No worries. Your post was well-written. And I’m glad people could offer some advice. Not even the proficient Lemmy users get all of this right all the time. I just figured I’d drop you a comment in case the mods take action, to spare you the effort to also learn about the modlog and how to look up their note… But seems it wasn’t necessary 😄

Sorry, I don’t have an answer to your question, but two other communities that would fit: !homelab@lemmy.world and !homelab@selfhosted.forum

They’re both not really active, though. And someone asked about OpenSense hardware before and didn’t get any answers…

Just writing this so you have some other places to look up, in case your post gets deleted, I think you’re technically in the wrong community here. As per rule 3 in the sidebar, this community isn’t about hardware questions.

Sorry, I’m not not able to help with that. Maybe there’s a limit how many old messages your server or client syncs?

I suppose it’s old drama by now. And I didn’t check if there’s new one in the meantime. As of now, both projects are active. Both have a userbase. Judging by the lasst commits, it’s still the case that Tuwunel is a one-man-show and Continuwuity is a community project.

I think whether you do closed source software is a personal choice. Based on considerations of your application. Like money, of if you want to rely on a company and how well they do their job, if it’s still gonna be around in 7 years. If you can customize it enough to suit your needs. Or you base the decision on ideology.

I’ve been using Yunohost on the NAS. And it’s simple, works well and is pretty reliable, I didn’t get any major issues for many years now. (And in general, community maintained open-source software has served me well. So that’s what I do.)

Downsides as a proficient Linux user are: You can’t just mess with the config while the automatic scripts also mess with the config. You need to learn how they’re set up and work around that. Hope software has a config.d or overrides directory and put your customizations there. Or something will get messed up eventually. And you can’t just change arbitrary things. The mailserver or SSO or reverse proxy and a few other components are tightly integrated and you’re never gonna be able to switch from postfix to stalwart or something like that. Or retrofit a more modern authentication solution. It is a limiting factor.
And YunoHost doesn’t do containers, so I doubt it’s what you’re looking for anyway.

I’m a bit split on the entire promise of turnkey selfhosting solutions. Some of them work really well. And they’re badly needed to enable regular people to emancipate themselves from big tech. Whether you as an expert want to use them is an entirely different question. I think that just depends on application. If you have a good setup, that might be better suited to your needs. And if done right might be very low maintenance as well. So switching to a turnkey solution would be extra work and it might not pay off. Or it does pay off, I think that really depends on the specifics.

Phones, sure. I -personally- think it’s massively problematic how the phone operating system ecosystem is basically a monopoly of two companies. And I almost can’t do my paperwork or get a doctor’s appointment or train ticket anymore without accepting to forward my personal information to a list of 40 “partner” companies, a good chunk of them abroad in the USA. And then it’s massively complicated and I need 3 authenticator apps, and they do device verification and SafetyNet to make sure my(?) phone isn’t controlled by me, but Google.

So yes, in reality it’s not how I envision it to be. Phones just do what Google wants them to do and that certainly also includes Gemini AI. All of this is almost impossible to avoid, and it’s getting harder each day. It certainly is that way.

(Same with edge-cases in general. I had to contact modern customer support lately, and that just got way worse than it already was before AI chatbots. We just don’t do edge-cases any more. Everyone needs to get in line, have the same life and same common issues or they’re screwed.)

With Linux, I doubt it. Traditionally it’s a lot about choice. Caters to its user group who (on the desktop) include a good amount of privacy advocates, people with older computers, nerds… I think we’d need some paradigm shift first. Before any of the larger distributions change their defaults. I like to believe we’re relatively safe here. And my biggest issue isn’t AI in itself, but how large, annoying companies shove it down our throats. And that’s really not how Linux works.

I’ve been pondering productivity as well. I once did some AI assisted coding. Took notes and did a similar task after that the old-school way. In that case AI had wasted time, I was faster without. But it’s been a while and AI tools have improved in the last months. So I probably should repeat that experiment. And do it a couple times to get some solid numbers. I find it hard to apply it the exact right way, though. It’d underperform (on me) if I don’t get the prompt right, feed it the right amount of context if there’s a pre-existing project… It’s better at some tasks and not so good at other ones… So with the current state of technology it’s not that straightforward to delegate stuff to AI, and it’d just increase productivity. At least that’s been my previous experience. But we get a plethora of contradicting and weird reports on AI’s performance when used for coding.

