All of them. Unless someone on board took a banana with them.

For whatever reason ISPs tend (at least in here) to be pretty bad at keeping their DNS services up and running and that could cause issues you’re having. Easy test is to switch your laptop DNS servers to cloudflare (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1) or opendns (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) and see if the problem goes away. Or even faster by doing single queries from terminal, like ‘dig a google.com @1.1.1.1’.

If that helps you can change your router WAN DNS server to something than what operator offers you via DHCP. I personally use opendns servers, but cloudflare or google (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) are common pretty decent choices too.

Depends on what you’re looking for, but for server use even a bit older hardware is just fine. My proxmox server has Xeon 2620v3 CPU and it’s plenty for my needs. For storage I went with SAS-controller, controllers are relatively cheap and if you happen to have a friend in some IT department you might get lucky when they replace hardware. RAM is a pain in the rear, but 8GB DDR4 rdimms work still just fine (if someone is interested I have few around)

Personally I wouldn’t pay current prices for new hardware, specially if it’s for hosting. A bit older, but server rated, components give a lot more value for your money.

This, in turn, is different from APT, which is not Debian’s repository, but Debian’s package manager. So, technically, I could write “sudo apt install (anything)” to get any piece of software from Debian’s repository indeed, but I could also use that command to get software from somewhere else also in the form of a Deb package but which would not have come from Debian itself.

With apt (and discover which uses apt/dpkg at the background) you can install anything from repositories configured on your system. So, if you want to use apt to install packages not built by Debian team you’ll need to add those repositories in your system, so they don’t just appear out of nothing.

Some software vendors offers .deb packages you can install which then add their own repository on your system and then you can ‘apt install’ their product just like you would on native Debian software and the same upgrade process which keeps your system up to date will include that ‘3rd party’ software as well. Also some offer instructions on how to add their repository manually, but with a downloaded .deb it might be a bit easier to add repository without really paying attention to it.

Spotify is one of the big vendors who have their own repository for Debian and Ubuntu and with Ubuntu there’s “ppa” repositories, which are basically just random individuals offering their packages for everyone to use and they are generally not going trough the same scrutiny than official repositories.

Also apparently really high in protein compared to human food.

So creating an onlyfans account using Grok is profitable?

Finland has similar thing, but it is not capped. There’s a ton of 100 000+€ fines given around here. Obviously with Musk it would be a bit different, since the fine is based on actual income, not some imaginary monopoly money on the stock market.

This does not apply to “installing software”.

So it doesn’t apply when I click the big button which says ‘Install’ on F-Droid app on my phone?

And it does come with risk,

Just like installing software from the ‘secure’ Google Play store.

Installing software is installing software, no matter where you get that software from. That’s it. You can try to twist that with nuances on terminology or invent new ones, the end result is that an piece of software is installed on the system and nothing more. It doesn’t matter if the software came from play store, f-droid, steam, windows store, shady google drive link or the pirate bay. It doesn’t matter if you’re a power user or never seen a smartphone before in your life.

Sure, there might differences in potential security, compatibility, licensing and whatever, but it is still a piece of software being installed.

“installing apps from outside the Google Play Store”

To me that implies it’s somehow different than just installing software. You could say ‘install from play store’ or ‘install from f-droid’ if you need to specify which app repository you should use, as that what it is. Sideloading might be an appropriate term if you need to upload apk to your device via USB-cable from your PC, which the term originally meant.

to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify

[Citation needed]

From the article:

This “advanced flow” is for power users and enthusiasts who “want to take educated risks to install software from unverified developers.” Google says it was “designed carefully to prevent those in the midst of a scam attempt from being coerced by high pressure tactics to install malicious software.”

Sure, the term itself comes from 1990s, but lately specially Google tries to twist that to mean something only ‘power users’ do and it comes with a ‘educated risk’.

Do you consider installing games to you PC from Steam sideloading too? What about downloading Firefox installer? It is installing software on your computer, no matter if that computer happens to be in a cellphone form factor, and always has been. Sideloading is a made up term to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify even bigger walls on the ecosystem garden and control how people use their own devices.

