Same. Nobody listens to his radio 24x7. Hardly anyone ever responds to "Hello, World!" messages in real time. We do see nodes located far, far beyond the horizon. On a good day, there are way over 150 nodes operating, which is enough to keep channel utilization above 10% without any traffic beyond NodeInfo, Telemetry, or Position.
I don't know what it's all for. A couple of friends keep nodes charged and on the air locally. We expected to be able to exchange off-grid text messages, but, on a bad day, only about 2/3 of our messages ever go through. We need more LOCAL nodes! It's difficult to imagine how to advertise though.
I suspect the agenda of Ham-Radio Operators with regard to Meshtastic who had nodes up before we did was just to dabble with the technology. Their agenda with regard to emergency preparedness is much more robust. For example the list of certifications required of Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network volunteers is (long):
"All SATERN Members
• Must be a FCC licensed amateur radio operator
• Must have an up to date completed volunteer profile
• Must be credentialed and have an ID badge
• Must follow the amateur radio operators code of conduct
• Complete Safe from Harm training
• Complete Introduction to Emergency Disaster Services training
• Complete FEMA ICS-100 and ICS-700
• Complete Salvation Army SA-200 Incident Command System Training
• Be proficient with net operations
• Be proficient with the ICS-214 form
• Be proficient with the ICS-309 form
• Understand the ICS-217 and ICS-205 forms
• Be proficient with the ICS-213 message and ARRL radiogram
• Must have an understanding of how to report and/or halt any unsafe operations.
"TYPE FIVE Shadow Communicator,
TYPE FOUR Canteen Communicator, &
TYPE THREE VHF / UHF Communicator
"In addition to the general training and proficiencies above:
• Must have a Technician Class License or higher
• Recommended Completion of FEMA AUXCOMM training
• Be able to program their radio equipment in the field without the aid of a computer
• Know their radios' capabilities and limitations
• Arrive equipped to meet the needs of the team typing
• Be able to function in high stress environments and in adverse conditions
• Be able to serve as a net control operator
• Be physically fit and able to walk for 10 minutes or more to serve as a shadow
• Be able to lift 50 lbs as part of a canteen crew.
• Type Three must be qualified to drive a Salvation Army vehicle (must have a valid driver’s license and be a Salvation Army approved driver)"
... so, if Meshtastic node owners aspire to having any role to play in emergency preparedness, then just operating a $50 LoRa radio probably isn't going to cut it. Understanding how to keep out of the way of the folks doing the heavy lifting is important, too. Meshtastic Users' getting the cold shoulder from anyone else having the least familiarity with emergency services is surely plausible.
I tried Tor for a while but it was too clunky and when used in conjunction with a search engine like Mojeek, was unusable. Whatever it was doing in the background made it impossible to search, with most failing due to suspected bot activity.
Yes, this is the point: Search engines are harvesting YOU and YOUR SEARCH TERMS! TOR prevents that, and they don’t like it.
OTOH, DDG Search and DDG(Onion): https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmv/ et al., almost always works for me. Startpage and Startpage(Onion), too, but Mojeek and Brave Search show results less often.
I made up my mind years ago to stick to TOR Browser and TOR VPN network for anonymity, privacy, and security regardless of poor response times. Today, I feel that that choice has been vindicated. TOR response times are no worse than they ever were, but response times viewing heavily ad-ridden sites with “normal” browsers have caught up. TOR blocks receiving a lot of ads and tracker folderal that “normal” pages spew out to all comers. It’s just that a handful of search engines — and many and yet more Web sites — will not serve content to TOR’s VPN network. But — You know what? — screw them!
I will admit to using the Chromium browser to retrieve must-have content from sites whose Web-hosting providers block the TOR network because — believe it or not — some of those sites don't support Firefox. It's deja vu all over again for those of us who lived through the Netscape Browser Wars.
Yeah, it's a story set in San Diego, not San Francisco, but no science fiction fan will fail to make the connection. It's all there: hippies, repurposed freeways, drones, anarchists, gangs.
