Not the original guy, but I went to Fedora (Silverblue) first, because I heard so much about Ubuntu being shit and basically slightly less corpo infested Windows. I had Fedora recommended to me by a person I know + privacy guides recommends it I think.

I just wanted a simple distro that is seen as privacy respecting for anyone who didn’t want to go into the deep end of Tails OS and the like.

Silverblue is atomic, which is typically advertised as “Noob-proof” since you can’t really touch the OS and system files itself. But I like to tinker a little and found it frustrating to work around, so I ended up going with regular Fedora Plasma KDE. Been a year or almost 2 now and it’s been great. My biggest “normal” issue was bluetooth and touchpad issues. Bluetooth issue was caused by not doing a full power cycle after a kernel update, and touchpad was randomly disabling itself in settings for some reason… The other issues were needing specific software for class purposes like VirtualBox (signing keys and shit for virtualization ig) or coding apps (had to start it in terminal).

Wifi blew up once and tried to troubleshoot to no avail, a reboot or two later and it fixed itself 🙏

Gen Z who was raised with Chromebooks since 5th grade (around 10 yrs old) here!

We definitely got Parental Controls on them by the time I got to middle school (6th grade), and it qas fucking egregious. I try to look up scientific or real world things for project purposes like “Barn Swallow”, “Guitara Latina”, or “Sperm Whale” and get my search blocked because of certain “keywords” in them…

By highschool that didn’t really happen anymore, but they probably were still blocking the usual porn sites (I never tried to look that shit up cause ew. And I’m not fucking dumb enough to do it on a school laptop and ESPECIALLY not on their network)

We got our homescreens locked to a preset background, couldn’t touch half the system settings, terminal was completely locked/inaccessible. I think social media sites were also blocked, I used to have to put my (shitty free VPN that had ads, forgive me for being dumb) VPN on to get around the block. But i only ever did that on my phone, not my laptop (still was connected to the School wifi tho).

I was a pretty straight-laced kid throughout school (friends? whomst?) so I never tried to do half of that on my Chromebook, even gaming. By HS I pretty much stopped going to places like coolmathgames, which is probably what teachers are complaining about. I do remmber people somehow making an entire google slide of links to bootlegged games (really shitty laggy Fnaf), can’t remember the website name tho.

Tbf, the IT capabilities probably vary vastly across school districts, and the schools themselves.

Misskey/Sharkey being similar to Pinterest??? Has Pinterest changed that much in about 4 years, cause that’s when I last used it (ads ad AI art chased me off)

Miss/Sharkey is more like Twitter but if it was pretty/customizable and with a pinch of overstimulation imo. The JP origins is what gives it the overstimulation (the reaction emotes, oh my god…)

I don’t really think any popular Fedi platform is similar to Pinterest tbh.

Cool. Did anything change with our healthcare?

I’m not shedding any tears over that shitty CEO getting killed but people act like everything magically got better because a CEO died.

Legislation is the only thing that can actually stop the next hydra head from popping up. People with wealth and power will easily outpower peasants. How many rebellions ended with another tyrant in place?

Felt this 😭😭😭

I bought 4 1TB drives way back around like 2020-2021 I think, and it was a little under $100, which I covered with an amazon giftcard. It’s been running lovely in my mirror zfs raid for about half a year now. Okay well the shitty Orico drive bay has caused some overheating but otherwise the drives themselves are fine.

Now, like 1 of those drives would be about $70-80+ at cheapest…

Sure, I’ll give you that. But I would assume a person wouldn’t put their phone/laptop password in a password manager as you use it every day. And if you were really planning crazy shit you should keep it on your local device and not posted to your Twitter account imo.

Edit: Even better? Keep your passwords saved locally. Still have to crack the phone to even ask you to open your manager app.

Motherfucker I said that biometric ISN’T protected and that you SHOULD go password only for that exact reason. ANd I wasn’t talking about warrants and subpoena, that falls under the 4th Amendment. 5th is self incrimination.

Passwords are protected under the 5th Amendment, as it’s something “from your mind” that would fall under self-incriminating. Hence why people say if you’re at a protest with your phone put it into lockdown mode so you have to input a code/password to open it as they can legally force you to use your thumb/face to unlock it.

We’re pretty fucked up as a nation right now, but in order to repeal or nullify a previous amendment you’d have to get a fuckton of states or representatives to agree and we literally can’t agree on shit, so it’ll never happen (Hell, Prohibition is literally the only amendment we’ve ever repealed in 250 years).

No law can revoke that and you’d have an easy case if someone did force you to give passwords.

It really bothers me that this shit is never mentioned or gets drowned out whenever people talk about Framework laptops. We should absolutely name and shame anyone who donates to alt-right nutheads that sincerely believe in “White replacement” bs.

Mailbox offers a secure version for your email that’s automatically encrypted, but also supports PGP for your reg email too (what I do). Proton is only encrupted when mailing other Proton users anyway, right? I say this as a former Proton Mail user.