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Sure. Sadly I don’t have the proper tools around to do that. And in my case I wasn’t too sad. These devices had 100mbps ethernet and a slow wifi standard. Now they’re on e-waste and I got an upgrade to Gigabit ethernet and 5GHz wifi 😆

Not sure if I get your point. Abstraction is a concept used by IT people to deal with complexity. You’ll use Docker containers in order not to have 200 very specific problems and learn about the intricate details of all of them. Or use a turnkey solution because a working day has a finite amount of hours and you can just not care and have somebody else set the XY value of Postgres to 128 because that’s somehow needed for software M on python x.xx… Of course you’re then not going to learn about these things. It is not “bad”, though, in itself to abstract these issues away from you. Same for the other things I mentioned, networking, virtualization. Abstraction there allows to swap out complex things, do things once and in a clean way because it’s easy to miss things without abstraction and you always need to pay attention to a bazillion of specifics. Also helps with backups, deal with issues because things should break within confined layers, punch above one’s weight, security, do something once and roll it out several times…

I think what you want to avoid is poorly designed or written software. Or poorly done setups. Or not learn about important things. Abstraction is generally something you want, especially with complex things.

every phone

Not every one. I have GrapheneOS on the phone. And Linux on the computer. Like some nerds here. And there hasn’t been any assistant popping up on mine…
Also don’t think whether that’s going to be built into any major operating system is much of an opinion. That’s more a fact 😉

But yeah, whether that’s useful… I’ve read all kinds of opinions on that. I think we need more factual data on user efficiency. I’m positive we’ll get some more studies on that.

Maybe try something like YunoHost. That’s a web server Linux distribution. And it’s supposed to take care of the set up and come with somewhat safe/secure defaults. You’d need some kind of server, though. Or run it in a VM to isolate it from your home services. They have PeerTube, Lemmy, PieFed installable with a few clicks. (There are other projects as well, Yunohost isn’t the only option to help with the set up.)

But yes, some kind of isolation is probably nice with web services. Also from the home network, and from storage with personal data on it.

Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.

You mean AMD or Intel? I can’t find any variant with an ARM processor. According to the internet, both the Intel and AMD version should work with Linux. My wife actually owns the Intel X13 Gen1. With Linux Mint Debian edition on it. Seems to work fine, she didn’t ever complain. Just be aware these are 5 year old devices. She paid 404€ for a refurbished one. We went with the 16GB RAM option, since that’s soldered and not upgradable. Also had an i7 processor at that price point.

If that traffic is going through an encrypted Wireguard tunnel, I don’t see a reason to encrypt it a second time. Judging by your description, it’s already encrypted on transport between the router and VPS. HTTPS would add nothing there. It will however add encryption within your DMZ, if you expect something nefarious going on within your DMZ.

Well, I tinkered around a bit with Speech Note which has a good amount of features and is easy to install as a Flatpak. I think it has an option to do this, but requires a bit off fiddling, an extra tool and permissions for the Flatpak. I didn’t find any software with a particularly good integration into the Desktop, though.

Also read about Blahst but didn’t try it yet. Maybe that one is an option.

Good question. maybe I was wrong, I’ve used Debian for so long, I’ll either just update it or use the advanced installer… It’s certainly on the installation media now. Not sure if it copies it over to the system. Would make sense, though if it did…

Good luck! And don’t forget to add the non-free-firmware repo and maybe the other additional ones if you need them. A standard Debian comes without. And if you’re following an old tutorial, that might not cover the split between non-free and non-free-firmware which happened somewhat recently in Debian terms. Their own documentation is good and up to date, though.

Me too. I guess the internet is going to change soon anyway. AI Slop is going to displace a lot of things. And these cooking recipes don’t really work. So there will be a demand for genuine, human content. And the only way to tell is if you have some connection to the creator. So we might see a revival of human connection online. At least that’s what I hope will happen… And seems lots of people are fed up with social media as well.

Nah. She doesn’t. And I think the days of Blogs and personal websites are mostly a thing of the past. These days people doomscroll on Instagram. But I have some fond memories of the good old times as well. I used to have friends (of different genders) who would write publicly about technology, sugar-free recipes, I knew someone who did styling videos on Youtube. But that toned down as we all grew older and got other things to do, and the internet changed as well.

Whatever people do on computers… Surf websites, do emails, online-shopping, organize documents, vacation pictures, paperwork, type letters, draw diagrams, watch videos, do video conferences, stuff related to hobbies… I mean she isn’t a programmer or designer by trade or anything like that, but computers are just useful tools for a lot of things.

Hmmh. I mean I mostly play old games and they tend to work better in Wine/Proton anyway, so I don’t have a virtualized Windows. I ran into some annoyances with other operating systems though, since most mundane desktop environments do lavish graphics these days. Or I’d randomly watch a Youtube video in a guest system and that’d use a lot of CPU with a recent codec and full HD or more… I guess all of this really depends on what people do with their virtualized machines, though.