It’s difficult to understand the move against custom ROMs. Especially considering the size of market for “weridos” that will spend hundreds of dollars on a device and first thing they do with it is unlocking bootloader.

Take that away and you go head to head against Samsung and Apple. And you will not win.

There is a hidden cost to every hobby and everybody is willing to tolerate a certain degree of shittyness.

I have a friends that has a rather old car and something on it is always broken. But he has no problem having 20 different apps for appliances, instead of deploying home assistants. Or having ads everywhere and even trying pihole or at least NextDNS.

On the other hand, I see my car as a transportation tool and when I need it I want to use it without worrying about some random part exploding. But I have no problem running Proxmox and hosting tons of services for my family.

That said, I would definitely not self-host something like NextCloud or any business critical component for my business and just paid somebody for the service.

My setup on GOS

• main profile

  • no play services
  • this what I use most of the time
  • Apps installed via F-droid or Obtanium

• secondary profile

  • using play services and store to install apps (I prefer bank apps to be installed from a trusted source, which Aurora store isn’t IMO)
  • disabled background running on this profile

Additionaly avoid apps as much as possible, use web version when available.

If I need or must have an app I switch to secondary profile, do the business there and end the session.

I’d argue that for Nvidia and their drivers management there are better choices, such as Manjaro.

Although on desktop I didn’t have any problems, laptop with AMD iGPU and Nvidia dGpu, prime etc. It’s really a PITA on Fedora.

AMD 9070 on Wayland and Plasma isn’t perfect neither.

Well it’s nice not to have a speed limit, but every time I see one, it’s such a sigh of relief.

Story time:

Not so long ago, I was on that 4 or 5 lane autobahn before arriving to Munich. I was already dark, overtaking some car, leaving the most left line empty. Then these laser high beams basically illuminating the nearby Alps. I was thinking geez I’m doing 160, relax dude, you have a free lane here. I moved to the right, 2 lanes to my left are now free. Car flies by me, doing probably like 50-70 more than I, AND, AND this guy gets overtaken by another one with about the same speed difference relative to the guy doing 210-230.

Brave person

Hard pass for me.

Well that was a problem in early '00. Lucky to have a PC at all. No internet at home and my freshly installed Mandrake, SUSE or whatever I was messing with booted to a black screen.

I reinstalled Linux a lot back then.

Take what you have, start small and learn from it.

Old laptops are great, because they have low power consumption and even pretty used up battery will give you power redundancy.

Even a 10yo laptop is something with 4-5th gen Core cpu and that has plenty of power to get you started.

“I will do it again.”

I was running a privacy oriented profiles on FireFox for years and kind of gave up recently.

You lose a lot of functionality and still get singled out because of some random property that is unique to your system.

I am on the opposite end with the battery life. When I first had P3a, I was charging it maybe twice a week. Same experience with P6a.

Now on P8, it seems a bit worse, but still I get easily 2 days from 80% battery.

I’m embracing no play services on my main profile. In general I don’t have any addictive apps(redreader was the worst) on the phone, so don’t spend that much time on it.

This. Surely not the fastest way to get content from/to a remote computer, but it just works as soon as you enable sshd.

Got 3060 in a laptop. Updating is like a box of chocolate. You never know what will break.

On the other hand… 6800XT in my desktop. No issues whatsoever in the last 4 years. It just works since I installed it.

I used to update my Fenix 3 by downloading BIN files from Garmin website and just dropping it onto the watch’s filesystem.

For EPO I used https://github.com/scrapper/postrunner

First you need to define your requirements.

1. Is just for browsing and the router will be connected to a VDSL link with something like 100/250mbit?
2. Are you planning to have a server at home and transfer a lot of data within your LAN and need a lot of throughput?

If it’s 1, then you can get a bunch of used ac routers, something like Archer C5 or C7, flash OpenWRT on it and configure 802.11r within your LAN. This requires some fiddling, but you don’t need to spend a lot of money on a decent mesh.

For 2, well you with with €200 budget it’s going to be trikcy.