From experience, older thinkpads usually sell for cheap, come with an inbuilt monitor, and are built sturdy. Highly recommend.

Random duckduckgo search brought me to this product. Maybe they are not comercially viable yet?

Ya, looked into it and I’m wrong. I still think there is potential but…

• Most popular messaging apps: signal doesn’t show up in top 6 (caveat: Jan 2023 but I don’t think trends changed drastically)
• Signal download numbers: complete flatline with massive spike in Jan 2021

Telegram is way bigger than I thought. Its bigger than snapchat. 😯

I think you’re right?

I also think they’re on the right track (and a better track than apps like telegram - lots of negative social baggage). They really have gotten much farther than any other privacy focused apps.

I don’t know, maybe I have a more optimistic view of the situation. It feel like they’re knocking on the door of going fully mainstream.

Signal: Because I want better messaging, and somehow they already achieved some adoption.

Firefox: If Firefox can somehow make their browser miles ahead of chrome, I think that’d be just plain good for the world.

Gitea/Forgejo: I think Github is another one of these centralized platforms that’s pretty ripe for disruption (and gitlab is just not gonna do it).

Lemmy: It’d be amazing to have all the kinks ironed out of lemmy.

Mastodon: Same thing as lemmy. Get social media out of the hands of big companies.

Mail-in-a-box: I want to be able to host my own email if I want to. Proton is great, but isn’t email supposed to be an open standard?

Framework: Not exactly a software project, but man I’d love to see them get the time to push out a ton of great different products and really spark the right to repair movement. It’s the first device I was actually excited to buy.

Linux Mint: I don’t use mint, but it seems like one of the most user friendly distros. I would love for them to make everything perfect and create a seamless experience (and really make a year of the linux desktop). I also think it would be great to just have one clear frontrunner for new users.

Coreboot: Make firmware open source? Yes please.

Truly Open Source LLM: I really don’t want this tech to be in just the hands of just a big company. I’d love for there to be an LLM that has not only it’s weights open, but the full dataset, training methods and everything open.

I think when you just get 10 years of dev time, you get an opportunity to push a project ahead of all it’s competitors. It is kind of interesting to get to pick and choose a project to be the frontrunner (even if they aren’t currently).

I see. On the surface, that seems to make sense. I might need to rethink how I configure my batteries.

First off, I think you’re completely right in that laptop batteries are definitely a non-ideal solution. And, I’m really not an expert in this, so take my words with a grain of salt.

You could mitigate a bit of the dangers by doing some of the following (I only did the first):

• Reducing the max charge level to 50% of the capacity.
• Monitor your batteries health to alert for any discrepancies.
• Switch out your batteries every couple of years (which is super easy without downtime on the aformentioned old thinkpads).

If you are an under $100 budget, there seems to be an argument that maybe you are willing to risk a little bit for that extra power reliability.

To give a different opinion than all the thin-clients, old laptops can be a good choice too. I am a bit preferrential to really nice old thinkpads.

If you buy them used you can get insane prices (~$40) and also you get all the laptop conveniences of a keyboard, screen, battery (for power failure). Also I think the power/performance ratio is pretty much the same to the thin clients.

Thanks for the correction, edited the post.

In the spirit of selfhosting, you can also host headscale. Its an open source implementation of the proprietary tailscale control plane.

It allows you to get over the 5 device limit (different depending on tiers), as well as keep your traffic on your devices. And, imo, it is pretty stable.

The only issue is that the control plane (by nature) has to be publically accessible. But imo it’s way less of a security target than a massive app like nextcloud.

Edit: device limits were wrong

I really like hugo. Everything is written in Markdown and its pretty light. Definitely not as heavy as a full CMS. I also think the themes are pretty nice.

To deploy it you can use github pages or some cloud services (the hugo site lists some).

Its also pretty flexible, so its pretty easy to change how you want to deploy it, or change the look.

Federation would be super cool. Lemmy has really sold me on it.

Are there any feature differences between gitea and forgejo?

I can’t figure out any differences other than the ownership structure.