I love the idea, I much prefer it to the mainstream. The problem is, the typical process of documenting FOSS and self-host projects (websites, wiki, mailing lists, etc) move too slow and are too cumbersome for how quick things are developing right now. So people are kind of having to invent the new tech a d new ways to communicate about it, and they’re not always making choices that either scale or are easy to find and reference.

Okay, since you seem to be so helpful here, I’ll lay out where I’m at. I’ve been using LLMs like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bard more professionally. I find them equal parts useful, confusing, annoying, and skeevey. I’ve got a lil VPS I run for services, I could put a front end on there easy. I’ve also got an old 8core Xeon machine with like 48GB ram and a leftover AMD R9 270 sitting there with Unraid barely installed. I can chamge the OS of course, but what am I realistically looking at being able to run locally that won’t go above like 60-75% usage so I can still eventually get a couple game servers, network storage, and Jellyfin working? I’ll be honest I don’t care about image generation much, but if I do I can always look into upgrading

Golf is so much better played with friends than watched

I’m not taking issue with anything else, but I just have to say something about the last bit of what you said.

Westerns. No. Not all of them. Or even most of them are from Italy. That’s a special and significant subgenre called Spaghetti Westerns. Or Italian westerns, mostly because of Sergio Leone, these happened in the 60s and 70s. But if you look at the history of westerns and western movies, they were made in the US starting all the way back in the 1910s with silent films and continued on into the golden age of the 40s and 50s.

Since we’re talking Ubuntu, I’d add

“flatpak update” and “snap refresh” to the cron

I’ve had really good experience with Genymotion android emulation on Linux, even on underpowered devices. Might work well to do video calls

Check out Heliboard (also on F-Droid) and follow the instructions to enable gesture typing. I also suggest Futo for on-device voice to text.

What specific apps are you using that you can’t deal going away from? Other than some social media or gamr or something. Even then it seems like there are replacements a lot of the time

Unless its something like Bitwarden where you can use it even if they go offline, can take an encrypted or unencrypted backup of your local passwords/accounts, and are FOSS so you can easily self-host your own version if anything happens where you want to cut ties (thanks Vaultwarden!). They’re an awesome company and one I highly suggest supporting with a paid account

This is what I landed on, really happy with it. Sync super fast, keeps adding features, clean UI, great WYSIWYG rich text, and dead simple imports. Plus they regularly do discounts, so even the low cost gets lower. Way better than the headache of SN or whatever else is out there

Thank you, I missed that

Most of this is right, but needs some things corrected.

LOS is kept up by individual maintainers of the devices, and so it can cover more of them. But that also means you expand your attack surface to lineage, maintainer, microg, etc. And that’s just on supported devices. Unofficial devices are even more wild-west, having much delayed releases, OS updates, security updates, everything.

Not only that, but Lineage requires that you unlock your bootloader and often have your phone rooted to be able to do everything. This introduces special points of insecurity and possible issues in the future.

GOS is from a single source, for a single line of phones, and uses a designed method to load cryptographically signed ROMs onto the device, and then validate updates using the same method. The Play Services are sandboxed and disabled by default, so you can just never use them if you want. Overall, this makes for a more cohesive device. One that is more private and more secure. Especially so, when you can buy a new Pixel device and have guaranteed updates for as long as Google will do so for the same device.

iPhones tend to send close to the same types of info back home. When started, idle, inserting a SIM, on the settings screen, even when not logged in. Like, its very similar even when you look at comprehensive lists which a lot of people either don’t know or ignore. I’m not saying that there aren’t specific benefits or reasons to feel more comfortable with Apple. But saying its because they intrinsically are more private, I feel like that’s a bridge too far

Anything by Andy Weir, he’s basically juvenile fiction with really good ideas and research

How do you carry a keyboard on a motorcycle? With a shoulder strap and turn it into a keytar. Immediately 200x more cool

The Republicans got Smirnov Iced

There’s anonymity and privacy. This keeps you private from other users, and they already keep you private from themselves other than the initial sign up. What this service isn’t, and never has been, is anonymous. They don’t want that and there are big usability issues with an extended anonymous user base. Decide for yourself what you need

Ew

We must have been alone but we called it Egg-Toastie-O’s

To be paired with “imnotgivingyouthepassword” to log in

I live at a place where I needed Starlink so I feel entitled to comment.

Ordered, and it took 6-7mo to allow me to start. In the meantime T-Mobile Home Internet let me start immediately. I kept both because when one had issues the other would be better (storms, updates, tower maintenance, downtime, Russian attacks, etc). But I noticed that Starlink kept getting worse. Lower speed, worse jitter/ping/bufferbloat/etc. it would routinely fail to hit 100mbps down with good sky view, mounted to a pergola. TMHI would routinely be above 250mbps, and I move to using it more often. Eventually a local ISP got a grant to roll out FttH in my area and I got rid of both.

It’s been a bit over a year since then, maybe things got better. But I noticed Starlink overselling their nodes, being non-communicative for support issues, and missing these easily attainable FCC goals to people that often have much less options than I did. There’s no reason for them to get absolutely wiped by a cell phone tower. Hope they made enough by packing on customers, because they just lost $900m

Check out koreader to put another OS on there. Might be what you’re looking for