time left was spent taking the pictures with a Doc Scanner app (I am looking for some FOSS alternative, but I use Notebloc because its the lightest of the bunch, and doesn’t seem to have any controversial things, like Cam Scanner and such).

Backing up apps and changing my rom once again

So, I have already done a similar blog talking about this topic, so check it out if you want to read a bit more about the topic. I said it before, and here I am again. I love android’s customization. ArrowOS, my previous rom, was alright, it was simple and minimal, pretty customizable, but it still lacked a few things I wanted. ## First impressions

I am now on crDroid. And just by checking its Recents screen, I noticed it comes already with a pretty distinct style to stock android. It reminds me of Resurrection Remix, which I had used before, but has not been updated in a while. So that’s great for me, since I got the CRT effect back for my screen off animation!

Syncthing, details and annoyances

After restoring my Migrate backup, reinstalling Magisk Manager and rebooting, I was ready to go. The default look and feel, as well as the wallpaper were beautiful, some apps were glitchy so I had to reinstall them. But that’s not the rom’s fault.

Syncthing, the backup program I use, doesn’t play nice when the folders that used to exist no longer do, but after resharing my folders from my computer, everything worked great, I was once again surprised at how quick the syncing process is, and wondered once again why this tool is not used by absolutely everyone.

Ending the day

So yeah, I have everything back on track. No real problems for me, since I am quite used to dealing with everything I had. School was a bit tiresome, but nothing too difficult really, I believe the teacher is going to be understanding of the situation, since most classmates also lacked enough time to finish.

There was one person, who actually did it all and got a 10/10. I would have been surprised if it wasn’t for the fact that some friends realized that ~3 of the problems were already solved from previous classes. In the end I got 5.5 out of the 6 questions I solved, its not ideal, but I also got some encouragement from my teacher, assuring me that I could have had a better score if I had more time, so I felt better, and I hope justice is made.

In the end, Android lives on, school moves on and I forgot to backup the MauiKit apps, I hope they improve and get published in a F-Droid or something!

This is day 35 of #100DaystoOffload