does it only effect privates? what about officers, like, say, captains?

I wonder how much of that has to do wtih chromebooks.

I bought a Dell Inspiron circa 2014 intending to run Windows on it. I was dabbling in Linux playing with Raspberry Pis, but didn’t really have designs to run Linux on my main computers. I found Windows 8.1 so unlivable that I tried out Linux Mint.

That laptop just kept dying.

I went around and around with Dell support for a semester about that damn laptop. I was going back to school, I bought a laptop for school, I didn’t get that fucking laptop. I did an entire semester of coursework with a Kindle Fire and two Raspberry Pis (a 1B and a 2). They finally replaced the damn thing with a different model, that was missing a lot of features I had ordered. Dell is at the top of my goddamn blacklist.

Anyway, the first x86 machine I ran Linux on, Linux compatibility wasn’t a factor, and then I really didn’t get a choice anyway because I didn’t get the machine I ordered. But I’ve had dental surgeries that I enjoyed more than Windows 8.1.

In the early days, Linux Mint needed a kernel update to support the trackpad. I’m still not convinced the dedicated GPU ever worked. I had an external docking station that was very meh. It did the job though, I actually still have it in service. It won’t run Windows 11 I don’t think but modern Linux runs just fine.

I’ve since built two desktops with Linux compatibility in mind which have worked very well, and a little Lenovo thing to use as a shop tablet which…could be a lot better.

I’m not sure how this one filtered through.

I do not know what those are.

I do want to use that machine for gaming, though more demanding games will be played on my main desktop machine. One thing about that GTX-1080 is it’s a blower-style card, and the Node 202 case …kind of needs it. Not a lot of ways for hot air to escape that case especially in the GPU bay, and I haven’t seen a retail blower-style GPU since the GTX-10 series.

Docker also isn’t available in the package manager for this thing, probably for similar arbitrary reasons; unless it would need to be side loaded.

I’m not buying another commercially made NAS after this one dies/is remotely bricked by Synology.

It’s a Model DS218. I don’t see Container Manager in the software center for it. Apparently there’s some hack workaround for this but…meh.

See? That’s great branding.

Europe isn’t a region, it’s a brand.

Remember when programming a VCR was a stand-up comedy joke?

When talking about hardware, the physical computer itself, a “server” is commercial grade and designed to run under heavy loads for years on end with very high reliability. Error correcting RAM, redundant power supplies, room inside for huge processors, more airflow than a C-130 for cooling, etc.

On the software side, a “server” is just a computer that provides some service to users on a network. You very likely have one of those Wi-Fi router/ethernet switch things from the likes of Linksys or whatever, right? That is almost certainly acting as a DHCP server for you LAN, in that capacity it might handle kilobytes of data a day because dynamically assigning IP addresses on a household Wi-Fi network is not a very demanding task, so it’ll do it on a tiny little ARM processor with a few MB of RAM. It probably also has a web server, which is how the “go to its IP address in your browser and get to your router settings page” works. It’s serving a little website that most of the time gets absolutely zero traffic.

So, turning a desktop PC into a “server.” The question is, what services will it provide? Desktop PCs are pretty good at mostly low traffic with bursts of intense work, so if they’re going to sit still doing nothing while you’re at work all day, and then maybe handle some file storage or media transcoding during the evenings while you’re home, a PC will do that just fine, if you’re okay paying the power bill of having a computer up and running all the time.

If you’re hosting a website or a game server with a lot of active users around the clock, you might want to look into more professional hardware.

It can, but is it likely to? To get my passwords, you’d need my KeePass database itself, which is only stored on computers I own. To unlock my password database, you need my password, which I have not stored digitally anywhere, and you’d need to have the keyfile. Oh which of the hundreds of thousands of files on my system is the keyfile?

So you’ve gotten my password database open. Critical things like my lynchpin email address and banking accounts just aren’t in there. Those I memorize only. All of the “This would be bad if this got compromised” accounts have 2-factor authentication.

Compared to breaking into a retailer or bank’s servers and getting hundreds of thousands if not millions of credentials, that’s a lot of effort to get one guy’s Lemmy account deets.

There’s a couple youtubers that mirror their content on PeerTube. The Giddy Stitcher for example uploads to Makertube.net

Ah the “We didn’t build a better world for our children for the benefit of the goddamn kids” attitude. My country is currently dying of that.

No, we’ve definitely gotten dumber as time has gone on. Especially socially; interpersonal skills have basically vanished since I was in high school.

Lemmy, and I guess mbin and piefed, seem to be their own little island. I’ve used a Pixelfed account to comment on a Peertube video, I tried that from my Lemmy account and it threw an error. That “ActivityPub services even of different formats can interact with each other” thing seems to break down with the Reddit clones. I genuinely can’t tell if I’ve never interacted with an Mbin instance or if they just look exactly like Lemmy from a Lemmy account.

People still use Lemmy exactly like they use Reddit, they fill it with screenshots of or links to other platforms. If there is direct interoperability with Pixelfed or Peertube or Mastodon, no one seems to know how to use it. I’ve heard but not played with Kbin/Mbin’s microblogging capability, so your mbin account is kind of also a Mastodon account in a way your Lemmy account isn’t?

Hell, commenting on that Peertube video from Pixelfed was done ass-first. Go to a Peertube instance’s website not logged into an account there, choose a video, then under that video click in the comment field, a pop-up appears that asks you to sign in or “remote interact” in which you input your account@instance.lol name, which opens a separate window for you to log into that account on that instance, where you are then given a form to write the comment. It doesn’t feel like a design feature, it feels like a thing that is technically possible.

I have seen this conversation play out a lot:

“We need to do [something] if we want the Fediverse to grow!” “Who says we want the Fediverse to grow?”

There are those who are perfectly fine with this being their little corner of the internet, somewhere they can personally escape to, and there are those who think they’re leading a revolution, overthrowing the oligarchs and creating a new paradigm for the world where we run on solar power and eat vegetables and other “better for you” wholesomeness.

As you say, it’s working fine right now while servers and their admins and moderators can handle the relatively small load. Just the legitimate traffic of Reddit would collapse the infrastructure pretty quickly.

A day or two ago I saw someone in a thread about “What actually stops the Fediverse from going the way of Reddit” acting actually offended at the idea that hosting your own instance would require owning server hardware or paying to rent one.

If the goal is to replace commercial social media with federated systems…where’s the funding going to come from?

I think the appeal is to have some kind of paper printer that isn’t under the thumb of fucking megacorps.

Some of the OLD HP Thinkjet printers were pretty rudimentary; the original Thinkjet cartridges are still widely manufactured for certain industrial applications. Tell me we couldn’t reprap that shit.