Self hosted stuff will collapse without you. Bitwarden has a family plan with survivorship rules. You can also share passwords easily. Also, Google and Microsoft accounts also have survivorship rules you can set up.

Unfortunately your less cautious cohorts can reveal much of this about you as well. Privacy is a deep rabbit hole. Do what you can, try to educate your peers.

Also, link to the original post: https://mstdn.ca/@Linux/114899148717382605

Tried to persuade him. He’s an adult son, so I wouldn’t force it on him.

Grandma’s using it just fine though.

As more people learn bazzite just works, it’s going to grow. If I hadn’t rescued my son’s windows license he would have switched.

Time to sprinkle DRM magic on every Windows application

In ye olde days software was obscenely expensive. That $74 is $260 inflation adjusted. Imagine losing your Word Perfect disks to an accident. That was a $2000 investment in today’s dollars. Which means Zork II cost more than the latest Zelda. There was a reason people tied up phone lines for hours to get on the local BBS.

Replying to give you an extra boost. If your courses are remote or have online exams, you may need to install spyware onto your computer. I’m re-imaging my wife’s computer this weekend because of it…

Yeah but private enterprise didn’t. And if commercial, Leo can buy it without a warrant

Agreed - for someone moving from Windows / Mac, the immutables and flatpak are the way to go now. It’s going to take a bit for the Ubuntu / Mint crowd to change their song. Bazzite in particular is a huge olive branch to the gamers. Even for someone who is “tinkering” learning distrobox and/or flatseal can enable most things you would ever want to tinker with on a desktop. If you are really developing something, chances are that you use containers or a VM anyway.

I have to concur on flatpaks though: they have room for improvement. More validation / trust is needed, and the options are wide open. For non-technical users, the *surety and security *isn’t necessarily on par with the app stores of Microsoft, Apple & Google - though the experience is getting there.

Mass adoption won’t come easily. People treat social media just like broadcast and print mass media: they want to follow big names and brands. It’s a change in mindset looking for niche communities instead. Look at Bluesky, it didn’t really take off until big Twitter accounts moved and brought their minions with them.

Using computers since before GUI was available… Sometimes I think we ought to go back to it

It’s all about the instance. For the Lemmy instance I chose I had to write a few sentences. For mastodon I had to provide a picture of my SubGenius pastor card. I intentionally picked ones that had requirements.

If you had installed bazzite those kids would worship you

Late to the party, but I’ve read that OP is going to be the sole admin. Do Not Do This. I admire what you are trying to do, but ultimately, you will have no rest, no vacation, no backup for yourself. The hardware & software aren’t the issue here - it is the human support of those services. You will put a single point of failure on yourself, and likewise your peers.

Many of the FOSS projects you mentioned have commercial services. SAAS exists for a reason. By subscribing to those services as a business, you underwrite their ability to provide the software for free to the community. It’s a win-win.

I just use SMB shares on my NAS. Why over think it?

check out OPNsense routers and use your existing equipment only as access points. You can then make firewall rules to block them from phoning home. protectli sells some inexpensive models.

This reads like an angry old man complaining how the internet was better back in my day. It may have been better, but it didn’t have every human being plus armies of bots. It was not user friendly. It was hard. So hard most people didn’t bother with much more than email. Neither is the fediverse easy. Facebook, xitter, reddit, Instagram etc… they are as easy as passively watching television or listening to radio. They require no thought, or even much interaction. There are so many trackers across the web that they already know you and what bullshit you’ll eat. That’s both their greatest secret to success and their greatest danger to society.