Lol, the poor suckers who ever paid for premium in the first place.

So true! Also, productive screentime has been nice. Instead of doomscrolling or mindlessly zoning out to video essays, I’ve been programming, doing some 3D modeling for 3D printing, working on some simple games, and reading long form articles from my own curated news feed.

Ublock Origin, NewPipe, and Grayjay, haven’t seen a YouTube ad in over a decade. 😌

Same, I’ve paid/donated far more for my FOSS than I ever did for proprietary software.

Insert the super fancy Tux for donating more for the FOSS than you would have paid for the proprietary software 🤴

Gaming PC - Nobara (Fedora base with lots of gaming-specifc kernel optimizations baked in.)

Personal laptop - Linux Mint

Business laptop - Linux Mint Debian Edition

Junk/Test laptops - Void

Home lab main hypervisor - XCP-ng (Highly customized Fedora under the hood.)

NAS - TrueNAS (Debian under the hood.)

Virtual servers - Mostly Debian, but a few Alma Linux VMs to get that RHEL experience. Ubuntu Server for my self-hosted gaming servers.

Steam Deck - SteamOS (Valve’s immutable spin of Arch.)

Curse USB and networking, purge that unclean heresy from your computing! Embrace the third temple!

Wish they handled it better, but I knew about this a while ago, and the price is more than reasonable.

A decade without a price hike is extremely generous, especially at how cheap their plan was.

They are a FOSS company that makes a fantastic product I’ve been happy with for years, I’ll gladly pay less than $2 a month to support them. Their server code is licensed with the AGPL, the strongest copyleft license there is, which gives me a lot of confidence.

Worse case scenario, they enshitify down the road, we are protected via the open source implementations. We’ve seen this many times in the past, Red Hat > Alma & Rocky Linux, Citrix Xen Server > XCP-ng, Terraform > Open Tofu.

Pay for your open source software, folks 💖

That’s a big one too, should catch lots of malware in that!

The Mullvad integration allows you to use Mullvad as your VPN for internet browsing while still being on your tailnet.

So normally, running two different VPN services can cause a bunch of problems, if it even works at all. Tailscale’s Mullvad integration fixes that.

Tailscale by itself is an overlay network. It’s literally a second network that your computer is connected to, but instead of it being a physical network with wires, switches, and routers, it’s a virtual network, a network that runs as software.

So imagine your computer right now at home. You plug into your router, and you have a local IP address, something like 192.168.1.20 right? If you run ipconfig on Windows or ip a on Linux, you’ll see your network adaptors listed with what their current IP address is. So if you’re running Windows, you’ll see your physical network adaptor listed with the IP address of 192.168.1.20

When you install Tailscale on that computer and log into your account, then run that command again, you’ll see a new network device listed, and it will have a totally different IP address, like 100.89.113.14

That is your Tailnet IP address, it works just like your “normal” IP address, but instead of it being a physical Ethernet adaptor on your motherboard and plugged into your home router, it is a virtual adaptor (software) running on your computer, connected to the Tailscale network, which has servers all around the world.

When you install Tailscale on a new device, say an old computer that you are using as a Minecraft server. That computer will get a new IP address on your tailnet, say 100.94.65.132

Because both of those machines were added by you to your own Tailnet, they can see and talk to each other by default. Meaning you could run a ping command from your home computer to your Minecraft server’s Tailscale IP, and it will respond.

Because this runs on the internet through Tailscale’s servers, you can do this from anywhere. That’s the “VPN” type functionality you are talking about. No matter where your home computer is, you can still access your Minecraft server because it is on your Tailnet, just as if it were still plugged into your router right next to you.

This is how I access my entire home lab from anywhere in the world. For example, I have a Jellyfin media server (like Plex) that I have a bunch of movies, TV shows, anime on. It’s running Tailscale and is on my Tailnet. I have Tailscale installed on my Android smartphone too.