It’s unfortunately not truly FOSS, it’s still closed source. But literally every map app with traffic data is so, I just use it to avoid Google… Use Aurora store to get it.

I think people should have to lurk and contribute a little before just advertising.

I don’t think we should promote closed-source apps on here at all, at least not in it’s own post. For exampke, many people here talk about Symfonium when mentioning their music client that they use to listen to their selfhosted music, and that app is not FOSS at all.

If an app is mostly open with some proprietary bits, then we can discuss. I’m perfectly fine with fully OSS apps that aren’t free, as the devs do deserve to be paid. As gnu.org states, Free means “Freedom” not “Free beer.” While I typically only use “free beer” type FOSS apps, I do occasionally donate to ones I love/use often, but we know that devs struggle to keep their projects afloat.

Holy shit I almost thought I posted a comment and then somehow forgot about it. Are you me?

Ok well, I don’t really listen on TV nor do I have a music assistant, but I do have Jelly on my TV for my family.

But I LOVE Feishin so much, it’s absolutely gorgeous.

Huh? I did a speed test with Air and it was relatively the same before and after connecting. Tbh it was just one test, I wasn’t really checking super hard. But I had it running in gluetun for my Qbittorrent and it works like a dream. Way easier to port forward too, I fucking hated Proton for swapping it every docker reload.

I despise most things about AI but people should be allowed to have the choice to use it if they want lol.

I do think it should be disabled by default / opt-in, but you’re dumb if you think that “it just shouldn’t exist!”

I’m pretty sure i got the whole article:

Sweden has reached its target of fewer than five percent of the population smoking regularly – and is consequently considered “smoke-free”.

“It is an incredible development that a harmful behaviour can be reduced to this extent,” Mats Ramstedt, head of research at the Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs (CAN), told the TT news agency.

For the first time in CAN’s surveys, fewer than five percent smoke regularly in Sweden, according to the 2025 annual report on smoking and snus habits, which means that the political goal for Sweden to be smoke-free by 2025 has been achieved.

The proportion of daily smokers dropped from 16 to 4.8 percent between 2003 and 2025, according to the new report.

“It is not just the proportion of smokers that has decreased; we also see that people are smoking fewer cigarettes. Given the health risks associated with cigarette smoking, this is obviously very positive,” said Ramstedt.

Smoking has been declining in Sweden since the late 1970s (for comparison: in the early 1980s, over 30 percent of Swedes smoked daily), thanks to broad preventative work, according to Ramstedt.

“The first and perhaps most vital point is that accessibility has been drastically reduced. It is both harder and more expensive to smoke today,” said Ramstedt, citing taxes and real-term prices rising by 45 percent since 2003.

FROM THE LOCAL’S ARCHIVE: How Sweden is close to stubbing out smoking for good

He also credited efforts made to deter people from starting to smoke in the first place, such as advertising bans, and to make it easier for people to quit.

Meanwhile, Sweden has seen a sharp increase in the use of snus in recent years – the small nicotine pouches popular in Sweden – a factor that the tobacco industry often highlights as a major reason for Sweden’s low proportion of smokers.

“One must keep in mind that smoking had already decreased sharply before we saw this rise in snus. In a way, that argues against it being a decisive factor in reducing smoking,” said Ramstedt, but conceded that more research into its role could provide useful insights. “My assessment is that there is a lack of studies proving this, and I would maintain that it is primarily down to preventative measures.”

My state is on here but it’s not my district rep. But fuck them anyway.

Ente and Immich are great for photos, although Immich is meant to be self-hosted (not sure about Ente). I use mailbox.org + Thunderbird email client and both support pgp encryption for emails, it’s awesome and only cost 12€ a year for the light plan (2G). People like Tuta but it doesn’t support 3rd party mail clients like Thunderbird. Maybe Proton mail.

I have a drive bay attached to my network that I’ve been using as my “GDrive” but I need to do an actual off-site backup location… You can self host Nextcloud for storage. I think I’ll use backblaze as a backup for my immich photos, all the other shit means nothing to me if it blows up cause I’ll just redownload it. You could also just encrypt your files with Cryptomator and then upload the encrypted files to Gdrive.

Yeah, I honestly think that initial “Hey, don’t do this” talk is better in advance. I remember getting my ass whooped for saying “Fuck” as a kid when I literally didn’t know what the word meant and my parent put the video on in the first place.

Educate your kids on what isn’t allowed in the first place. If they do something bad that you didn’t tell them in advance, then explain why the action is bad, not to do it again, and that you will be checking/monitoring for that behavior. Then you can at least be fully justified in any future punishments because you gave a warning.

Punishments for initial mistakes and unknown wrongs just suck, and they kinda stick with you 🫤

I distinctly remember my elementary school not being able to call my parents because their area code wasn’t the local area code but okay.

Phones should be allowed in schools, just take them before class starts and hand them back after.