Andres

@chronicledmonocle @irmadlad The irony is that when Ubuntu was created in '04, one of the first features they worked on (after the initial 4.10 release) was fast booting. Debian at the time used sysvinit and booted pretty slowly. And in addition, long-term support.

Those things eventually made their way into Debian through various means; I haven’t messed with Ubuntu in years, but it’s very amusing to me to hear that Debian might boot faster than Ubuntu.

@wilo108 @Cyber For your kids’ friends, are you using a web interface like movim or something? Or are they installing their own clients?

@anakin78z I still have to use Matrix for work. The clients suck (literally every single one I’ve tried, and I even briefly maintained Neochat for debian) and I routinely get key errors.

@anakin78z We use xmpp (prosody on the server; a mix of conversations/cheogram/dino/snikket on our phones and laptops). We’ve got a family chat where the kids share the latest memes, and we message back and forth. We do also have signal (or in my case, Molly) installed, but don’t use it that much. My wife just switched phones and signal was unable to transfer stuff from phone phone to the other - in general I find signal annoying to use.

We use matrix for a few years but it was buggy and dumb.

@PabloSexcrowbar @anon_8675309 When my bank _doesn’t_ allow check deposits via website, I will switch banks. Ain’t installing a stupid app for a _bank_ of all things, and why would I bank from a device that I could accidentally lose at the grocery store?

@DosDude @NotEasyBeingGreen The fun thing about this whole saga is that there’s linux phone stack stuff that’s been completely neglected for the past ~15 years that we’re now having to bring back to functionality because of projects taking up pieces of maemo/meego.

@SuspiciousCarrot78 @curbstickle adb is not at all convenient compared to something like fdroid. I wouldn’t consider that a real alternative other than in rare cases.

@exu I think it’s new!

@exu You can also add a password to the Listen section for that; though I haven’t personally messed around with that feature.

@exu @gedaliyah fyi, yggdrasil supports a shared password. So while by default yggdrasil nodes on the same network will automatically find each other (via multicast) and form a single yggdrasil network, you can ensure only certain nodes connect to each other by setting the same password on each of them.

@Mordikan @Maroon A lot of people _don’t know what their ISP does_. Many seem to think that the ISP is selling them the entire internet as a product, and so from that logic why shouldn’t the ISP be liable for whatever mayhem they get into online?

Source: worked for a little while as dial-up ISP support.

@somegeek @jobbies This is a good read. I was rather amused by your “TODO: How to use Git offline? Offline merge requests?” section, though. Git was written by people who literally email each other patches. It’s offline-first, with online stuff tacked on there. You can copy a cloned git repo to a usb stick and give it to someone, and now they have the entire history. Of course merge requests and bug tracking are separate (I understand what you meant w/ the TODO), but git itself is already there.

@K3can So you’re running the systemd services as root, and letting systemd change them to their relevant users? Or are you running the systemd services as a non-privileged user, and using container subuid/subgids?

@K3can @silver How do you handle running as other users? I like to run services as their own user, so currently I create a new user and (as them) run podman compose.

@irmadlad Also, I would think that companies offering long warranties on refurbished drives are playing the odds in a way that makes them money. It probably wouldn’t be profitable if they sold drives w/ bad/reallocated sectors and the majority of them died within the warranty period.

My assumption is that all drives will die (or suffer corruption) at the worst possible time, so do proper backup/scrubbing. Then look for deals where I can.

@irmadlad I can’t tell you averages (I’m not running massive storage servers with hundreds of drives here), but I ordered this particular one in Oct 2025. It’s still going strong. There’s another one that I bought back in 2019 or 2020 that I used for a few years before replacing it due to needing more space. Meanwhile, I’ve used plenty of consumer drives over the years that were a lot less reliable, so I have different rules for consumer drives (toss 'em at the first error) vs enterprise drives.

@irmadlad @moonpiedumplings Enterprise drives w/ bad sectors and a 5yr warranty? Me (raises hand)!

With snapraid and backups and the warranty, I’m perfectly happy to use enterprise drives _where the drive errors aren’t increasing_. Worst case, I lose some of those linux distributions and have to re-download them. I wouldn’t use one without a warranty though (and I certainly wouldn’t waste my time on a 500gb drive, the last hdd I bought w/ sector errors was 14TB for $140).

@KneeTitts @Jason2357 Recently there are a lot of zero-day kernel exploits (local privilege escalation), so I would make sure “up to date” includes regular reboots into new kernels. As opposed to just relying on something like unattended-upgrades.

For the past few weeks we’ve been averaging one LPE per week, and it’s probably going to continue like that for a bit.

@yestalgia I will say that the configuration is not the most intuitive. Part of it is just that the web UI is, imo, not that good. There’s a lot of confusing stuff exposed to users that isn’t really important for like 99% of use cases.

(who cares whether compression is metadata only or all data or none? wtf is “introducer” vs “auto-accept”? why do I need to see a random hash for device or folder id in addition to a device or folder name?)

@yestalgia So I set up syncthing between a server and one client. Share folders between them. Figure out how you want the folder data replicated; for my phone pics, for example, the sync is one way from (phone) -> (syncthing server). For kids’ health stuff, it’s a two-way sync; because the sync might be (my laptop) <- (syncthing server) <- (my wife’s laptop), or vice-versa. Then add another client to the syncthing server, following the same process. Never sync client-to-client; always via server