Well, I’ve been using Ubuntu for the last 20 years (god, it hurts to say that) and only started playing with NixOS, 3 years ago.
Between the two I like NixOS better, but if I had to choose only one it would probably be Ubuntu. When things break, I know how to fix it. Usually without having to spend 2 hours of reading and trying to understand the documentation.
Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN
You can split your devices traffic, Tailscale traffic through Tailscale, everything else through your masking VPN.
I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.
For that, what I would do is put the masking VPN (like PIA or whatever) on your router (not all routers can do this) and then have Tailscale on the devices or individual services. In theory, everything would still be able to talk to each other (even if your mobile device is not behind the router), but everything that is behind the router would enter and exit their traffic wherever you have the masking VPN set to. Downside of doing this is that EVERYTHING that is behind that router is also behind that VPN which can cause problems with some services, like banking and streaming.
It would also mean that the only way you could host a public service is to have an external VPS acting as a reverse proxy. Cloudflare might also have something that could work around this setup, but I’m not familiar with their offerings.
This setup also doesn’t mask your traffic (origin and destination) from your mobile provider (just your home ISP), but that is a harder nut to crack as they can see, real time, where you are physically, and depending on your device, may have deeper device access anyways. I’m thinking prepaid phones and phones bought from the carrier (at least here in the US) or if your carrier has “asked” you to install an app to manage your account. My assumption is that my mobile provider can see anything I do while I have my phone or tablet with me, and just work around that.
You might want to ask in !privacy@lemmy.ml and !privacy@lemmy.world, as this is more up their alley.
Publicly acknowledged as real? Maybe 2 years. Fairly good evidence something was out there, maybe 30- 40 years. The evidence has been good enough to say something is out there, but it was never good enough to say it was more than highly probable. I remember being shocked when there was a Senate hearing about it a while back.
The idea that aliens might exist goes back a long time though. Here in the US, first major incident I remember was Roswell, back in the 1940’s. There were depictions of strange things going back a lot longer though, vast majority of which can be explained by our modern understanding of science. Some though, not so much.
And yes, it is a distraction, but at this point I’d have to ask “From what?”. Is this (aliens) important? Doesn’t seem like it at the moment, there are bigger problems. Like the administration ignoring orders of both congress and judges. The Epstine files are one example , DHS’s behavior is another.
Hosting for the public, it’s honestly going to depend on how many users you are going to have. Pretty much anything that is light on bandwidth should be doable. Websites, blogs, wikis. XMPP chat servers might work. Matrix might work as well. Adding to your seeding idea, you might seed torrents for any Linux distros you happen to like or build torrent seeds for projects with larger download sizes. I seem to recall a project that would enable you to seed peertube channels as well, though I can’t find the project right now.
If it’s just you and maybe a few family and friends,say over a mesh VPN, what ever you want, though video streaming may be a bit much for that bandwidth. Any other type of personal media should be very doable. Books, music, that sort of thing.
Lack of trust, for the most part. I’ve been screwed over a few too many times for me to rely entirely on someone else. Whether it’s Audible claiming I never bought an audiobook I knew damned good and well I did buy or seeing someone else getting their life made difficult by Google, Apple or Microsoft, or “friends” and family making life difficult, I’ve learned the hard way over the years I can’t rely fully on anything not under my control.
What would you advise i do?
If you can afford to and if what you are looking for is even available (for non-DRM’d download) through legal channels, I advise purchasing the content legally. (Yes, I know what community I’m commenting in… :D ) Doing so supports the artists that make the content.
Otherwise, I would check and see if what you are looking for is on Youtube or in Anna’s Archive. You can download things from Youtube using either yt-dlp (give it a Youtube link) or spotdl (give it a Spotify link and it will download the song, album or playlist from Youtube and tag the songs using Spotify or Musicbrainz metadata). The current addresses to Anna’s Archive can be found on their Wikipedia page.
I also like Usenet, currently, for a lot of the more esoteric, hard to find elsewhere things (like TV shows that don’t have DVD releases and aren’t on Youtube). Just a heads up if you go this route, the Usenet provider “Eternal September”, while free, does not provide access to the groups where binaries (things like video, music, epubs, and pdfs) are posted. They only provide access to the discussion side of Usenet, which has been largely dead for the last 10-15 years. Generally, Usenet access is fairly cheap, as are the nzb trackers needed to download binaries from Usenet.
Torrents don’t require a VPN, however, torrenting does broadcast your IP address for all the world to see if they decide to look. A VPN is used to obfuscate your IP address to minimize the odds of trouble with your ISP, the rightholders (who might sue) or depending on where your are, law enforcement. Just don’t ever use the “free” VPNs that are out there. They tend to be honeypots or malware vectors.
