Also it’s obvious Trump is a felon rapist and pedophile.

I mean it is obvious to you and me. Most people seem to either not believe it or just straight up don’t care.

He also frequently broke promises from his campaign, to the point where I’d say “most”, with usually zero response from anyone on “his side”. But for some reason, this time they seem to care, at least some of them. If that matters in any way remains to be seen though.

The (re)pebble probably also falls in this category. It’s a relaunched pebble after Google open sourced the original pebble os it acquired, but then didn’t do anything with. It’s the original pebble founder that is doing this relaunch (you can consider this both good and bad, but I’m sure his intentions are actually good).

It’s of course a commercial product, but at least the software side is open. Battery should last a month (!). Display is always on and readable in daylight.

First of these devices should be about to ship soon, but new orders will take considerably longer.

I finally switched from Windows to Linux and chose CachyOS. This was months ago. I never had to fix anything (so far). There was a fuck up by me once, but that wasn’t the distros and could’ve happened on any distro. Honestly couldn’t be happier with it being arch based, as it’s really nice to basically get anything that is released instantly as a package update.

I haven’t had to hunt for packages that aren’t years old for anything as I was used to on Debian (used on most of my servers). And while the AUR is there, I think I got a total of two things installed from there, anything else was just there in the repos.

But if you’ve got a setup that already works, and you’re happy with, why change anything? Having something that works for you is what makes the large amounts of choices in the Linux world so great.

ZFS, specifically RaidZx, can be expanded like and raid 5/6 these days, assuming support from the distro (works with TrueNAS for example). The patches for this have been merged years ago now. Expanding any other array (like a striped mirror) is even simpler and is done by adding VDevs.

Keepass just uses a (local) file, but it expects and can handle if the file is modified externally. That’s important because it means you can store it on a network share, or in some sort of synchronized storage, self hosted or not (next cloud, sync thing, Google drive, whatever). It’s just up to you. If you have it open on your PC and you add an entry on your phone, your PC won’t “overwrite” it, but integrates any changes you’re making there at the same time.

For example the android client has direct support for a long list on storage services for this exact reason.

Let’s just say I also don’t play platformers, basically ever. It was fine.

I haven’t played inside, but limbo is absolutely fantastic.

I hope that isn’t the future, because that’s a very long list of down sides for very few positive aspects. Plugging my bike in every few days is not something that has ever felt like it needed optimization. It takes basically zero effort and roughly 5 seconds, so why put all that effort into something that works less reliably?

Didn’t the spin-off do that already? So from that perspective, things can only go up.

In the context of communication networks, WiFi is a high speed netowrk. It was designed to be basically a “normal” (ethernet-like) network, but wireless. It acts for all intents and purposes like an ethernet network. There are significant requirements that devices need to follow, many include frequently saying “hello” (simplified). The complexity of the protocol to be able to send at gigabit and faster speeds over dozens of meters is significant. Having relatively low latency adds to this as well. If all you need is a few bytes every now and then, that isn’t ideal. Having devices in your network that follow older/slower standards is essentially like pulling the handbrake for your network (again, very simplified). But explaining this in detail is also very much beyond the scope of a comment here.

If I’m gonna install a device by some random manufacturer that acts as a wifi access point inside my network, I also give them full access to my network. That access point can do all sorts of things, and I would describe this as a security nightmare. It also doesn’t even have to be malicious: the manufacturer could get hacked, and now the hacker has access to all these wifi access points all over the world, and all their home networks. Fun.

Zigbee or Thread doesn’t actually stop them from adding cloud connectivity, they all still do. But you yourself can stop it. Similar to the “gateway” you suggested with dedicated WiFi, they sell you a gateway for Zigbee or Thread, which then connects to the cloud/internet to allow you to control your stuff. As they would with a WiFi gateway. The protocol isn’t “less capable”, it’s intended use is around (home-)automation. It is low power, low bandwidth and most importantly both are a mesh network. That means that while you have a central point to access them (at least Zigbee has exactly 1), they all talk to each other and for a fully connected mesh. A device doesn’t need to be able to see/hear that central point. It can send it through a multi-hop route, and that route is dynamic so when a device leaves (out of power, turned off, …) the packets basically just find their way. Generally anything that has a stable power sounce will act as a router and forward packets. The low power part means that if you have a battery powered thing (remote switch, thermometer, …) it can run off a single button cell for like a year or so. With wifi it would last a week, maybe two. The bandwidth thing is related to that as well, as a thermoeter needs to send the temperature and/or humidity maybe every few minutes, or even just when it changes and there is no need for that. That comes with power usage, complexity and many other downsides, but of course a zigbee device can’t stream video or something (like a security camera would need to).

When using wifi, any device needs to be in range of the access point. You can have multiple access point but those aren’t that cheap, and should be wired in. Devices only ever talk to the access point. When multiple devices talk to each other, it goes to the access point who then sends it out again to the other device.

There are great writeups on the internet, just google “zigbee vs wifi” or something. I’m not gonna repeat what

Side note: you can reply to more than 1 paragraph in a reply. No need to reply three times, but I guess I’ll stick with it now.

