Germany actually does that! Quite a few government bodies are already active at https://social.bund.de/. Maybe there‘s hope that other countries will follow.

I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/month, maybe even less, depending on how much heavy usage your Nextcloud instance requires. And you won‘t have to worry about keeping your hardware and network running, which pretty much always takes up more time than expected.

Some web hosters (I‘ve had very good experiences with Hetzner) charge an hourly rate and allow you to preconfigure VPSes with software like Nextcloud. So unless you have specific needs, you could just spin up an instance, check if it suits your needs and, if not, only pay a few cents.

That really depends on what you mean by privacy. They probably won‘t sell your data or even look at the stuff you‘re doing with your server, if you‘re not disrupting their service. But they definitely will cooperate with law enforcement if your server is used for illegal stuff and someone reports it.

In the end, you’ll always have to trust your server host to some degree. Some other hosts, like Hetzner, allow you to install your own operating systems on their dedicated servers, so you can set up full disk encryption. But even though this is definitely better than unencrypted disks, it‘s still not a reliable way of preventing access while your server is running.

So if you’re just wondering if you can host a Nextcloud instance at hostinger without your files being sold by them: Almost certainly, yes. If you, on the other hand, plan to host manuals for building bombs or, even worse, offer downloads of old Nintendo games, they‘re probably not going to respect your privacy for long.

That‘s what I call good timing.

I’m not an expert, so take my findings with a grain of salt, but the current scientific consensus seems to be:

We don’t know.

Recent studies suggest that the behavior of spiders is more complex than previously thought. They show behavior that can’t be explained by simple automatisms, such as the development of hunting strategies depending on their prey.

Keep in mind that these findings do not indicate any capability to love or to grow fond of someone. But there is an ongoing discussion about whether invertebrates should be considered sentient.

According to their FAQ, all fonts on Google Fonts are open source and their library is pretty extensive, searchable and usable without an account.

So, unless I’m missing something, it seems to be what you’re looking for.

Cool project, but it seems to be very similar to PairDrop with the major downside of not being open-source. What would be the advantages of using this project over existing FOSS-solutions?

I think Ghostfolio might be what you’re looking for.

And that arrogant “I understand it, why don’t you?!”-attitude is exactly what’s so often the main issue in the design process of open source software.

I’d recommend watching this recent talk by Tantacrul, the design lead for MuseScore and Audacity. In it, he shows some videos of first-time user tests he conducted for Inkscape recently. It’s really fascinating to see, how users fail to do what they want because of confusing UX choices. And often it isn’t even that hard to fix. But open source image editors are just full of these little annoyances by now, which really smell like the result of inadequate user testing. And no professional would prefer to work all day with software full of little annoyances when there are alternatives.

I mean, just try adding text in Krita, for example. There’s a giant pop-up where you have to format your text without actually seeing it on your image. That’s just klunky and far more time consuming than a WYSIWYG approach would be.

This isn’t Adobe.

And as much as I want to like Krita, GIMP and such, their workflows just can’t compare with proprietary software in many cases. Also, especially for photo editing, their feature sets can’t compare with Adobe’s or Affinity’s either.

I use Krita, GIMP and Affinity Photo pretty regularly, and while there have been great improvements to the open source alternatives recently, I just get stuff done with Affinity, while still having to constantly search the web for things Krita and GIMP hide somewhere deep within their menus.

All open source image editors I’ve used are in dire need of a complete UX rework (like Blender and Musescore successfully did) before being more than niche alternatives to proprietary software.

So, as of yet, I can definitely understand the wish for a feature-rich and easily usable image editing suite on Linux.

I disagree with that assertion.

While not in power, the conservatives have shifted their position to what was considered to be the far right only a few years ago. For example, one of their main messages during their campaign was to close Germany‘s borders to refugees, a position that was only supported by the far-right AfD beforehand (and which is violating EU law).

Their main target during the lead-up to this election wasn‘t the far-right, it was the green and left-wing parties. They ranted against renewable energy, taxes on gas, the legalization of Cannabis and such, instead of fighting against the rising far-right extremists.

