I actually kinda did that. Sent a preconfigured thinkcentre to my mum that boots into the jellyfin media player, connects to my server via tailscale. Just had to plug it into power, lan, hdmi. Immutable, atomic system that looks for updates on boot, applies them on next reboot, and does a rollback and ping me if the update fails.

I have ssh access, and my brother lives nearby in case everything fails, that makes things easier.

I don’t think it’s necessarily worth it for anyone currently on Linux, but if they provide support and a warranty, it might be helpful for some folks who aren’t that computer savvy, but still sick of Windows.

I guess you could install cockpit (via Terminal, sorry, but it’s pretty straightforward and there are good guides). After that, you could use the cockpit web interface to deploy docker/podman containers. It’s a bit clunky sometimes, but it does the job purely in UI.

You can also manage updates, backups, etc via cockpit if you install the required modules.

As base, I’d use any stable Linux distro that’s reccomended for server use.

Edit: Comment was in wrong place, refiled as op level comment.

I use atomic distros on my server and a media centre, but don’t see any reason to do it on my main systems. Stability is fine, and atomic distros make said tinkering more difficult.

Graphene doesn’t. The way I see it is like buying a laptop with pre-installed Windows, and replacing the OS.

Recently needed to set up a Win11 VM. It worked after removing the network adaptor from the VM setup, and then using the bypassnro command.

Fucking Microsoft.

I never got the motivation this “otherwise benevolent superintelligence” would have to behave like this. There seems to be absolutely no benefit whatsoever that could be derived retroactively punishing people for not working on it (hard enough). Whether or not it does is immaterial to the motivation of those who were convinced it might.

Also, focusing on one possible future scenario and completely ordering your life around it seems, like, dumb.

I don’t think the average user thinks much about the platform they’re on, and about who controls it. I think they go to wherever most of their family/friends are.

Also, those platforms are firmly in the mainstream, the alternatives aren’t really - you’d have to actively go search for them. People just aren’t likely to do that, I don’t think.

While what you said isn’t untrue, .ml does Bill itself as a general purpose instance. Also, not all the replies are from accounts on .ml.

In a more general sense, I always felt that only reading sources that alligned with one’s political alignment narrowed one’s perspective.

Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, taz, dpa, Reuters, ap, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandfunk. Some others, if they come up. Mostly via RSS.

Finally someone who actually uses a Vostro. Always found that name unreasonably funny.

I set up my current desktop while reading Gaiman’s The Sandman, so it’s called Morpheus. Because I felt I needed to keep with the theme, my laptop is hades, my phone persephone, my server apollo, my router helios, the media centre PC is orpheus, the pi that boots and updates it outside of usage hours is eurydice, and the pi that runs home assistant is zeus (because it’s responsible for light(n)ing.

Oh, and the work profile on my phone is sisyphos.

Any video surveillance not controlled by you and you only seems like a bad idea. iRobots products have had privacy problems for years, regardless of whether they’re owned by Amazon or not (which they aren’t, merger got cancelled). Alexa does cost them money, but I wouldn’t use any non-FOSS non-self-hosted smart home system for privacy and security reasons.

There’s also qobuz. They have a streaming service, but you can also straight up buy a lot of albums and download them drm free.

https://www.qobuz.com/shop

My last phone lasted 5 years till the display broke. Had to switch the battery once, but nothing else gave out. My current one gets 8 years of updates, and I plan on using it till then, as long as nothing unexpected happens.

No? Kinda? I’d say a Pixel (so Google hardware, yeah) with Graphene, and either self-hosted, or independent end-to-end encrypted cloud storage.

There are alternatives to the tech conglomerates.

There’s quite a few TP-Link Models that can be flashed with open source firmware. The ones I helped friends and family with seemed to get software updates consistently after being discontinued.

This isn’t an all out endorsement, but I’ve certainly seen worse.

What did you do with the school bus?

Rather annoying. You would think that it shouldn’t make a difference whether or not a mounted drive is present in the machine. I run everything I host in containers on a single machine, so I can’t say whether I’d have encountered such issues.