Wrote my own digest of NOAA text products. It's a URL: Gnashtooth's Weather. Needs US Zip Code. Then bookmark the details page to return. Also, there is a current-conditions page:
LAFAYETTE PURDUE UNIV AIRPORT (KLAF)
Temperature: 24.1°F
Dewpoint: 12.0°F
Wind: NNE at 3 mph
Visibility: Unlimited
Sky: Mostly clear
Barometer: 30.44 inHg
Recorded: Sat 07 Feb 2026 11:54 AM Etc/GMT+5 (Sat 07 Feb 2026 16:54 PM Etc/UTC)
en: https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/KLAF.TXT
And there is a one-liner. You can include the one-liner in your eMail sig if your mail user agent (MUA) allows a shell script. Just download and print:
I've written a python/Qt script that keeps lists like those you mention. It's sort of a poor-man's database manager, but its only database is a collection of csv files.
You can use an address list to keep track of contacts' phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.
You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.
You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.
You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.
When I try to include a direct link to my python script, which does that, my responses and in fact the whole posted discussion are taken down. … something to do with self promotion of untested software I suppose. But you can find it in the Cheese Shop (See Wikipedia “Python Package Index.”) under tonto2.
Here's a strategy for scoring your own search results.
"Keywords" are the seven words most commonly occurring on the page. If these seven words are seen to be repeated on the page to an unusual degree, then it is a good assumption that the page was designed by the author to appear high on search results.
Keyword density is a measure of "gloss." Most people will read pages with high keyword density as unusually glossy. Keyword density is not necessarily related to how genuine the page content appears to be otherwise, but most people will look askance at a page that is too glossy.
It should come as no big surprise that the pages that appear high on search results have been designed that way. They are deliberately glossy with high keyword density. You may consider whether to skip reading them or even loading them in your browser. Chances are good that the glossy pages are mostly advertising.
Generally you will find interspersed in your results a handful of sites with low keyword density. These are likely from universities, government sites, and research institutions that have sources of revenue beyond advertising. You may consider whether to load these up and skim through them. Probably they will show a publication date, author, and list of references, which will move your research forward.
It can be noted that AI-generated sites often exhibit high keyword density. This is probably deliberate so that they garner advertising revenue. However, it may also be due to "bot 'splaining," which is polly-paraphrasing a series of several (perhaps contradictory) articles.
Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately NONE OF THESE — including keyword density — distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.
Piskorski, Jakub, Marcin Sydow, and Weiss Weiss. "Exploring Linguistic Features for Web Spam Detection: A Preliminary Study." Airweb '08: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web. Ed. Carlos Castillo, Kumar Chellapilla, and Dennis Fetterly. New York: ACM, Apr. 2008. 25-28. ISBN:9781605581590. DOI:10.1145/1451983. 09 Nov. 2025 https://users.pja.edu.pl/~msyd/lingFeat08draft.pdf.
Nevertheless, you may wish to explore keyword density as a means to rank search results.
When I try to include a direct link to my python scripts, which do that, my responses and in fact the whole posted discussion are taken down. ... something to do with self promotion of untested software I suppose. But you can find them in the Cheese Shop (See Wikipedia "Python Package Index.") under clanker_score.
We don't want to make this too easy for just anyone to censor all his search results. Rather, these scrips are meant as a learning tool. They demonstrate generally how rotten search results can be on one particular and not very compelling dimension. It should not be necessary to download and scan each and every page. You should be able to train yourself to ignore a priori results that include handfuls of pages from unauthoritative sites.
Full disclosure: It doesn't work. But the idea is nice: ... that you could — perhaps in real life — identify AI-generated content. ... so I wrote a framework that purports to do that.
Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately none of these distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.
Piskorski, Jakub, Marcin Sydow, and Weiss Weiss. "Exploring Linguistic
Features for Web Spam Detection: A Preliminary Study." Airweb '08:
Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Adversarial Information
Retrieval on the Web. Ed. Carlos Castillo, Kumar Chellapilla, and Dennis
Fetterly. New York: ACM, Apr. 2008. 25-28. ISBN:9781605581590.
DOI:10.1145/1451983. 09 Nov. 2025 https://users.pja.edu.pl/~msyd/lingFeat08draft.pdf.
