There’s always BSD!
There’s always BSD!
Fair. :)
You seriously haven’t had to provide tech support to relatives with MacOS. Windows is brilliant in comparison.
I would love to see this on my ATM!
A lot of people deride security by obscurity, but I like using Linux simply because the Linux desktop is secure and isn’t as big a target as Windows or MacOS. These “year of the Linux desktop” articles have been coming out for years and I’ve always thought, “I sure hope not!”
This is why we still need Richard Stallman. That guy never gives up on explaining why manipulative, proprietary software is against our interests.
Use free software – and when you can’t, use ad-blockers, privacy badger, noscript, etc.
What these people do makes no difference to me unless significant numbers of annoying posts end up in my “all” feed. But for that to happen, large numbers of people would have to engage with them. So don’t do that.
It’s probably better that our edifying posts are filtering into their feeds. They might learn something.
I’ve been using LibreOffice at home for years.
My employer’s recent wholesale shift to Office365/Teams/OneDrive convinced me to switch to LibreOffice at work. It’s a good thing that there’s a portable version, because that’s the only way I can use it on their locked-down laptop.
Trout slapping is still a thing! There’s a Hexchat extension for that!
I found out because it was on TV. He must have been in Ontario by then, because the early part of the run didn’t get a lot of attention. I was 10. So if I knew, everyone probably knew.
He died on a Sunday. We were at church and the priest said something about it. It felt like everyone there was crushed by the news.
Costco would cover some of that. I live in a small place and try to buy local, then Costco, Best Buy, Staples, etc., before Amazon as a last resort.
Early in the pandemic, I got funny looks when I started referring to it as Captain Trips.
It’s been a while, but I recall enjoying A Madman’s Diary and The True Story of Ah Q.
Brezhnev by Susanne Schattenberg
One thing that’s really easy to do is to set up a low-resource “Dropbox”. Just install Syncthing on the server and sync all devices to the server, using it as a hub. You can have many different Syncthing folders on the server and assign one to each family member.
Another low-resource service I self-host is Radicale, which provides calendar and contacts syncing through caldav and carddav.
Since people are making recommendations regarding VPS providers, consider Ramnode. Completely reliable in my experience.
Other people will know much more than I do, but you should look into these things for security:
set up key-based authentication for ssh’ing into your server (https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-ssh-key-based-authentication-on-a-linux-server). This way, you don’t need a password, and you don’t accept passwords – from anyone. That’s crucial: if you check your auth logs, you’ll see that malicious login attempts go on all day, every day.
set up a firewall so that the only ports that are open are the ones you want to have open. I like ufw (uncomplicated firewall).
you might also look into fail2ban.
Backups will really depend on what kinds of devices your friends and family are using. Remember, above all, that if you take on that responsibility, you may get blamed in case of data loss. I backup data for myself and my spouse, but that’s about all the responsibility I want to take on (and about all the tech support I’m interested in providing too).
A. yes, that’s me.
B. we can’t force other people to come here, though it would be nice if they did.
I surf gopher and gemini, so I still get my fix. I like the quirky, idiosyncratic nature of the kind of stuff people just throw on a server. That was what was best about the early web. It was an adventure.
LXTerminal.
I don’t know if increasing the font size counts as customization. I’ve got old, tired eyes.
Transparency is also turned on, which I think I did with compton. It was a long time ago and seems to persist through Debian’s dist upgrades.
It’s worth adding that the entire LXDE suite is great software. It just works. I hope I don’t have to give it up any time soon.