Geary is very polished and shiny. I ended up not using it because I have a lot of folders, automatic rules to sort things, different signatures and addresses and some of the advanced email stuff isn’t in there. But definitely worth a look for someone with a simpler private email inbox. And so much more intuitive to use than for example Thunderbird.

I’d say that depends on exactly what you’re trying to protect. They’re both large American companies with control over your data and your data and metadata will end up in their respective clouds. Push notifications will be handled by Google services if you use Android, but there’s an equivalent mechanism for iOS just that it uses their servers. They handle some details differently, but I don’t think any of those options deserve the word privacy.

Great. I’m still disgruntled by them restricting device-trees, AOSP development and app installation in the future.

There’s always a possibility of someone posting arbitrary content when a platform allows user content or combines content from many sources. I mean we do have moderation here and illegal content is supposed to be removed or flagged. However as the operator of some internet service, you are ultimately responsible for what’s on your instance. So you definitely do need to make an effort to stay in control. Btw, there are possible compromises, such as using an allow-list of instances you federate with, so you don’t pull content from sources you don’t trust and didn’t approve.

I think the entire origin story of Amazon and why they outcompeted other bookstores, online- and mail-order companies was automation and their more streamlined processes. Afaik they’ve made sure to implement it as an entire chain from end to end, and that’s been their huge advantage from early on.

Uh good question. Seems people recommend Tipp10 and it’s in the repositories. Looks like for way older people, though. I remember playing Tux Typing that’s more colorful with words falling down. Idk. I hated these programs as a kid. 10 finger typing is a boring and tedious task. But I’m not sure about the didactics of it. My knowledge on when you should learn proper typing is a bit outdated. Maybe not yet at that age. Just give them some motivation to type something (anything)? So they start trying and understand how the keyboard is useful?

With the mouse… Well I just picked that up on my own. We played PuttPutt and Monkey Island 2. And obviously playing point and click adventures is going to give you the needed skills fast. Though you really need to be able to read for that and that might take 2 years of school? Most of the computer isn’t accessible without being able to read. You can draw, though. Or play games with speech output. (And non-educational games like racing games or whatever works without language)

And by the way, I had another look at it and some people curate educational games for Linux:

• https://www.icefun.ch/
• KDE for Kids
• KDE Education Project
  and I remember Debian has some metapackages with education software as well.

I think kids find ways to play and tinker with stuff. I’d give them an office suite to practice writing letters or advertisements or whatever they come up with, something to draw… maybe not Gimp because that’s not easy to use… I’ve seen people give their kids an instant messenger which connects to their dad/mom so they’re incentivised to type something. And then of course we have games. From Supertux, PlanetPenguin Racer, Tuxkart to commercial games. There are some kids games in the repos. Kartoffelknülch, drawing programs. Programming languages to learn coding with puzzle pieces and blocks or animate Turtles. There are educational games, at least my local library has some and I played some as a kid. But maybe at least try to balance the gaming. There’s so much more interesting stuff in computers. And then of course you could put some content into some directories, I think unrestricted internet access isn’t great at 6yo and the computer will be empty without, so idk. Maybe put some templates there, ideas what to draw, music or audiobooks or whatever fits the purpose…

I think they should be roughly in a similar range for selfhosting?! They’re both power-efficient. And probably have enough speed for the average task. There might be a few perks with the ThinkCentre Tiny. I haven’t looked it up but I think you should be able to fit an SSD and a harddrive and maybe swap the RAM if you need more. And they’re sometimes on sale somewhere and should be cheaper than a RasPI 5 plus required extras.

I’m a bit below 20W. But I custom-built the computer a long time ago with an energy-efficient mainboard and a PicoPSU. I think other options for people who don’t need a lot of harddisks or a graphics card include old laptops or Mini-PCs. Those should idle at somewhat like 10-15W. It stretches the definition of “desktop pc” a bit, but I guess you could place them on a desk as well 😉

Linux Antivirus is a very specific niche. It’s mostly there to scan for Windows viruses and malware. So your Linux mailserver for example (or storage system) filters those out before they appear on your employee’s computers.

What you’d instead do in Linux is harden your webserver and services, keep the webservices you host up to date and have some monitoring so you detect known rootkits or if your DNS server gets abused for a DDoS attack. And keep an eye on supply chain attacks if you’re a developer. Because that’s how attacks against Linux work. I’ve been scolded for saying this on Lemmy, but to this date, desktop computer malware isn’t really a thing with Linux. Attacks almost exclusively target webservers and Internet of Things devices, routers and so on.

So an Antivirus on a desktop computer isn’t going to do much, due to the lack of malware which works that way. And you’d still be vulnerable if someone hands you a malicious bash script to delete your home directory. It could however do something if you run Proton or Wine and run Windows programs in Linux.