Friedrich Merz, the conservative’s candidate and likely future chancellor, is an opportunist. If he expects to win something from the talking points of the right-wing extremists, he has absolutely no issues embracing them. He’s very, very different from Angela Merkel.

He already voted with the AfD against the other democratic parties a few weeks ago, which he explicitly ruled out only two months earlier. I have no reason to believe him, if he says he won‘t cooperate with them again.

I‘ve been using Kagi since September 2023.

The biggest difference to other search engines is really the quality of the results. Before Kagi, I‘ve used DuckDuckGo for a few years, but had to switch to Google more often than not, as I just didn‘t find what I was looking for. Most alternative search engines only use Bing‘s index, which just isn‘t any good in my experience. Kagi‘s results are built from quite a few different sources as well as their own index. Seeing how crappy Google‘s results are by now, I don‘t think you can get better search results right now.

Also, the ability to rank and block specific domains in my results is something I really like and wouldn‘t want to miss anymore.

Lastly, I really enjoy using a search engine that isn‘t being optimized for advertisers, but for the user. Kagi‘s team is very receptive for feedback. For example, they’ve implemented an icon for search results with paywalls, because users asked for it. There are many small, nice details like that, which can save you a few clicks or just improve your general experience.

That really depends on the service you’re looking at and what your needs are. Google probably offers the best all-round package, but depending on your needs, there are often times good or even better alternatives available.

As far as I know, address completion is supported by almost every alternative. At least I don’t know of one which doesn’t support that.

The quality of directions not only depends on the product, but also the method of transport you want directions for and the geographic region your targeting. For example, Google is, in my experience, very good for cars, but terrible for cycling. At least in Europe, OSM based maps generally include far more paths and details, which, combined with a good routing engine, results in better routes. I have made very good experiences with OpenRouteService.

For SteetView-like images you’re unfortunately pretty much limited to Google or Apple. Mapillary exists, but, as it’s crowdsourced, quality and coverage just aren’t all that great.

I think that there’s a good open alternative for most use cases of embedded maps available, as few of them really need StreetView or traffic-based routing. If that’s the case, though, you’re unfortunately stuck with Google or Apple.

Someone‘s probably just using those ports wirelessy!

While this is definitely a great read and an interesting attack vector, I think the term „deanonymization“ is stretching it here.

As far as I can see, this attack would only let you determine which Cloudflare datacenter the target has been accessing. This would, in most cases, be one near the target, but it wouldn‘t get you a precise position or any personal information about the target. You‘d just get a pretty unreliable and very large radius of where your target might be.

It‘s also worth mentioning that Monitor anonymizes your data before checking it for breaches.

So there shouldn‘t be any serious privacy issues.

I’m doing all of my PC gaming on Linux for years now. Except for VR. It’s unfortunately not running well at all for me. I’m running an Nvidia GPU with a Valve Index and whenever I was able to even get a picture on the HMD in the first place, the latency from movement to screen was about a second or so. Which is an incredibly efficient way to feel incredibly sick.

I’m not sure about your setup, maybe it’s better supported in some way, but, from my experience, I’d unfortunately recommend keeping a Windows partition for VR and saving yourself the (quite literal) headache.

I‘m personally very happy with kagi when it comes to features and, most importantly, the quality of search results. But, as they don‘t have ads, it’s pretty expensive to use.

There‘s a great video on that topic by Matt Parker (Standupmaths) which I‘d wholeheartedly recommend.

TLDW: No, terrain elevation isn‘t generally taken into account when calculating a country‘s surface area, though the actual method differs slightly from country to country. Switzerland would be around 7% bigger, if its mountains were to be taken into account.

I think we‘re in a very different situation right now. Proton has become so good that it‘s just not necessary for most developers to do anything to get their game running on Linux. When Macs peaked in the hardware survey, the compatibility tools were far less powerful and developers had to actually invest time and resources, if they wanted their game running on Mac.

I also think that the Steam Deck is absolutely being recognized by many developers. Even big publishers proudly announce their games being playable on it. And having games optimized for Deck often improves them on Linux in general.

So I really wouldn’t worry about developers not specifically targeting Linux. Even without that, gaming on Linux is in the best spot it has ever been and is steadily improving.