But that is not a fault of WiFi as a medium, …

but it is a fault of WiFi as a choice for that application. Just because it does wireless communication doesn’t mean it’s suited for any application that needs a wireless protocol. Using it for very-low traffic applications is simply not what it was designed to do, and it has significant negative effects if you do. Any device you add basically slows down any other device by a bit. And wifi network you add in a physical area decreases the effectiveness of all other wifi networks in it’s vicinity. In even medium densly populated areas, wifi is already borderline unusable due to congestion. Your proposed (dedicated) hub is a good idea for network isolation, assuming it’s designed and configured correctly, but that also comes with more and frankly just as bad security implications, just different ones. To be clear, having like a light bulb or two wifi is a fine choice. For 50 or a whole smart home network, it no longer is.

Both Zigbee and Matter do not rely on cloud connectivity as a protocol, though many of the manufacturers implementations do effectly add that on top: you get the exact solution you propose here as well. At least with these standards you can control everyhing locally, if you want to, and you don’t congest the spectrum nearly as much as wifi does.

Good luck explaining how to do any of this to my parents, for example. For someone with a technical background that’s feasible, for someone with an it background it’s even easy. For the other 90 or 95% of people who are actually supposed to buy and use these things, it isn’t. They don’t even know something like this can be done, let alone that it should be done.

I’ve had nothing but issues with NC instant upload, and stopped using it. It’s error prone and needs constant hand holding for no good reason. It didn’t handle taking a picture and then deleting it instantly very well (and will throw your notifications at you for this, often more than 1). When you have limited connectivity it will utterly confuse itself and ask you to resolve conflicts for 100 files for no reason, when it could just checksum server and client files and notice they are all the exact same. Also when set to only upload on WiFi, and not being connected to WiFi it often still spams notifications that the “upload failed”, despite not being supposed to upload anything. And btw. it could upload files just fine, they failed only because upload on mobile is disabled!

It’s a nightmare. Commonly also referred to as a cluster fuck.

The closest small one is about 1 km, a reasonably sized one for stocking up is 5 km or so. I have never walked to either in 5+ years of living here. Even the closer one is like a 10 minute walk (ish), and then I would have to carry back what I bought, which also means I can barely buy anything. 5 km is more like an hour by foot one way, so that’s just not happening, ever.

I usually take my bike to the closer one, or the cargo bike to the bigger one. I also pass by the smaller one on the way home from work (I commute by bike). The fact that I own bikes is why there’s never any rain to walk anywhere, basically. Additionally, there is very little sense in taking a (relatively small capacity) bike to a big store when a cargo bike is available. I also don’t own a car. I don’t know a single person who would regularly walk 1 km+ for shopping, but I also don’t know anyone who doesn’t own any form of personal transport. Most would usually take a bike, and take a car for bigger or heavier trips.

Taking a bus or tram/train for grocery shopping does happen for some, but highly depends on the local situation and town or city layout if that can bring useful time savings. Unless you live is the middle of nowhere, bus and train schedules are anywhere from every 10 to 30 minutes or so, more frequent in dense areas where there’s multiple lines.

Edit: for context, I live on the outskirts of a medium sized city (250k inhabitants), but my town only has 3500 or so. The small supermarket is on the literal other side of that town, the bigger one is one town over (opposite direction of city). Distance to the city is also only only 10 km or so (to the center), but there happen to be no “attractive” supermarkets in that direction for me.

Thanks for the update!

I don’t understand the change in regards to how ‘mention’ suggestions are handled. When viewing this changelog post in summit, they show identical text. When I started writing this comment I noticed that they are in fact different in the markup/source code, as seen above the input box.

So what effect does that change have in practice, or does it functionally do the same just less verbose?

I’m not seeing it either (yet), and I’m on Haas-os.

Edit: nevermind, manually checking for the update in settings/system/updates made it show up

So you’re basically saying “I don’t have any proof of any of this, but I’m scared so I’m scaring others as well”.

Your first point makes zero sense: it can’t be both “for profit” and have “no means of generating income”.

Their way of generating income is the reason they created the distro/OS in the first place: selling hardware. To my knowledge, they wanted to ship their mini servers (ZimaBoard) and later NAS-like devices (ZimaCube I think?) with an easy to use OS that can do all basic home server tasks. That didn’t exist, so they made one. They didn’t need to make money from the OS, it’s a catalyst to bring able to sell (more) hardware. I personally think that is a great way to use Linux as a company and contribute to the wider ecosystem, why does it scare you so much? They could’ve closed this of much more, but made it for available to everyone, on any hardware.

From what I heard, they did achieve their design goals. It’s a bit simplistic for me personally, but probably great for a beginner.

I get that enshittyfication is everywhere these days, but maybe don’t try to stop people from using things that haven’t actually seen ANY yet, just because they might? With no indication that they will, either.

4&5 might be fair points though, I for know enough about the details.

Yes, it’s the first of the month, which is the most heavy of all days for the the giveaways. They sometimes come out on other days, but only a few.