I’m always hiding my internet activity from others.
Me, too. What's wrong with us?
I think the less stressful approach is limiting Internet activity altogether rather than obsessing about whether or not what I'm up to is hidden well enough. For example, you could write your own software. I, myself, obsess about whether or not my python scripts actually work instead of inveigling my friends to encrypt everything they put in the Cloud. See, for example:
You can use lists to keep in touch with family, friends, and cow-orkers.
Tonto2 keeps four kinds of lists:
You can use an address list to keep track of contacts' phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.
You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.
You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.
You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.
Additionally you can make a list of bibliographic entries for writing research papers and for saving well-formatted footnotes for Web sites, but this is an arcane topic that will probably not be of general interest.
The information in these lists is at your fingertips.
You own it, and you can keep it. You can share it piecemeal with other people and computers without having to trust anyone or any thing with the whole enchilada. This is the idea of Tonto2.
Exactly! I harbor nostalgia for the old Windows 3 desktop icon grid, so I open a file manager window pointing to ~/Desktop and display the *.desktop shortcuts there as icons. This is done automatically when gdm starts. My file manager is PCManFM, which is a rip-off of nautilus. Double-clicking on an icon opens the shortcut — be it to a terminal or a graphical application. I have to alt-tab to the PCManFM window of course, so I need the keyboard. Then I have to double-click with the mouse. It’s keeping both hemispheres of the brain active: subject/verb, left/right. Presumably you can map your game controller's buttons to keyboard equivalents like , , and (or map your game controller's buttons to PCManFM's hot key config), which would allow you to navigate the PCManFM icon grid.
I harbor nostalgia for the old Windows 3 desktop icon grid, so I open a file manager window pointing to ~/Desktop and display the *.desktop shortcuts there as icons. This is done automatically when gdm starts. My file manager is PCManFM, which is a rip-off of nautilus. Double-clicking on an icon opens the shortcut — be it to a terminal or a graphical application. I have to alt-tab to the PCManFM window of course, so I need the keyboard. Then I have to double-click with the mouse. It's keeping both hemispheres of the brain active: subject/verb, left/right.
then I have a terminal which does not start maximized on workspace 1
I run devilspie in the background to catch windows of certain applications such as terminal and maximize them on the fly. For this reason, I must disable wayland.
Does the vanilla Gnome workflow expect you to use mouse and keyboard?
Yes, both, apparently.
It just seems like a lot of work/clicks/keys to achieve something simple.
Well, that's what you get for downplaying the role of icon grids.
The ideological issue (which you probably don’t care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.
The only meltdown I've had with Linux occurred on a minor rev-level update to Debian that plugged some hole in the kernel the NVidia proprietary driver was crawling through. I had used Debian and an NVidia proprietary driver for years on an ancient motherboard. Then suddenly that "solution" disappeared. I had to replace the whole machine. Yeah, it was time. No, I wasn't ready. I don't know whether I should have been more pissed at Debian or NVidia, but I'm still on Debian. After the kernel update, X11 reverted to a default driver, and no install, uninstall, reinstall combination of the proprietary drivers seemed efficacious. I'm sorry I don't remember the exact software rev-levels and drivers involved. All notes I took at the time, if any, were lost in the subsequent crash and recovery from incompetently trying to roll back the kernel update.
This is probably NOT what you had in mind. What I use for launching apps under Gnome 43.9 is a traditional file manager. Historically, nautilus was Gnome's file manager. I note that Gnome still has a file manager, but they don't call it that. Over time nautilus has been gutted of a lot of its functionality. Thus, I have switched to PCManFM, which is a lightweight lookalike. I autostart it in my Desktop folder, which holds a handful of *.desktop shortcut files. I like the look of the "Icon" view mode because it reminds me of the old Windows 3.1 desktop. Alas, there is no grouping like what you're hoping for (so far as I know), but you could create shortcuts to other *.desktop folders. PCManFM displays a tabbed window, and you can drag and drop icons onto folders on a window, and between tabs. I launch apps by double-clicking icons.
I’m not aware of any service that [goes fully peer-to-peer] while being practical for most people, yet.