People not seeding things has made bittorrent pretty much useless for anything not currently popular. The only thing I use bittorrent for nowadays is speeding up the download of larger downloads, like Linux install disks. Works well for that. But if there’s not at least 15 seeders for the file your looking for, you may never actually be able to finish downloading the thing.
what did you do when starting out?
I’m getting to be an old fart. I was using Napster (early predecessor to bittorrent, now long dead), IRC and random ftp and gopher sites on a dialup modem in the late 90’s and into the mid 2000’s. Dial-up BBS’s were fading out into obscurity, and I hadn’t really heard of Usenet (even though that was during it’s hayday) and Bittorrent hadn’t been invented yet.
I would take a look at TeamSpeak or Matrix.
Of the two Matrix is probably the closest to Discord.
What the actual fuck.
I’m sure there are flakes that can do that, but I just use the config file, adding things as I find I need them. Flakes weren’t really all that well documented when I first installed it so I never messed around with them. Out of box though, it was fairly decent for relatively simple needs. If I remember correctly, the graphical install could set you up with any of a half dozen different DEs out of the box.
One heads up. While NixOS is a Linux distribution, it is radically different design philosophy from every other Linux distribution I’ve ever used. In some ways better and far easier to setup and maintain, and sometimes, as headache inducing as Gentoo or Arch. Once you have it setup to your liking, though, it has proven incredibly solid and hard to break.
Here’s a redacted copy of my configuration.nix file. I really need to clean it up, reorganize, and remove things I’m not using anymore, but it’s what I’m running on my desktop. Basically hasn’t changed since KDE6 came out something like a year ago. I think the last change I made after that was when I finally added flatpak support.
Might take a look at NixOS. Releases every 6 months and you can pick your DE.
Possibly. I don’t remember that being an option when I was setting things up last time.
From what I’m reading it’s sounding like it’s just acting as a slightly simplified DNS server/reverse proxy for individual services on the tailnet. Sounds Interesting. I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to use on the backend (what happens if Tailscale goes down? Does that DNS go down too?), but for family members I’ve set up on the tailnet, it sounds like an interesting option.
Much as I like Tailscale, it seems like using this may introduce a few too many failure points that rely on a single provider. Especially one that isn’t charging me anything for what they provide.
In my case, most things that I didn’t explicitly make public are running on Tailscale using their own Tailscale containers.
Doing it this way each one gets their own address and I don’t have to worry about port numbers. I can just type http://cars/ (Yes, I know. Not secure. Not worried about it) and get to my LubeLogger instance. But it also means I have 20ish copies of just the Tailscale container running.
On top of that, many services, like Nextcloud, are broken up into multiple containers. I think Nextcloud-aio alone has something like 5 or 6 containers it spins up, in addition to the master container. Tends to inflate the container numbers.
Nice! I hadn’t thought of that.
It’s kinda an ethos thing that goes way back, and Microsoft keeps giving us examples of why it can be a bad idea. Essentially, it boils down to the idea that YOU should be in control of what your system is doing.
Most distros can (including Raspberry OS), and many of them will check for updates automatically, but none that I can think of will install updates automatically unless you purposefully choose to enable that function.
Raspberry OS is, imho, is not really representative of the desktop Linux experience. It’s a bit like Gentoo or Arch. Great OS’s, for their intended use cases.
While RPis with Raspberry OS can be a decent desktop replacement in a pinch (I’ve done it), it’s more intended for learning and experimentation.
If you’re intending to use it as your primary computer, I’d recommend using Ubuntu or Fedora. And running the OS on an USB3 external solid state drive.
With modern UEFI, it’s controlled by both the OS and the UEFI
I haven’t used Windows in a long while, but there is a setting in KDE that allowed me to disable the power button’s short press function and I think the long press as well.
Came in handy for me when my cat decided to start laying on top of my tower. Every now and then she’d decide to slap her paw down on the power button and abort whatever I was working on.
I was cursing the change away from mechanical toggle, and that button’s position on the top of the case, when she started doing that.
I would think they first would have to actually release the feature.
I’m also on SDF’s Mastodon server. Fairly small and largely general purpose. Seems to have pretty good uptime.
Linktree is just a static site with a list of links. You could do the exact same thing using Hugo as a site builder and GitHub Pages for free hosting. All it would cost you is a custom domain name if you wanted one. Not sure activitypub brings anything useful to the table here.
Basically what you want is to turn the linux laptop into a router. Thats doable. I believe Ars did an article on a similar build a couple years ago.
And here it is: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/the-ars-guide-to-building-a-linux-router-from-scratch/
It’s an old build based on an almost 10 year old version of Ubuntu, but quickly glancing through it, I didn’t see anything completely out of date. Version numbers will have changed and perhaps some package names will have changed but it will give you a starting point for further research. You won’t want to cargo cult this build.
I think the main difference is that your internet would be coming in from the wifi interface and going out the ethernet interface rather than the other way around.