“This is Android’s new ‘advanced flow’ for INSTALLING apps without verification”. Sideloading is such a bullshit term made only to confuse consumers. They can wrap that in sparkling wrapper, but it’s still security theater at best and definetly misleading. Apps from F-Droid or any other app ‘store’ are not any less safe than the ones at googles own offering.

No deduplication, encryption nor support for non-linux operating systems for a start.

Not from my wife if I lose our photo collection which has been building up since we got our first digital camera 20ish years ago.

I have dynamic dns address and a handful of CNAME records on my domains pointing on that dyndns-address so I can use ‘proper’ names with my services. When my public IP changes it takes a few minutes for the records to update, but it usually happens only when my router reboots so it’s been good enough for me.

Also I use two separate dyndns providers so there’s likely at least one working DNS entry to my network.

I’ve always liked the way slashdot handles comment rating. It’s a bit complicated, so maybe that’s why it’s not adopted elsewhere, but it gives a much more fine grained options instead of just up/downvote.

ISP obviously don’t see the traffic inside your own network, regardless of the router used. But as soon as you open any kind of connection over the internet, incoming or outgoing, your ISP has to have some information about it to route the traffic. DNS over TLS doesn’t hide that your browser opens connections to servers, they can see if you use wireguard to access your services (not which ones, just in general that there’s traffic coming and going) and even if you use VPN for everything they can still see the encrypted VPN traffic and, at least technically, apply pattern recognitions on that to figure out what you’re doing. And if you use VPN then your VPN provider can do the same than your last-mile internet provider, so you’ll just move the goal by doing that.

Last-mile ISP is going to be a middleman on your network usage no matter what you use and they’ll always have at least some information about your usage patterns.

ISP can see your traffic anyways regardless if their router is at your end or not. In here any kind of ‘user behavior monitoring’ or whatever they call it is illegal, but the routers ISPs generally give out are as cheap as you can get so they are generally not too reliable and they tend to have pretty limited features.

Also, depending on ISP, they might roll out updates on your device which may or may not reset the configuration. That’s usually (at least around here) made with ISPs account on the router and if you disable/remove that their automation can’t access your router anymore.

So, as a rule of thumb, your own router is likely better for any kind of self hosting or other tinkering, but there’s exceptions too.

Pretty much all ‘major’ distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSuse…) have 20+ years on their belt and none of those are not likely to go away any time soon. Some niche variants of those might vanish, but the main distributions will be there.

You are on the right track. Installing Debian packages don’t require password to access shared libraries but to write into system wide directories. That way you don’t need to install every software separately for every user. Flatpacks are ‘self sufficient’ packages and thus often way bigger, since they don’t generally share resources.

From security point of view there’s not much difference in every day use for average user. Sandboxed flatpacks can be more secure in a sense that if you harden your system properly they have limited access to the underlying system, but they can be equally unsafe if you just pull random software from a shady website and run it without any precautions.

Flatpacks tend to have more recent versions of the software as they can ‘skip’ the official build chain and they don’t need to worry about system wide libraries. Tradeoff is that the installations are bigger and as flatpacks run on their own little sandbox you may need to tinker with flatpack environment to get access to files or devices. Also if you install flatpacks only for your user and you have multi-user setup other users of the machine can’t access your software, which might be exactly what you want, depends on your use case.

Personally I stick with good old Debian packaging whenever possible, I don’t see benefits of containers like flatpack on my own workstation. Newer software releases or using software not included in official repository are pretty much the only exceptions when flatpacks make more sense to me.

But there’s a ton of nuances on this, so someone might disagree with me and have perfectly valid resons to do so, but for me, on my personal computer, flatpacks just don’t offer much.

We need to pick our battles. I don’t see much difference in paying Google for a service than having a Spotify family plan like I do. I know spotify has its own problems and my money would be more ethically spent on some other service, but with everything else going on life I can’t be arsed to switch to anything right now. For me it gives enough value for the money spent and that’s good enough for now.