Retroshare is almost ready for prime time after remaining in development for over 20 years. Each "friend" runs it's own service for the decentralized network of "friends" and hands off message fragments from immediate "friends" for swapping files, store-and-forward messages, chats, etc., to other more distant network participants.
The swindle is that your friends know you by your IP address. If Big Government, Big Media, or Big Crime knocks over one of them, they've got you, too. But — not to worry — you can actually — so I'm told — run an RS instance behind a TOR hidden service.
Same. Nobody listens to his radio 24x7. Hardly anyone ever responds to "Hello, World!" messages in real time. We do see nodes located far, far beyond the horizon. On a good day, there are way over 150 nodes operating, which is enough to keep channel utilization above 10% without any traffic beyond NodeInfo, Telemetry, or Position.
I don't know what it's all for. A couple of friends keep nodes charged and on the air locally. We expected to be able to exchange off-grid text messages, but, on a bad day, only about 2/3 of our messages ever go through. We need more LOCAL nodes! It's difficult to imagine how to advertise though.
I suspect the agenda of Ham-Radio Operators with regard to Meshtastic who had nodes up before we did was just to dabble with the technology. Their agenda with regard to emergency preparedness is much more robust. For example the list of certifications required of Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network volunteers is (long):
"All SATERN Members • Must be a FCC licensed amateur radio operator • Must have an up to date completed volunteer profile • Must be credentialed and have an ID badge • Must follow the amateur radio operators code of conduct • Complete Safe from Harm training • Complete Introduction to Emergency Disaster Services training • Complete FEMA ICS-100 and ICS-700 • Complete Salvation Army SA-200 Incident Command System Training • Be proficient with net operations • Be proficient with the ICS-214 form • Be proficient with the ICS-309 form • Understand the ICS-217 and ICS-205 forms • Be proficient with the ICS-213 message and ARRL radiogram • Must have an understanding of how to report and/or halt any unsafe operations.
"TYPE FIVE Shadow Communicator, TYPE FOUR Canteen Communicator, & TYPE THREE VHF / UHF Communicator
"In addition to the general training and proficiencies above: • Must have a Technician Class License or higher • Recommended Completion of FEMA AUXCOMM training • Be able to program their radio equipment in the field without the aid of a computer • Know their radios' capabilities and limitations • Arrive equipped to meet the needs of the team typing • Be able to function in high stress environments and in adverse conditions • Be able to serve as a net control operator • Be physically fit and able to walk for 10 minutes or more to serve as a shadow • Be able to lift 50 lbs as part of a canteen crew. • Type Three must be qualified to drive a Salvation Army vehicle (must have a valid driver’s license and be a Salvation Army approved driver)"
... so, if Meshtastic node owners aspire to having any role to play in emergency preparedness, then just operating a $50 LoRa radio probably isn't going to cut it. Understanding how to keep out of the way of the folks doing the heavy lifting is important, too. Meshtastic Users' getting the cold shoulder from anyone else having the least familiarity with emergency services is surely plausible.
Yes, this is the point: Search engines are harvesting YOU and YOUR SEARCH TERMS! TOR prevents that, and they don’t like it.
OTOH, DDG Search and DDG(Onion): https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmv/ et al., almost always works for me. Startpage and Startpage(Onion), too, but Mojeek and Brave Search show results less often.
I made up my mind years ago to stick to TOR Browser and TOR VPN network for anonymity, privacy, and security regardless of poor response times. Today, I feel that that choice has been vindicated. TOR response times are no worse than they ever were, but response times viewing heavily ad-ridden sites with “normal” browsers have caught up. TOR blocks receiving a lot of ads and tracker folderal that “normal” pages spew out to all comers. It’s just that a handful of search engines — and many and yet more Web sites — will not serve content to TOR’s VPN network. But — You know what? — screw them!
I will admit to using the Chromium browser to retrieve must-have content from sites whose Web-hosting providers block the TOR network because — believe it or not — some of those sites don't support Firefox. It's deja vu all over again for those of us who lived through the Netscape Browser Wars.
We feel mirror manufacturers should be held accountable for reflecting nudity by, of, from, or to minors.