If you want to do something for security, learn not to copy-paste stuff into the command line. Don’t run executables from random places of the internet. Try to rely on your distribution’s package repository. Do automatic updates, and generally do timely updates, especially with the webbrowser and stuff that’s reachable from outside. Set strong passwords. And don’t neglect your backups. Your harddisk is bound to fail anyway, eventually. I think that’s going to get you 99% of the way. Installing an antivirus is only the next 0.2%.

[…] said the company has now been able to mitigate the serious mental health risks and […]

Wow. So they don’t just ignore all the warnings about detected suicidal thoughts any longer? As far as I remember from the news stories, that specific teenager got flagged hundreds of times by their systems for spiralling towards suicide. It’s just that OpenAI didn’t do anything…

There’s another community for this: !localllama@sh.itjust.works
Though we mostly discuss the news and specific questions there, beginner questions are a bit more rare.

I think you already got a lot of good answers here, LMStudio, OpenWebUI, LocalAI…
I’d like to add KoboldCpp that’s kind of made for gaming/dialogue, but it can do everything. And from my experience it’s very easy to set up and bundles everything into one program.

I think they want you to add something like

guest ok = yes  

Isn’t there some example config installed along with samba, which you can modify or copy-paste? I think that’s more likely to be laid out correctly than a random internet tutorial which might be outdated or for another distro or another use-case…

Indeed, the story is funny and weird. Though he used to share lots of interesting and funny perspectives. And these days the Youtube comments underneath are way more funny and on point than all his content.

Idk, I can’t find that supposed Bluesky and Mastodon discussions, I think he made that up. And he fails to mention the email address is just a text field, people can put anything in there. And while highlighting it, he also completely fails to spot the timezone which is right next to it. And that’s set to UTC-4 so America east coast. And as a blogger/influencer he could at least have sent a mail and see if it bounces before reporting on it… And then he invents what the reviewer’s thought process was according to him, while the real next joke is their nationality, but he doesn’t spot that either. So I don’t know what to make of this. Sure he has a community and reach, and brings attention to niche things. But his own take on it tends to be wrong(?) and not in an inspiring way… In the old days he used to play devil’s advocate and I think that was extremely on point. But you can’t really fabricate “facts” and argue against that, because it turns it from a sarcastic, Socratic dialogue into just framing, spiked with misinformation and the next 15 minutes are just rambling and bullshit… And I think that’s a bit sad because we know he’s able to do more than that. And there’s no shortage of people rambling and talking bullshit, so there is no need for him to jump on it as well. It turns him from the troll he used to be into just your average anti-woke nut without any originality, just a Linux theme slapped on top…

Did Lunduke now entirely jump on that bandwagon? Seems he now does 3 videos a week “calling out” wokeness and “extreme” leftists and it’s become quite monothematic.

Yes. Waydroid is very nice. What do you use it for? I’ve come to the realization I don’t really need a lot of Android apps on my laptop, I have good Linux software for 99.9% of the stuff I do. So Waydroid mostly sits there, unused, while I use a regular Linux messenger client and Google Maps on the website.

Is there any tool to make this easy and back up the app data, wifi credentials, settings, calendar etc? Or do you just copy the files you’re able to access with the file manager?

Fair enough. I mean I’d pay about 200€ a year in electricity to run 3 efficient computers. And my VPS is only 73€ and I never have to pay for replacement parts (SSDs, harddisks) which I had to replace at home. And then they have gigabit network, low latency, a proper IP address, it didn’t fail yet so their reliability >99.6% seems to be correct. And that’s all way better than what I have at home. So it’s a no-brainer to go for that. But your calculation might be different.

I mean ultimately there is no harm in trying. If you have 3 old computers laying around, you might as well try setting up a kubernetes cluster. I think it’s going to prove difficult to handle the IP addresses but I’m not an expert on high availability and gaming clients.

But doesn’t that require some software-defined networking or a special network setup? I’m pretty sure with the average home internet connection, you’ll fail over to the replica at your friend’s home. But that has an entirely different IP address and the game client will not handle that gracefully. It’s going to disconnect. And you need to do some DNS as well to always point at the active server and forbid caching. In a datacenter or enterprise setting, sure. you’ll just reroute the traffic and nobody will notice.

I’d rent one (small) VPS for $10 a month and split the bill. As far as I know that’s how most people do it. It’s going to have >99.6% uptime, a fast datacenter internet connection at some central location and runs on enterprise hardware… The Kubernetes approach adds a lot of complexity, you’ll have your games disconnect anyway once it fails over as you can’t migrate the IP addresses. And there will be some additional traffic between the locations to keep everything in sync. And 4x chance of some of the hardware failing and someone needs to fix it. Unless I’m mistaken about how Kubernetes works.