Good that they’re fined but I expect it was worth it when you only get a fine that small compared to the branch’s size

I was a bit unsure of contacting them because of self hosting it. Thanks for telling me! I’ll edit the post to add the fix if I/they found a way to resolve it.

I don’t get what you mean by organic process. But sure, if you don’t think many people getting into self hosting would look something up like that, I get that you don’t think it’s worthwhile for a self hosting community being present on those platforms.

It’s fine if you disagree with me, but please keep it civil. The reason I’m saying they won’t go to Lemmy is because those hyperlinks will usually lead to the relevant docs, a couple of blogpost, or Reddit. I personally have never seen a Lemmy or Piefed instance in my search results when I looked up a problem.

To give an example: I went to Google and I put in the query “how to start self hosting on a linux server”, which is what I assume someone getting into it would look up. The top site (skipping the AI response and for some reason, Youtube videos?) was Reddit. That’s why it makes sense to me to offer help on a more conventional platform for people getting into self hosting. The people among them who get into federated services will naturally find their place here. They are not forced either way.

They won’t go to Lemmy. Anybody getting into self hosting will not just know what Lemmy is. Nor will they per se care for FOSS to the same extent you do. So having people helping around on conventional platforms seems perfectly valid to me.

They could always advertise a Matrix room and bridge conversations if the moderators really wanted to as well, instead of isolating themselves.

I personally like Cryptpad. It can be self hosted, but you can also make an acount elsewhere considering you don’t want the hastle of maintaining.

Overleaf can be self hosted too

I was a bit surprised this was mentioned so far down in the comments. Especially since the article is sparse on the details for obvious reasons.

Gnome with a ton of extensions and a Catpuccin theme for gtk apps

I’m mainly going into the negatives because the positives are fewer in number. Though those few do outweigh the negatives I’m about to write about. In my opinion at least

From what I’ve read it’s a lot better than what it used to be, but you can still bump into some weird issues that require more knowledge of your computer (compared to Windows) to get it fixed. Usually it’s audio, Flatpak permission issues or some application that comes preinstalled but crashes anyway. (i.e. Kontact on Fedora’s KDE spin). And in one case NetworkManager just disappeared on the family computer.

Gaming can be an issue, depending on what you like to play. AAA games with an important online component usually don’t work on Linux because of their anti-cheat. Not all of them of course like CS2, Rivals, and Dota 2. It was a bummer since I switched to Linux with the expectation that I’d still be able to keep on playing League, only to see it being unusable after a year. But if your friend group doesn’t play those kind of games (and I got lucky on that part), you’re fine. For example Peak and Gambling with Friends just worked on launch. I didn’t even bother looking at ProtonDB

I’ve seen a lot of people downplay the fact that you may not be able to play the games with invasive anti-cheat. But if that’s the game you (or your friends) like to play, that’s the game you like to play. No shame in that, especially if you don’t care/mind the anti-cheat. It’s your computer, you don’t have to be fully into foss to use Linux and you should (in my opinion) be able to weight the pros and cons yourself.

Another con (for people who just want to use their computer) or pro (for those who like to thinker around) is choice. There are so many distro’s with a ton of DE’s and ways of customising those DE’s where a new user will probably get stuck just deciding what they want to pick. Or you can just as easily look at something more technical and decide what compositor or init system you want to use. It’s a lot and for many users the deeper stuff doesn’t really matter to them.

I wasted* at lot of time tinkering with my Nix configs and my Arch install to not even use either distro anymore. It can get a bit much, especially if the thing you’re tinkering with is your main computer. Now I just have a separate second hand laptop to mess around with now so it doesn’t get in the way of actual work.

All of my most painful issues wouldn’t have been too bad if I just had someone to guide me in the right direction. This became really apparent when a friend of mine bumped into a lot of the same issues I did when he switched. He got his fixed fairly quickly since I was there to explain, for example, what was wrong with his fstab config and why he got into emergency mode because of that.

*It was a ton of fun looking back at it (and educational). But if you go into it with the idea that it’ll help you (in part) with productivity, you’re going to have some regrets with the time you actually spent on it in the moment

Just so people know, Belgium has one-party consent laws regarding the recording of conversations. I’m Belgian, see Art. 314bis in our penal code.

Don’t tell me you actually read through the millions of lines of driver code in the Linux kernel

Heyhey, nice overview, though on the “just works” thing on atomic/immutable distros I want to say that that’s not the case by virtue of a system being atomic.
I’m on Fedora Atomic (which Bazzite layers on) and the codecs you’d expect being on there aren’t because of licensing (just like all of Fedora’s distros).
I also don’t believe Fedora Atomic does anything in particular in regards to drivers. So the advantages you’re talking about are there because of the people who worked on Bazzite.

On breakage, it’s definitely not a bad thing for a system to *gently* push users into installing software in user space and with some isolation, but it’s far from a requirement for a stable system.

And if you’re going to be layering everything anyway (so installing basically only installing using rpm-ostree), you’re not gaining much by choosing an atomic distribution. Those layers can conflict like with any other distro packages

Fedora KDE, which I ran for almost a year, has not given me any issues except for the codecs which I had to install myself.
It’s actually more of a pain to get codecs to work on Fedora Atomic because of how RPM Fusion needs to work with layering (https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/OSTree), which wasn’t an issue on standard Fedora.
So you’ll end up needing to manually updating the repository RPM Fusion repository every 6 months.

Also some software, like Steam, is also a pain to work with when using the Flatpak. \

VanillaOS (which *doesn’t* use rpm-ostree since it’s based on Debian) and Bazzite are both good atomic distros if you really want that, while having those kind of annoyances handled for you.

I have GOS, you can’t remove it unfortunately. Those kind of people are everywhere online but never forget it’s your device. You can do with it whatever the hell you want, regardless of what the “point” of anything is.

I’m currently using a Pixel with GOS on it. But I “went away from Google” (stopped using their services) because I don’t trust them to keep the telemetry about me they store safe. (Or use it in a way I’m fine with).

And altering the physical hardware in a way to spy on a phones users, irregardless of the operating system, isn’t a reasonable concern (I believe you can think of a fair few reasons).

There are very few phones that actually have open firmware, which is unfortunate, but in most peoples cases (like when you don’t trust Google to use your data responsibly) they can accept that risk. They have done it with every other phone they used as well. And those were (probably) a lot less open than Pixels are.

You can also make the more meta-argument that since the police in Catalonia and French law enforcement saw those phones as a threat, you can be sure you have secure phone in your hands.

p.s. This was a lot less concise than I expected. Sorry for the text wall :)

But how does this tie back to your original statement about GOS security and tying itself with Google? The issues you’re raising aren’t even a GOS specific one. I also find it strange to not call it secure because services themselves are reliant on Google’s services. That is not an issue any OS can solve. I say this as someone who does not rely on any Google services on my phone. I also believe you might be conflating security with privacy.

I don’t really see the issue. So you don’t really care about robust and trustworthy hardware. That I get to some extent considering you’re more worried about your data itself. But if you’re flashing your device with GOS, there is no data being shared to Google unless you specifically want to use Google Play Services or the Play Store. Both of which don’t come pre-installed

Edit: I added the if

Just wondering, do you have a problem in the sense that you don’t want to support Google or more that you’re worried the actual hardware is not safe or trustworthy?