Yeah, it's a story set in San Diego, not San Francisco, but no science fiction fan will fail to make the connection. It's all there: hippies, repurposed freeways, drones, anarchists, gangs.
Wrote my own digest of NOAA text products. It's a URL: Gnashtooth's Weather. Needs US Zip Code. Then bookmark the details page to return. Also, there is a current-conditions page:
And there is a one-liner. You can include the one-liner in your eMail sig if your mail user agent (MUA) allows a shell script. Just download and print:
I've written a python/Qt script that keeps lists like those you mention. It's sort of a poor-man's database manager, but its only database is a collection of csv files.
You can use an address list to keep track of contacts' phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.
You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.
You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.
You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.
When I try to include a direct link to my python script, which does that, my responses and in fact the whole posted discussion are taken down. … something to do with self promotion of untested software I suppose. But you can find it in the Cheese Shop (See Wikipedia “Python Package Index.”) under tonto2.
Here's a strategy for scoring your own search results.
"Keywords" are the seven words most commonly occurring on the page. If these seven words are seen to be repeated on the page to an unusual degree, then it is a good assumption that the page was designed by the author to appear high on search results.
Keyword density is a measure of "gloss." Most people will read pages with high keyword density as unusually glossy. Keyword density is not necessarily related to how genuine the page content appears to be otherwise, but most people will look askance at a page that is too glossy.
It should come as no big surprise that the pages that appear high on search results have been designed that way. They are deliberately glossy with high keyword density. You may consider whether to skip reading them or even loading them in your browser. Chances are good that the glossy pages are mostly advertising.
Generally you will find interspersed in your results a handful of sites with low keyword density. These are likely from universities, government sites, and research institutions that have sources of revenue beyond advertising. You may consider whether to load these up and skim through them. Probably they will show a publication date, author, and list of references, which will move your research forward.
It can be noted that AI-generated sites often exhibit high keyword density. This is probably deliberate so that they garner advertising revenue. However, it may also be due to "bot 'splaining," which is polly-paraphrasing a series of several (perhaps contradictory) articles.
Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately NONE OF THESE — including keyword density — distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.
Nevertheless, you may wish to explore keyword density as a means to rank search results.
When I try to include a direct link to my python scripts, which do that, my responses and in fact the whole posted discussion are taken down. ... something to do with self promotion of untested software I suppose. But you can find them in the Cheese Shop (See Wikipedia "Python Package Index.") under clanker_score.
We don't want to make this too easy for just anyone to censor all his search results. Rather, these scrips are meant as a learning tool. They demonstrate generally how rotten search results can be on one particular and not very compelling dimension. It should not be necessary to download and scan each and every page. You should be able to train yourself to ignore a priori results that include handfuls of pages from unauthoritative sites.
Boy howdy, do I have just the script for you!
https://pypi.org/project/clanker_score/
Full disclosure: It doesn't work. But the idea is nice: ... that you could — perhaps in real life — identify AI-generated content. ... so I wrote a framework that purports to do that.
Keyword density is not the only measure of gloss. There are others that have been developed to measure ratios between parts of speech. Unfortunately none of these distinguish sharply between pages that naturally convey genuine information and pages that have been designed to convey fluff for ulterior purposes. It is unlikely that combining measures of gloss will result in a tool that discriminates much better than keyword density by itself.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.solidexplorer2&hl=en-US
Uh, what about gnome-system-monitor?
Me, too. What's wrong with us?
I think the less stressful approach is limiting Internet activity altogether rather than obsessing about whether or not what I'm up to is hidden well enough. For example, you could write your own software. I, myself, obsess about whether or not my python scripts actually work instead of inveigling my friends to encrypt everything they put in the Cloud. See, for example:
The correct term is cow-orker (n. sing. masc.). See also, http://www.fact-index.com/c/co/cow_orker.html
I recommend my python script, Tonto2.
What does Tonto2 do?
It keeps lists.
You can use lists to keep in touch with family, friends, and cow-orkers.
Tonto2 keeps four kinds of lists:
You can use an address list to keep track of contacts' phone numbers, mailing addresses, and eMail addresses.
