I don’t really get the idea of decentralized internet.

The internet is already decentralized. There are millions of websites hosted on thousands of separately-owned machines.

“Decentralized” services like the fediverse use thus exact same structure and bind them together by a search/aggregation API.

The “centralized” part of the internet is DNS/IP Assignments, Service providers, and search.

You are perfectly allowed to go your whole life without using search, or by self-hosting searX.

If we go back to the age of webrings, that is essentially decentralized internet. It seems like every decentralized internet idea is just a rehash of this with some Tor ideas sprinkled in.

You are never going to be able to pull a “Silicon Valley” and make every device into a mini server. The ping and uptime would be horrific.

This is what I need.

If you only need to drop files on the same LAN, then you really don’t need a server. P2P is perfect and cuts out the middle man.

Sorry, I think options like Firefly III for that might not be sufficient for small business, but it was the only great Foss personal finance software for a long time.

Odoo is the gold standard for business. I think they also have a business finance app? It isn’t free, but the cost is reasonable.

Otherwise, I use Leantime for project management. If you work in a project-based or contract-based company (like consultancy or design house), then it has a lot of project & product features including time tracking with a plugin. Not financial though.

Oh boy! Here goes

Desktop:

• Bazzite
• KDE Connect
• KiCAD
• FreeCAD
• Plasma
• LocalSend
• Thunderbird
• Bitwarden
• Code OSS
• Krita
• CoreCTRL
• LibreOffice
• CuteCOM
• KopiaUI
• Calibre
• Heroic Games Launcher
• Lutris
• PrusaSlicer
• Okular
• Inkscape
• FluffyChat
• SyncThingy
• Elisa
• Haruna
• Kdenlive
• YouTube Downloader GUI
• Paperwork (stille can’t get network scanners working on Bazzite with sane set up)
• Solar
• ProtonUp-QT

Phone:

• AntennaPod
• Immich
• Aegis
• Heliboard
• Organic Maps
• Breezy Weather
• Aurora Droid
• K9 mail
• Signal
• Fluffy chat
• Home Assistant
• Eternity
• Findroid
• Gadgetbridge
• Fitotrack
• Loop habits
• Tuta
• StreetComplete
• Wireguard
• Unit converter untimate
• mastodon
• ntfy
• newpipe
• KDE Connect
• bitwarden
• findroid
• localsend
• material files

server:

• Leantime
• Bookstack
• Immich
• Jellyfin
• Home Assistant
• Traefik
• Crowdsec
• Authelia
• Dozzle
• Glances
• full *arr suite
• transmission + wireguard
• paperless-ngx
• cloudflare-ddns
• syncthing
• valheim server
• Boinc
• stash
• ntfy.sh

If I donated $5 per month to each of these projects I would be broke 😂

Hibernation doesn’t work at all on my windows HP work laptop. Sleep has gotten way way better on Linux in the past 2 years even. My desktop that would be buggy going in and out of sleep has now been flawless such that I auto sleep it after 30 minutes.

Battery life on Linux still sucks though.

Literally the 2nd post on !tech@programming.dev is about mega corporations financials. Many other posts are about legal cases of megacorporations.

It seems to be less about technology, and more about the market and software drama/politics.

At least no musk spam.

Not OP, but maybe because it is a survey from a Linux group and discord has treated Linux like 2nd class citizens since 2015 and they don’t give a flying fuck about making the experience as good on Linux as windows. It is an afterthought.

And it is not like they did anything special at all this year to warrant a “of the year” award. Discord has been out for almost a decade. That is like saying windows is OS of the year when they have done almost nothing but bad decisions this year and the OS is already been out for a long time.

Interesting, when I started using FreeCAD I had 0 training, and I have managed to make it work just fine. Was mostly frustrated by the topological naming problem, but that is fixed now.

You can do quite complex things with it.

You just have to put in a bit of effort and think in an additive sketch-extrude workflow. But yeah, not easy to transition from solidworks.

To be honest. I had a similar question for my girlfriend for drawing with krita. A drawing tablet + a traditional laptop is better for almost everyone except students who will be taking notes in class and people who have to be drawing in a chair or meeting room with no desk setup.

Otherwise a drawing tablet is more accurate, faster, and with better features than a 2-in-1. Much better sensitivity, generally better pressure and tilt functions, and a much better feel (more like paper)

You don’t even have to spring for a Wacom. They have been resting on their laurels for over a decade and have become completely uncompetitive in the past 5 years (kind of the Intel of drawing tablets).

An XPPen Deco Pro Gen II (as an example) has good ergonomics, rotary knobs for zooming, rotating, and scaling, and works over Bluetooth. Their Linux drivers (4.0.x) are pretty great at a fraction of the price of a Wacom or the price difference between a traditional laptop and a 2-in-1.

It ends up being way more ergonomic also to look at a screen and not having to hunch over a tablet. It just takes a week or so to get used to not looking at your hands.

Well the gadgetbridge comment is not really true.

