I gravitated towards icalendar as a storage format for VJOURNAL entries with Evolution as my primary entry interface.

My workflow evolved over the years, but the earliest goal was to get started writing. Evolution > Memos > New Memo List > “On This Computer”. Then write.

In between writing I git-tracked that file then backed up the repository. I played with setting up xandikos to automate those parts (and it worked pretty well) but I stuck with direct file management to keep the writing path clear.

I also use tasks.org on my phone for intake, but I don’t do any automatic synchronization. Typically the app serves as a dumping ground, and from time to time (ideally though rarely before it gets weedy) I’ll massage those bites into longer form journal entries and clear the inbox.

From there, consumption/review is a free for all. I once converted my VJOURNAL entries to nikola blog entries so I could see them marked up, but I’m part robot and reading the markdown has been fine. I use nikola for other blogging, but the ability to view journal entries in Evolution (or some theoretical other VJOURNAL editor that I haven’t been able to find) without having to do anything more than write was appealing. Web based means you could point nutch at it once grep/sed/ack/awk on local files stops scaling. It took a lot of writing to get there, good job!

cpio/tar for the one, mqtt/http/smtp/scp/dcc/tftp/uucp/dns for the other

without installing another distro over the top of it … [replace] package managers

The package manager is the distro, though.

$ pacman -S apk-tools
$ apk add alpine-base linux-lts

Then kexec to alpine’s kernel and the initramfs generated by its installation (which would incidentally “replace” PID 1 with the new /sbin/init). For clean up you could take a diff of “tar -t” for all the installed packages from both distros then delete the files only in the old distro’s packages.

Make a self-compiled distro your target.

Replace the first step with a compilation of apk, abuild everything required by alpine-base and linux-lts (git clone aports to bootstrap that work), then add the package directory to /etc/apk/repositories before the second step. Next, begin to worry that you haven’t fully broken free yet, replace abuild with a bespoke mybuild and apk with tar -x, grapple with signed binaries, reflect on your own identity and authenticity, then take a tour through gentoo and find yourself missing the $HOME you left and its familiar comforts.