You can use a calendar to remind you about events and appointments including date, time, and duration. You can add notes about finding the location and other prerequisites to attendance.
You can keep separate passwords in a password list for every website you visit and every piece of gear you own.
You can keep links to favorite websites in a bookmark list.
Additionally you can make a list of bibliographic entries for writing research papers and for saving well-formatted footnotes for Web sites, but this is an arcane topic that will probably not be of general interest.
The information in these lists is at your fingertips.
You own it, and you can keep it. You can share it piecemeal with other people and computers without having to trust anyone or any thing with the whole enchilada. This is the idea of Tonto2.
Exactly! I harbor nostalgia for the old Windows 3 desktop icon grid, so I open a file manager window pointing to ~/Desktop and display the *.desktop shortcuts there as icons. This is done automatically when gdm starts. My file manager is PCManFM, which is a rip-off of nautilus. Double-clicking on an icon opens the shortcut — be it to a terminal or a graphical application. I have to alt-tab to the PCManFM window of course, so I need the keyboard. Then I have to double-click with the mouse. It’s keeping both hemispheres of the brain active: subject/verb, left/right. Presumably you can map your game controller's buttons to keyboard equivalents like , , and (or map your game controller's buttons to PCManFM's hot key config), which would allow you to navigate the PCManFM icon grid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog
I harbor nostalgia for the old Windows 3 desktop icon grid, so I open a file manager window pointing to ~/Desktop and display the *.desktop shortcuts there as icons. This is done automatically when gdm starts. My file manager is PCManFM, which is a rip-off of nautilus. Double-clicking on an icon opens the shortcut — be it to a terminal or a graphical application. I have to alt-tab to the PCManFM window of course, so I need the keyboard. Then I have to double-click with the mouse. It's keeping both hemispheres of the brain active: subject/verb, left/right.
I run devilspie in the background to catch windows of certain applications such as terminal and maximize them on the fly. For this reason, I must disable wayland.
Yes, both, apparently.
Well, that's what you get for downplaying the role of icon grids.
The only meltdown I've had with Linux occurred on a minor rev-level update to Debian that plugged some hole in the kernel the NVidia proprietary driver was crawling through. I had used Debian and an NVidia proprietary driver for years on an ancient motherboard. Then suddenly that "solution" disappeared. I had to replace the whole machine. Yeah, it was time. No, I wasn't ready. I don't know whether I should have been more pissed at Debian or NVidia, but I'm still on Debian. After the kernel update, X11 reverted to a default driver, and no install, uninstall, reinstall combination of the proprietary drivers seemed efficacious. I'm sorry I don't remember the exact software rev-levels and drivers involved. All notes I took at the time, if any, were lost in the subsequent crash and recovery from incompetently trying to roll back the kernel update.
This is probably NOT what you had in mind. What I use for launching apps under Gnome 43.9 is a traditional file manager. Historically, nautilus was Gnome's file manager. I note that Gnome still has a file manager, but they don't call it that. Over time nautilus has been gutted of a lot of its functionality. Thus, I have switched to PCManFM, which is a lightweight lookalike. I autostart it in my Desktop folder, which holds a handful of *.desktop shortcut files. I like the look of the "Icon" view mode because it reminds me of the old Windows 3.1 desktop. Alas, there is no grouping like what you're hoping for (so far as I know), but you could create shortcuts to other *.desktop folders. PCManFM displays a tabbed window, and you can drag and drop icons onto folders on a window, and between tabs. I launch apps by double-clicking icons.
There's always RetroShare.
Retroshare is almost ready for prime time after remaining in development for over 20 years. Each "friend" runs it's own service for the decentralized network of "friends" and hands off message fragments from immediate "friends" for swapping files, store-and-forward messages, chats, etc., to other more distant network participants.
The swindle is that your friends know you by your IP address. If Big Government, Big Media, or Big Crime knocks over one of them, they've got you, too. But — not to worry — you can actually — so I'm told — run an RS instance behind a TOR hidden service.
I much prefer the article from 22 Mar 2019 about "TOR Onion Services" preserved at the Wayback Machine instead of the current article.