if it’s free, you’re the product.

signal seems really good right now, with open source clients, but they already show that they’d like to keep the ecosystem locked down by not allowing 3rd party clients. at some point they will need a way to pay for their datacenters, and even if they claim the foundation or whatever is doing well, i can see the pestering for donations getting much worse in the future.

that said, threema is far from optimal too, im still waiting for matrix servers to become solid options. last time i wanted to set up synapse, the only captcha they supported was fucking Google captcha :|

i think flatpak has done a lot to make this easier, but at the same time… i’ll admit i’m not a fan of it (mostly due to random issues).

the way i see it, more distros need something like arch linux’ AUR. if an application is reasonably easy to build, it really does not take much to get it into the AUR, from where there’s also a path towards inclusion in the official repos.

i don’t know too much about other distros, but arch really makes it amazingly easy to package software and publish everything needed for others to use it. i feel like linux needs more of this, not less - there’s a great writeup that puts why linux maintainers are important way better than i ever could:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230525163337/https://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

my phone won’t even do “force stop” anymore… fairphone 5 running whatever os fairphone ships, and all force stop does is put the app in the background or whatever, if it has an issue the issue will still be there when opening it again.

personally, i’d have pretty big benefits for my homelab if i could use my own ipv6 range for everything. having only a singe public IP is just very limiting.

sadly, my ISP does give out ipv6 for home networks, but i cannot connect to any of them from my mobile phone with the same carrier. so that’s fun. they talked about rolling out ipv6 on mobile networks years ago, but i guess it’ll take a few more…

i’m thinking long term - sure, right now google knowing everything about me isn’t dangerous. but if a massive political slide to the right happens in countries that host services, suddenly all the saved data from many years ago can be used against me. and don’t fall for the “end to end encrypted” bullshit either - all these services can flip a switch and have your encryption keys instantly. (or, if its an open source app that ACTUALLY keeps keys on the device only, which is extremely rare, it’s one update away from happening, and you better read the whole diff every update and compile the app yourself.)

that’s why i choose to self host everything. yes there’s a risk of being hacked, or installing something malicious because i don’t read every diff on every update. but i feel more confortable with it being my own responsibility, and my services are also all on seperate virtual machines to hopefully isolate any breaches.

using dd for that is outdated info that everyone keeps blindly parroting with zero understanding why. cat is simpler and works fine.

note: both cat and dd only work for this when the image is made in a compatible way, my linux isos always work fine but a windows iso didnt and needs a more specific tool.

The updating issue is something i have to deal with too, its just that the good mirrors constantly change. there’s several tools to automatically update pacman’s mirrorlist, but for some reason i don’t really like any of them ( reflector, rankmirrors/ratemirrors idk, others…)

but with an updated mirrorlist and a pacman config that allows like 5+ parallel downloads (dont ask me why thats not the default, or at least wasnt when i installed) updating is decently fast. until you start using certain packages from the AUR.

i loved mine but 2 years from launch they stopped all updates. can’t recommend asus at all just for that reason. i havent tried custom roms because a couple years ago when i tried they all had weird issues

i use Termux and just scp/rsync my stuff around.

ideallyi’d use Unison sync inside termux, but it hasnt been packaged and i dont know the first thing about ocaml, so it’d be hard for me to make the needed adjustments to package it.

it definitely taught me about how linux works, at least the parts that are relevant for most users. starting from a clean install without any kind of gui (or common networking tools) really made me understand all the building blocks modern desktop linux uses. sure, installing a full blown desktop environment skips most things, but going with just a window manager and adding required features package by package really does help with understanding, and if a problem does pop up later you’ll know exactly where to look, instead of having to search super generic terms.

most games have never had flicker issues for me on arch/sway with a rtx2070. Steam itself used to be unusable and last i checked was still a bit glitchy, Discord also sucked, but the games always worked fine.

apart from some issues with recognizing the mouse cursor in a few games.

agreed with debian, it’s by far the most stable and no bullshit system i’ve ever used. however, BIG condition: do NOT install .deb files manually. that’s an extremely easy way to break your system. use what’s in the repos, and if it’s not in the repos, use something like flatpak (not sure how well it works for debian since i haven’t used it).

in general though, if you want a stable linux system, just don’t try to install stuff that isn’t packaged in official repos.

that said, i did end up finding open source alternatives for all the software i use often, and don’t use bottles much.

honestly, wine has seemed unreasonably complex to me in the past and i haven’t tried since. but Bottles offers a nice easy to use GUI, i do recommend giving it a shot. at least on arch linux it’s super easy to install via the AUR.

the only issue is some apps need additional dependencies which can take some searching to figure out what exactly is needed. the arch wiki lists a bunch of them though, and often the error messages bottles shows will point you the right way.

i’ve gotten almost every .exe to work with it, most immediately, some after a short bit of tinkering.