matlag

XMPP is so bad it was the baseline for Whatsapp. You know: that minor platform that feels like IRC and never took off. A lot of the techno around you are old stuff that evolved, “new” techno usually comes with new unexpected issues. Then they mature, get better and… old?

I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but my feedback would be: drop that chart!

It’s daunting, it’s going to freak out many newbies. Too much choice kills the choice.

You have one “default” at the bottom, Mint, so stick to that. Tell the newbies they can switch anytime to something else once they’re a bit more comfortable with the Linux-world. And if I’m not mistaken, you can install and try the main DEs with Mint also. Or you can recommend Ubuntu, or any other newbie friendly distro. Just pick one and don’t lose them over what they could see as an important difficult decision before they even get started.

Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.

Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…

In theory, yes, you could make a mess, and any firmware is supposed to be certified to allow the device to be used.

In practice, this has been a convenient excuse to keep a whole chip with a separate OS in every smartphone, and it is very difficult to isolate from the rest of the system (see Graphene OS efforts).

I say all firmware should be opensource. Whether you’re allowed to change them or not is a separate question… for now.

This might be an unpopular post but so’ll be it: Mastodon is the existing proof that Meta could kill Mastodon any time.

Mastodon was using a protocol compatible with GNU Social: OStatus, but some features were quickly added without consideration for other implementations.

So when per-post privacy were introduced, for example, they were very public on GNU Social, because their devs had no idea this was coming. And GNU Social was blamed for it.

https://privacy.thenexus.today/mastodon-a-partial-history/#mastodon-gnu-social-and-the-early-fediverse

Instead of having more users, GNU Social is now (almost?) dead. Of course it’s not just because of the above. But it wouldn’t have been set back so much without Mastodon.

Now, Mastodon is opensource, has more features and some compatible implementations. I run Pleroma myself. But why would one think Meta could not cripple them both?

Don’t know if that covers your need, but at least their angle is privacy:

https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/

For example:

https://farm.bot/

There are others. Plenty of small/medium businesses just don’t have the resources to develop small computers and the matching software stack. In that regards, the RPi is an appealing choice.

Besides panicking a few regional managers, this can only be a bad news for Meta if other countries, or even better, the EU follows them.

100kUSD/day for a 5.4M inhabitants country, that scales to 8.3M$/day for the total 450M inhabitants EU has (yes: I know that’s not how it works, I’m doing a very gross approximation here).

That’s would be 3B$/year. Now we’re talking!

After a terrorist attack, emergency state was declared (nomally used in case a war actually put the survival of the country’s institutions in jeopardy). First use of the extra-powers: assign some targeted pacific climate activist at home so that there would not be a protest during the COP.

Anti-terrorism bill was passed some time ago. It was used to repress the protests against the retirement bill, literally banning anyone from carrying a saucepan in the street (ban of “noise emitting devices”) during a protest.

Climate protesters have been labeled “eco-terrorist” even though they never put nor attempted to put anyone’s life in danger.

France is under requests from the UN for fixing severe issues regarding right to protest, police excessive violence and systematic racism in the police force. France is taking a dire path, joining Hungaria, Turkey in authoritarism, maybe evolving to a clone of Russia, as there were hint of a will to change the constitution to let Macron run again after his second mandate.

I have 0 trust this bill is intended to be used for severe crimes. It’s another attempt to control and repress.

It IS literally a Linux distribution, based on Debian with a layer on top of it for easy admin and managing applications. So you don’t install it on Linux, you just install it.

So, if you don’t know yet what you’re doing, I wouldn’t host anything critical yet, but I’m using:

https://yunohost.org/

And so far, very few troubles. It’s a layer on top of Debian to ease self-hosting. Comes by default with email and XMPP server. You can add Nextcloud and many other services as you wish.