WhatsApp requires that you have a mobile device (Android or iOS) connect through the official client at least once every two weeks. They also monitor for “suspicious” API usage, and will ban accounts for using their service wrong (though it is very uncommon and often temporary).

The only mostly FOSS third party solution I am aware of is the mautrix-whatsapp bridge. The developer of that bridge also created Whatsmeow, a WhatsApp Golang library.

mautrix-whatsapp requires a mobile device to connect using the official WhatsApp app. It pretends to be a WhatsApp Web client, and allows you to send and recieve WhatsApp messages on Matrix. The bridge (effectively) requires hosting your own Matrix homeserver, so it’s not a simple solution.

The company that now owns SteamDB has this bolded on their front page:

We acquire. We amplify. We conquer.

It can’t really get more dystopian than that.

NexusMods themselves went to absolute shit, requiring an account for stuff like downloading mods, and getting a premium subscription for basic features like “Instant downloads”, “Viewing more mods per page”, and “The ability to choose a preferred download server”.

SteamDB used to provide a completely free (in price) service, with no strings attached. This was by far the most common usecase of the service. Seeing the history of NexusMods and the company that owns it, this will change. The moment SteamDB requires an account for previously public info, or even a premium subscription, is the moment the service becomes unusable for most. Effectively, SteamDB is marked for death.

Or no desktop environment at all. Depending on your needs, you can get GUI base usage down to under 100MB. Usually you’ll sit much higher than that though, to support many of the features you need like audio.

Check whether your BIOS settings show the system clock UTC or adjusted to your timezone.

Windows stores hardware clock time in your local timezone. Other operating systems usually store it in UTC. If you’re dual booting, this could cause issues.

It’s also possible that saving the current time to the hardware clock in silverblue/secureblue is misonfigured in some way.

For backups, see if there’s support in rclone. You can set up encryption in rclone (crypt remote) as an overlay to other storage locations.

Once you encrypt your own backups, the privacy of the cloud storage provider doesn’t matter much. The main things to consider are price, storage capacity, and reliability.

Ubuntu Pro requires users (both individuals and enterprises) to register with Canonical to receive security updates.

Microsoft is the company that approved the software to automatically download and run as admin when a specific device is plugged in. The OEM submitted malware and Microsoft approved it. Both are at fault for letting malware download and run on your device.

In the case of vulnerabilities, MS is fully aware of this happening frequently and has announced they want to do something about it, but hasn’t actually done anything about it.

Monitors don’t need drivers. Your GPU needs drivers, and you might need color correction for your monitor.

Microslop decided that any device that is plugged in might need drivers. They allow device manufacturers to specify an arbitrary program to be downloaded and executed by Windows Update, any time a device they make is plugged in.

The difference isn’t digital vs physical. Either medium can have DRM. It’s whether you own your copy or not.

Physical DRM like the classic dial-a-pirate is owned by you. You can choose to hand someone a copy of the game and the physical DRM, and they can play it. Nobody can take that right away from you.

Online DRM will always have the flaw of someone being able to take away your rights, for any reason. Thus, you don’t own a copy of the game. Since digital games can’t have physical DRM, the only way to truly own a digital copy of a game is DRM-free.

No actually, that would be impressive. The DS is barely capable of decoding video. Getting that to work in real time, over the network, and low latency is a huge technical achievement.

This is just a text input and output connected to a remote machine.

Consoles have really been getting closer to more standard hardware over the last years. The WiiU was a mostly custom PowerPC box, with a proprietary version of wifi for the gamepad, and including hardware specifically to run Wii games. The Switch was a barely modified nvidia shield, with bluetooth wireless controllers. The PS3 had a fully custom CPU, and old models included PS2 hardware for backwards compatibility, the PS4 is x86_64 with a custom AMD GPU.

For the PS4/PS5, the majority of effort on running Linux is in getting it to boot in the first place. While some hardware does require patches to existing drivers (like mesa on PS4), or sometimes fully custom drivers (like the CPU fan on PS4), other hardware is completely standard, over a standard interface. Like the HDD and Blu-Ray drives on the PS4.

