• 6 Posts
  • 215 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • To be fair, if something is open by default or very easy to enable without informing about the risks, tons of people will have it exposed without thinking.

    It isn’t that “tons of people do it so it is normal and perfectly fine” but more “people don’t realize.” It also uses some nontrivial amount of resources to process and block those attempts, even if they never have a chance of getting in.

    There is yet a reason I can find to have it forwarded for home use. Need to ssh into a machine to fix it? VPN.

    There are plenty of secure web-based tools to manage your server without a VPN also.


  • Depends. If someone is gaming with new hardware, don’t use a distro that doesn’t update the kernel quickly and regularly.

    Almost every problem with hardware on mint is solved by going through the process of updating the kernel or switching to a distro with up to date libraries.

    It’s fine for a lot of people, but it doesn’t “just work” outside of the use case of only browsing the internet and word documents.

    This is coming from someone who used mint for 4 years. There was about a dozen times where the software on the software center was so out of date that it simply didn’t work and I had to resort often to using random ppa’s which often broke other things. Definitely not user friendly.

    That being said, Cinnamon is probably one of the most user friendly DEs for people switching from window. It is very nice.


  • People have hit on most of them here, but here is another big one:

    Fitness apps. Mainly calorie tracking, workout tracking and heart rate tracking

    Health app

    Sleep as Android

    (No, gadget bridge is not a replacement for 99% of cases and doesn’t even support the gold standard for heart rate tracking, polar H10)

    For calorie tracking, the massive food databases required, barcode scanning, and crowd sourcing are generally not compatible with the open source community’s privacy ideals. OpenNutriTracker has promise though!

    For workout tracking, none of them have any device support and most of them are dead and abandoned. Not to mention heart rate zones, stats and training trends, etc… FitoTrack and Opentracks are good starts though.

    And then a google fit alternative. Something that can integrate sleeping, workouts, heart rates, sensors, etc… Data all in one aggregates place. It is a huge task and it makes sense that there is no open source alternative for it. Especially when the components aren’t individually there to aggregate.



  • I will go out on a limb and say FreeCAD and KiCAD specifically in examples. Right now you have to search forum posts and videos to find out how to make something work and it is always an older version completely irrelevant to the current version.

    For other things that need note basic general and setup documentation:

    Traefik: It is only decodable to experienced people right now. I tried about 15 tutorials a few years ago and SmartHomeBeginner was the only one that actually was able to connect to the internet and didn’t “rest of the fucking owl” it

    Authelia could also use some documentation updates specifically around the area of integrations.

    Libopencm3 also could use some more complete documentation instead of basic API descriptions, but the project is not very active anymore

    Opensuse Aeon and Kalpa could also use some documentation love, especially Kalpa.



  • True, meanwhile my HP printer had a hell of a time trying to work on windows much less finding an actual downlosd for the scanner tool on HP’s websitr for a printer ovrr 5 years old and on Linux I typed yay HP, 1, then I was ready to print and scan.

    Plus KDE discover is the convenience if the Microsoft store was actually good.

    Settings are ACTUALLY in setting instead of being split between settings, control panel, individual tool auto diagnoses, powershell, and registry edits.

    KDEconnect works seamlessly and I can also locate my phone if I lost it in the house.


  • And in all tiers: make an additional profit by selling your information without your consent (it has been decided in many courts that burying subtext deeply in forced terms of service isn’t consent)

    We are already paying them by letting them harvest our data, ads or not.

    Then they double or triple dip with the scenarios you describe. I am still paying them by being on their site with an ad blocker as they harvest my data and sell it to the highest bidder. Not to mention quadruple dipping with using our info and content without consent to train AI to sell.

    They use the argument “your data/art/photos/videos are freely posted on the internet, so we can use them how we please”. If they publish content openly on the internet, then we are free to do with it as we please.

    They can’t use the argument but say “no no no, it doesn’t apply to things WE put out”

    They are either pirating our content and data constantly or ad-blocking is not pirating.





  • There is one neat trick: don’t expose SSH.

    There is still not a reason anyone has been able to give for 99% of self-hosters to expose SSH.

    If you need to access your machine via ssh while on the go. Wireguard to your local network, use SSH. Done. Unless you are running an always-up public facing site, the amount of times you have to access your machine that can’t wait until after work is very low anyway.

    Bots will scan all ports. That is just how it works. Less than 22, but you will still get spammed. Why force your computer to go through the fail2ban loop and take up resources when it is simply not needed at all and you can block it on another machine?


  • I have an orangepi zero 3 with pihole

    Then an ITX PC with

    • mealie (meal planner, recipe parser, grocery list maker with a bunch of features and tools)

    • immich for self hosting a google photos alternative

    • *arr stack for torrenting Linux ISOs

    • Jellyfin for LAN media playing

    • home assistant for my VW car, our main hanging renovation lights, smoke and CO monitors, and in the future, all of the KNX smart systems in our house

    • Syncthing for syncing photo backup and music library with phone

    • Bookstack for a wiki, todos, journal, etc… (Because I didn’t want to install better services for journals when I don’t use it much)

    • paperless-ngx for documents

    • leantime for managing my personal projects, tasks, and timing

    • Valheim game server

    • Calibre-web for my eBook library backup

    • I had nextcloud but it completely broke on an update and I can’t even see the login fields anymore, it just loads forever until it takes down my network and server, so I ditched it since I never used it anyway

    • crowdsec for much better (preemptive) security than fail2ban

    • traefik for reverse proxy



  • L O L “doing something different”

    Epic tried to pull an Amazon.

    Get VC money and chinese money and subsidize and undercut competition using anticompetitive practices to gain market share before the rug pull where they jack up their margins to the industry standard. (Everyone uses 30%, even brick and mortars except humble which is 25)

    The difference is Amazon actually made a good software experience in the beginning few years and Epic spent literal years with very few feature updates and whining and burning money suing about “unfair market practices” when they were the only ones actually engaging in anti-consumer practices like paying off developers to be Epic-exclusive and buying developers and removing their games from steam. The other “different” thing that they did I guess is their CEO is an outspoken objective asshole.

    They never got to the rug pull part because their actual software sucked balls and they refused to improve it so much so that someone else actually made a better launcher than them for their own products…


  • Epic tried to pull an Amazon.

    Get VC money and subsidize and undercut competition using anticompetitive practices to gain market share before the rug pull where they jack up their margins to the industry standard.

    The difference is Amazon actually made a good software experience in the beginning few years and Epic spent literal years with very few feature updates and whining about “unfair market practices” when they were the only ones actually engaging in anti-consumer passes like paying off developers to be Epic-exclusive and buying developers and removing their games from steam.