So if I am staying at a hotel in another state, or visiting my family on the other side of the country, and I want to watch a movie or show that I have on my server all the way back home. I just run the Tailscale app on my phone, then open the Jellyfin app and I see all my home media right there on my phone and can watch it flawlessly. Even though I am at my parent’s house, on a totally different internet connection, 500 miles away from my home.

No, Tailscale is an overlay network. In it’s simplest form, it can act as a VPN. But it does much more than that.

Tailscale installs a virtual network device and allocates IP addresses to any device you install it on and sign in with your tailnet. Think of it as a virtual meshed LAN that runs on top of your physical network.

Tailscale becomes your control plane and provides advanced access control options for all your users and devices.

I use Tailscale and share out that server machine’s tailscale IP with just my gaming buddies.

But if you wanna live dangerously, you can port forward from your router to your internal mumble server.

I’ve got a Mumble server running on a little Linux container in my home lab.

Easy to set up and configure, very stable. Nothing special, it does what it is supposed to do, be a low latency, stable voip system, and it does great.

Waterfox on Mobile has been working well for me so far.

KDE is my favorite, but I’m excited to try Cosmic once it’s a little farther along.

I also love Cinnamon, not because it looks great, or has a ton of customizablity, but because it is so stable. It’s been the best #JustWorks DE in my experience.

Those are the only two I use regularly. Xfce is nice once you get it customized, but it’s kind of a pain to get configured. I don’t have much use for sophisticated tiling, so tiling window managers are just curiosities to me. I’ve played with i3, Sway, Hyprland, and a few others over the years.

I wish I had a use case for them, but alas, all my day to day needs are handled just fine with basic Window snapping, tmux, kitty tabs, and occasionally using a second virtual desktop.

So FOSS Devs using ChatGPT are taking them…how?

Yeah, you can’t, because it’s not claimable, it’s proprietary software, even the “open” models are restricted in their licensing and usability.

Perhaps local models will make some positive difference in the future, but likely not. I suspect that decades down the line, we will see LLMs in a similar light as asbestos or Teflon. Things that were hailed as “miracle products” that seemed amazing at first, but had incredibly destructive side-effects that we only found out about long after the proliferation.

If something is overall destructive to society, I don’t want to “take” it, I want it gone.

I don’t want worker-owned casinos, or online gambling markets, or cigarette companies, I want those things gone. They don’t make us better off or more free, they harm and enslave us.

I’ve been using Graphene for several years and I love it. I could never go back now, Google android feels so incredibly bloated and invasive by comparison.

Double check your backups just to be safe, and then go for it. It’s not hard to revert if you hate it. There is a big of a learning curve, mainly just using the alternative app stores like Accresent, F-Droid, etc.

But once you spend a bit of time getting your apps installed and your system set up the way you like, you’ll love it.

First off, the luddites were right back in the day.

Second, just because you can use something effectively doesn’t make it good in general.

There are people who can have multiple credit cards for years and never carry a balance, or walk into a casino with $100, lose it all, and quit right there.

But most people can’t, and being one of the few that can doesn’t make it safe or good overall. Credit cards and casinos are still predatory and a detriment overall to the population.

I puffed a few cigs back in high school and college to see what all the fuss was about, didn’t get it. But I personally know multiple people that did the same thing, got hooked almost immediately, and took years to quit. Cigarettes are bad for you and highly addictive. The fact that they never hooked me doesn’t change that.

Third, I’m not sure how using LLMs is “fighting against big tech.” unless you just mean using their tools to build FOSS more effectively.

But that’s the whole point, it’s not at all clear that LLMs enable that for most people. In fact, there’s already quite a bit of data to indicate the opposite. That using LLMs results in worse code, worse development of skills like critical reasoning and problem solving, worse productivity, worse security, and undeniable environmental harm.

Awesome to hear!

+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.

It’s my #1 “just works” distro

Why not both? 🤓