The big difference is that a game console is “allowed” to deviate from standards, as it does not need to be compatible with anything outside the control of the manufacturer. This results in often small differences that require changes to a kernel which wouldn’t work on any other device.

The biggest reason why emulation is hard, is often no longer the custom hardware like it used to be, but the OS and other fully custom standards like a graphics API. The structure of games is completely different too. The old “ship the drivers on the game disc” like on the Wii no longer holds true on modern consoles, and emulators don’t need to ensure the exact timing of an optical drive matches to get a game to work.

There have been some attempts to get modern console games to work through kernel patches and translation layers, see horizon-linux and fpPS4, proving just how close modern console hardware is to standard PCs.

All that being said, I don’t think SteamOS on PS5 would work for multiple reasons. It’s extremely difficult to get the process simple enough for the average consumer, especially with Sony quickly patching any exploits required to boot it. It’s also not in Valve’s business interest to make it easier and explicitly supported to buy a cheaper and more powerful standardized machine. As they would just be creating a direct competitor to the Steam Machine.

I have a setup similar to this, but not for ddos protection. If I were to get ddossed at a network level, my home connection wouldn’t feel much of it, as my VPS quickly gets overloaded. I have been “ddossed” at an application level though, I hate AI web scrapers. Since the entire line from VPS to my home network is 1gbps, that alongside most of my server cpu resources got oversaturated with fake traffic.

(I say ddosed in quotes, because I’m not sure of the intentions of these AI webscrapers. Thousands of requests per second on a server that’s usually seeing maybe 5 isn’t “normal” traffic either.)

Since this installed a malicious dependency from NPM (and later with bunjs) in the pre install script, it would need at least complex correlation to catch. Maybe building and installing all AUR packages, which would cost far too much for the Arch team.

Individually and automatically scanning only the PKGBUILDs (the stuff actually on the AUR) would likely not have caught this.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to run a basic scan over every change, but it wouldn’t magically “fix” aur malware.

Not OP but a couple things:

• It’s a full controller, no “only one joystick” like the 2015 model.
• The quality of the IO is great, like the TMR joysticks, good trackpads, gyro, and nice haptics.
• If a PC runs Steam, it supports all the controllers features (in Steam). This isn’t always the case on DS5/xbox controllers.
• The “puck”, despite looking insignificant, makes the experience much better. Unlike Xbox with AA batteries or DS5 with USB-C charging, and both of those with Bluetooth wireless connectivity (by default). The Steam Controller (2026) is fully “pick up and start playing”.

Whether it’s worth the price depends on what you value in a game controller, and how much. For me, the “extra” inputs (mainly back pedals, touchpads, gyro) and accurate sticks (TMR instead of potentiometers) are worth it.

KDE Connect

This is an absolutely bottom of the barrel machine nowadays. You’ll be able to run Linux on it, but nothing is going to run “fast”. Especially not a webbrowser with modern websites.

If you’re actually considering using this machine, the two most important upgrades you can make are SSD instead of HDD, and a bit more RAM (8GB if possible). With the ~2011-2012 CPU (judging by the release date of the iGPU listed) and the mentioned upgrades, you should have a usable (although slow) workstation for light tasks. Without the upgrades, be prepared to wait for things to load.

Individual AppImages still highly depend on system libraries, I’ve seen them often fail to run on older distros, for example due to an out of date system glibc.

Flatpak is not owned by RedHat or systemd. You can use flatpak while avoiding systemd components.

a solution to a problem most people don’t have

I’d say the timeless problem of “I just want to run this app, why doesn’t it work” is solved with Flatpak. People who can compile software themselves are the exception, not the norm. For an average user, an app store that “just works” is great. And for a developer, only being required to target one common runtime simplifies things.

Hoping for another Moonlight/Sunshine moment! Already running Vaultwarden, rbw, and Keyguard. Just need a simple FOSS browser extension for autofill and editing entries.

For context, Moonlight was created first as a FOSS Nvidea gamestream client. Then Sunshine was created as a FOSS server implementation. Later, Nvidia dropped “official” support, now the two projects are a FOSS stack built atop a formerly proprietary protocol.

… Are there others?