I never understood why people use Tailscale

I use it for the NAT busting and direct connections. This means that my devices can talk directly to each other, even when there’s NAT and dynamic IPs sitting between the devices with no port forwarding. This is not possible with Wireguard alone; usually you end up with a hub and spoke network model.

As for them man-in-the-middling, the client is open source (for Android and Linux at least) and traffic is end-to-end encrypted. If you don’t want to trust them with distributing the keys (completely valid concern) then it’s possible to configure things such that you must sign the keys of clients yourself for your devices to trust them (see Tailnet Lock).

In my case, because I like self-hosting, I self-host an open-source coordination server called Headscale. So in at least my circumstance I really am only using my infrastructure and open-source code.

Do they sleep inside the house? Like, are they housepets jumping up on your table and bed?

I use and love Arch, but it’s definitely not for everyone.

Jellyfin can’t go closed source as it’s a fork of Emby from before it was closed source, licensed under the GPL. They don’t own that code so they can’t change that license, thus the whole project is GPL. In addition, Jellyfin isn’t being developed by just one company (it’s all volunteers), so every new contribution is also GPL licensed, owned by each contributor. The only way Jellyfin could go closed source would be to cut out the Emby backend and for every single contributor ever to agree to change the license, or have their code cut out. In short it’s not happening, and if somehow it did the project would just get forked regardless for everyone to switch to (the community did it once already!).

Your approach won’t work if you’re behind carrier grade NAT or you can’t open ports. My landlord provides my internet so I use tailscale (with headscale on my long distance vps) to connect everything and it works great. It uses LAN when I’m home, and NAT punches when I’m elsewhere.

Entirely depends on who’s publishing the image. Many projects publish their own images, in which case you’re running their code regardless.

Yes but there are ways to protect against that. For instance you can configure Tailscale clients to only trust nodes that have been signed by trusted nodes, or something like that.

Just going to mention that if you’re okay with non-FOSS office software, I really like Softmaker’s suite (their buy-once non-subscription version).

Out of curiosity - what laptop maker is installing Sway by default?

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

They also believe we (Arch users) are unaffected because this backdoor targeted Debian and Redhat type packaging specifically and also relied on a certain SSH configuration Arch doesn’t use. To be honest while it’s nice to know we’re unaffected, it’s not at all comforting that had the exploiter targeted Arch they would have succeeded. Just yesterday I was talking to someone about how much I love rolling release distros and now I’m feeling insecure about it.

More details here: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/xz/-/issues/2

Related question - how usable (in practical terms) are these cards for running AI models like Llama or Stable Diffusion? I know it’s technically possible but I don’t want to install a billion AUR packages and a custom kernel, etc.

I don’t think their Linux support is bad, but it’s not Linux first. If Windows users had to run a command to fix a display bug it would have been held back until it was fixed. With something like System76 you get a laptop with Linux preinstalled that just works, no commands necessary.

Keep in mind I called them Linux-conscious / Linux-second. They still focus on making it a fantastic machine for Linux users, but I think it’s a little less than some other shops provide for Linux.

Just want to add that Framework isn’t quite Linux first, more like Linux second / Linux conscious. With some tweaking it works great but there are sometimes little issues that crop up, especially if you’re using the newest machines.

For example, when I got my Intel 12th gen Framework last year, X was super laggy (opening a terminal and typing a few characters might take several seconds). You’d have to end up disabling some kernel power management setting. That was fixed in later kernel releases and was because it was new hardware, but their focus pre-release was making sure Windows worked well on it, not Linux. Technically even now there’s some kind of conflict between the ambient light sensor and the screen brightness keys and the fix has always been to disable the light sensor, so I’ve never actually used that feature on my laptop (unsure why Windows is unaffected).

It’s still a great laptop and I absolutely love them, but I think other shops like System76 should get credit for their top-tier Linux support.

They said they tested using the version of Windows preinstalled by HP, as (presumably) HP would have fine-tuned it for the machine.

Both i3 and sway are very lightweight so you do get good performance, but it’s the easy tiling / no-nonsense looks that appeal to me.

I’d hold off then as I would expect you to need to iron out wrinkles with regards to collaborating with others in the MS universe.

For gaming and desktop use, I’ve had a flawless experience using AMD cards and a decent time with NVIDIA. The only reason I’m with NVIDIA now is for the AI capabilities (don’t bother trying to run stuff using AMD’s ROCm - it’s near impossible to install).

I’ll buy Windows games at full price only if the developer has made efforts to better support Linux users (say by fixing a bug that only affects Linux users).

I think it’s gotten better in recent years. Years ago when I was trying to switch to Linux I had an NVIDIA 750 GTX Ti, back when it was the first Ti card and required the absolute latest drivers. Ubuntu’s repos didn’t package those drivers and Nouveau didn’t support it, so I had no choice but to install NVIDIA’s drivers manually. Then every time the kernel updated the drivers were effectively uninstalled and my system was unusable until I reinstalled the drivers manually. That experience led me to switch to AMD for the next card I bought.

About a year ago though I switched back to NVIDIA for the AI capabilities and I’ve had an absolute flawless experience with it, despite using (or because of?) Arch.