It can’t pull activities from Strava, runkeeper, or similar or push to them. Syncing across services via APIs or Heath Connect stops it from really being a proprietary watch software replacement or a google fit replacement as they all do that and it is a core function because people want to use the apps they want to use. For example, lifting tracking from Progression or similar which other apps like gadgetbridge or strava just aren’t made for. It doesn’t have the functionality built in to cover every activity set.

GPX is extremely limited and is only GPS data, not good for fitness trackers as they track all sorts of activities. TCX or FIT are better, but of course managed by Garmin. There isn’t really an open alternative standard. I guess the closest we come is the Health Connect API which is completely local interoperability.

Just send the energy directly back to the power executives houses with a high power laser. They want the energy for free so badly to pad their profits and buy a 5th yacht, give it to them 😉

Only partially true. The solar panels almost all inject power back into the grid. Power companies started complaining about their profits when they had to actually pay the users for their power that they generated so now home power generating houses get paid pennies on the dollar for delivering power and reducing the power capacity needed by the power companies and of course the power companies didn’t lower prices at all, so they are just sucking up the difference in pure profit.

Depends on what your usecase is for what is “essential.”

I think keeping household documents, taxes, medical bills, etc… In a local only paperless-ngx instance is quite essential to the organization of a household where everything is searchable and able to be organized on multiple levels compared to a simple document folder on 1 computer.

Having a document or self-hosted wiki with an in - case - of - death document that gets backed up in an encrypted, but accessible by family place is probably the most “essential” thing.

Actually, the AI assistant fad isn’t all bad.

HomeAssistant has an open souce assistant pipeline that integrates into the most flexible smart home software around. It is completely local and doesn’t rely on the cloud at all. Essentially it could make Alexa’s and google homes (that literally spy on you and send key phrases back to your built data collection profile) obsolete. That is a way not to have to rely on corporate bullshit privacy invasion to have a good smart home.

Indeed transcribing and translating (and preserving dying languages and being able to re-teach them) are 2 of the best consumer uses for AI. Then there is accelerating disease and climate research.

If these were the use cases that were pushed instead of fucking conversational assistants, replacements for customer support that only direct to existing incomplete docs, taking away artists’ jobs, and creating 1984 “you can’t trust your own eyes and ears” in real time, then AI would actually be very worthwhile.

What?

He is saying that AI uses countries worth of energy by itself. Even a normal search query using AI uses orders of magnitude more energy than a traditional search query.

Literally tech companies have been buying or reserving entire power plants exclusively for training AI datasets. At least Microsoft reactivated an old nuclear plant instead of buying out coal plant energy shares.

And 90% of uses for AI are absolute dogshit corporate fluff or a shiny activity for 10 year olds to play with for 30 minutes.

There are legitimate uses like auto note taking, voice assistants, etc… But it is destroying the environment because corporations are shoving it into every possible thing they can, quadrupling the energy growth rate and straining our electrical grids and burning tons and tons more coal to do it.

Here in Belgium there used to be big government subsidies for solar panels 5-10 ago.

Now the same wattage battery + solar setup without any government subsidies is a good chunk cheaper than that time with the large subsidies.

Pretty cool and shows the power of government renewables subsidies. A huge percentage of houses in Belgium have solar panels now.(and electricity still costs 0.30€/kWh average because of fossil fuel energy lobbies)

Now that there is a local industry around it, most renovations and almost all new builds include them.

won’t work, this is their own hosted gitlab instance lol

This is a good way to do it.

I went one smaller with the Node 304 which only can do 4 HDDs with a GPU inserted. Going used for consumer desktop CPU is the most powerful play for the money I think.

This is a good path forward OP for a pretty powerful server

• Node 804
• Used AM4 motherboard ( microatx B550) (can be around 150€)
• used 5700X or similar (seen as low as 100€)
• new 500W power supply
• 32GB DDR4 3200 ram in 16GB sticks
• WD red plus 10TB helium filled for balance of noise and performance and price. My 10TB drives are as quiet as my 4TB. My scheme is ZFS mirror of 4TB (2 drives) for important docs, and 10TB drives for non critical data. Drives are by far the most expensive unless you get good second hand drives
• if you want to do Jellyfin media server, pick up an arc A310

In the professional space:

Add Altium, KNX, pspice, LTSpice (luckily works in wine), and for us electronics/electric guys lol.

Linux is a 3rd class citizen in ANSYS simulation tools. Slow updates, old UI, etc… On Linux. Pretty much only used as a simulation node for kicking on sims from windows since Linux machines can be >1TB RAM + 144± core powerhouses where windows sucks on those type of machines.

Pretty much all architecture software

Many ERP systems desktop apps

Not to mention a lot of companies use active directory for access control + sharepoint

Web apps suck, but have been very helpful in Linux compatibility in the enterprise space since the devs only have to care about 1 set of production builds.

At my work, software guys and mechatronics PLC focused guys get away with Ubuntu (saleae is great), but for electronics and mechanicals it is not even worth it to dual boot.

New year 2026? 😉