I share your sentiment about Syncthing-Fork and the botched handoff to researchxxl. I have yet to implement the Termux-based workaround that allows me to use Syncthing from the browser without the Android app / wrapper. It looks pretty clean as it’s just pure Syncthing with a little starter script.

The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human.

Bullshit. Social networks track the living shit out of everyone and know exactly what’s human traffic and what isn’t. Device identifiers (user agent, IP ranges, browser fingerprint, (lack of) ad id, etc.) and behavioral patterns (including purchase history) differ wildly.

Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something,

Bullshit. Even advertising to kids were outlawed (it isn’t), politicians could be just bought off by advertisers to turn a blind eye. This is particularly true for the land of their formerly free and home of the formerly brave where corruption is now an above-the-counter item, practiced out in the open by the president himself.

“Thou shalt not use the Chrome, unless thou wantst be hung from yonder tree by thine ballsack!”

Leviticus 13:37

If Graphene stops bitching about things, it’s a sure signs the project’s dead. ;D

More generally: driver support on par with Windows. To be fair, Linux has come a long way and driver support is pretty good most of the time. But if you happen upon a piece of hardware that does have driver issues, you’re still in a world of shit, with no or no easy fix.

Case in point, I have been battling with a weird S3 sleep bug on Lenovo Yoga L13 Gen 2 notebooks recently. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not even a kernel error, but something in Lenovo’s mainboard/BIOS firmware. Fix: write Lenovo an email and hope they’ll fix the firmware of a 5-years-old just for desktop Linux use. (And, no, I’m not under the illusion that this is going to happen.)

What do you mean by “phone backups”?

• Contacts? Synced to my Nextcloud instance via CardDAV.
• Calendar? As above, CalDAV.
• Browser bookmarks? Floccus > to Sync to Nextcloud.
• Apps? My custom ROM has Seedvault baked in. If I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t care much though, and just reinstall.
• Photos? Immich.
• Other Files? Nextcloud, Syncthing, or good, old-fashioned USB transfer.

OpenMediaVault. CasaOS. There may be others.

No drop-in replacements for everything TrueNAS did, but at least something.

Self hosting […] P2P

You do realise that’s a contradiction, right?

Unless you’re hosting a TOR node (which is outside of the scope here and, in the case of exit nodes, extremely risky), there’s nothing here that’s relevant to self-hosting.

And honour to them for sharing the knowledge here others won’t fall for this shit.

Sure, that’s what I do for hosting my stuff. DDNS does not help with SSH whitelisting because that is IP-based, not based on a URL.

Set up a firewall and only open port 22 with your IP (you can look it up using ip.me).

I keep wondering about this part whenever I read it. Do y’all have static IP addresses so you can do this easily? If I did this, I’d probably lock myself out within a week (which is roughly the interval at which my public IPv4 will change).

Discovered and got psittsa up and running, a cool little project that combines Piper (TTS engine) with a web frontent that allows users to copy-paste text or URLs and to either stream the audio from the browser or download it as mp3. Apparently it even does clean-up of old files behind the scenes.

These people are foolish for reasons far worse than just using Telegram.

…and once you get to “AI” with system level access that is supposed to scan for “bad content” (like with Apple’s supposed “CSAM scanning” and Google’s Android System Safety Core), all bets are off.

All of the major platforms owned by corporations (including Apple) are or will be compromised.

The only way out is degoogled Android (for now) or, better, a true Linux device.

I’m pretty sure everyone’s birth date is 1/1/1970

FTFY

“Won’t anyone think of the cHiLdReN?!”

Where I am, Telegram is mainly used by alt- and far right figures close to Russia. Facts don’t matter in these circles any more. Feelings do. And Durov knows how to manage those.

I see the Graphene bois still like shittalking other ROMs. Not exactly the kind of behaviour that builds trust, but we’re used to it by now.

Yes, other ROMs make compromises, as do the people using them. Saying that all others are “bad for privacy” is just bullshit. Anything is better than stock Android.

Things are moving very fast right now with a lot of back end linux stuff changing rapidly to support more people and programs coming off Windows.

Please, indulge me. What exactly is it you’re talking about here?

Imo, not having access to the most recent Thunderbird or LibreOffice version doesn’t matter at all to beginners, making Debian-based systems perfectly viable.

Fedora KDE, on the other hand, may turn out to be an annoyance once they need to install proprietary drivers (as OP is due to their NVIDIA card).

Don’t worry, Arch will do that over time.