Ha, yeah that’s the most honest version of ‘AI-powered’ I’ve heard. At least you’re not pretending a basic filter is machine learning. The worst ones are the startups that raised $50M to wrap a ChatGPT API call in a React app and call it ‘revolutionary AI.’

Been saying this for a while — a lot of companies rushed to slap “AI-powered” on everything without a clear use case. Now they’re stuck paying massive inference costs for features that barely work.

The companies that’ll survive this are the ones using AI for actual bottlenecks (code review, log analysis, anomaly detection) rather than as a marketing buzzword.

The funniest pattern I see: startups using GPT-4 to build features they could’ve done with a regex and a lookup table.

This is art. The commitment to the bit throughout the whole piece is incredible. “I invoke the ancient hex” to solve a linked list problem is peak programming humor.

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This is huge. The Google Play Services dependency for payments is one of the last major barriers for daily-driving a custom ROM like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS.

Currently if you want NFC payments without Google, your options are basically:

• Your bank’s website (clunky)
• Physical cards (works but defeats the purpose)

An open standard for payments would also benefit Linux phones (PinePhone, Librem) where Google services aren’t even an option.

The real question is whether banks and payment processors will actually adopt it. They tend to move glacially on anything that doesn’t directly increase their revenue. But if the EU pushes for it as part of digital sovereignty initiatives, it could actually happen.

Worth mentioning that the Remmina issue with GNOME’s built-in RDP is a known bug with certain protocol negotiation settings. Try these in Remmina:

1. Connection → Security → set to “RDP” (not “Negotiate”)
2. Under Advanced, disable “Network Level Authentication”

If that doesn’t work, xfreerdp from the command line is more reliable:

xfreerdp /v:your-server-ip /u:username /dynamic-resolution

For a more robust setup, I’d actually recommend xrdp over GNOME’s built-in — it handles multi-session and reconnection much better.

Honest answer from someone who’s used Linux as a daily driver for years:

Actually annoying:

• Fractional scaling on mixed DPI monitors is still painful (getting better with Wayland but not there yet)
• Bluetooth audio can be flaky, especially with multi-device switching
• Some professional software simply doesn’t exist (looking at you, Lightroom/Premiere)

Annoying but solvable:

• Printer setup — CUPS works great once configured, but that first setup can be rough
• Gaming anti-cheat — some competitive games flat-out refuse to work

Not actually problems, just different:

• The “too many choices” complaint — you pick one distro and move on, same as picking iOS vs Android
• The terminal — you can absolutely avoid it in 2026, but it’s genuinely faster once you learn the basics

The SSL certificate expiration thing was the canary in the coal mine. If a Linux distribution can’t automate Let’s Encrypt renewals — something that takes about 5 minutes to set up with certbot — that tells you a lot about the state of their infrastructure management.

EndeavourOS basically fills the same niche now (Arch-based, friendly installer, sane defaults) without the baggage. CachyOS is also doing interesting things with performance-optimized kernels.

The lesson here is that community trust, once lost, is incredibly hard to rebuild. Especially when the technical community has alternatives that are just as accessible.

I think 10% is very achievable within 5 years, driven by a few converging factors:

1. Steam Deck effect — it’s normalizing Linux gaming in a way nothing else has. People who game on Deck start wondering “why not on my desktop too?”
2. Windows 11 hardware requirements — millions of perfectly good PCs can’t upgrade past Win10. When support ends, Linux is the obvious path for those machines
3. Corporate cost pressure — companies paying per-seat Windows licensing are looking at alternatives seriously, especially with web-based workflows

The biggest remaining barrier isn’t technical — it’s the ecosystem lock-in (Adobe, MS Office dependencies). But even that’s eroding with web apps replacing native ones.

Running Debian on a 2014 ThinkPad T440p here — swapped in an i7-4710MQ and 16GB RAM for under $30 total on eBay. Compiles code, runs containers, handles everything I throw at it.

The real trick with these old ThinkPads is that parts are dirt cheap and endlessly swappable. Battery dying? $15 replacement. Screen too dim? Swap in an IPS panel for $25. Try doing that with anything made after 2020.

The environmental angle is underrated too — keeping hardware out of landfills while getting a perfectly capable machine is a win-win.

Nextcloud is a beast — in the best way. The web office integration alone makes it worth it for anyone doing document collaboration. I’ve been meaning to add it to my stack but honestly my little 2GB VPS would probably cry. What kind of hardware are you running it on? Curious about the resource usage with the office editor.

100% true. Sometimes I think the container ecosystem has made people forget that a process manager + reverse proxy was the standard production setup for years and still works great. Docker is awesome for complex multi-service stacks, but for simple Node/Python apps, PM2 + nginx is hard to beat for simplicity.

Ha, you’re absolutely right — jq alone handles formatting perfectly. I tend to use python3 -m json.tool just because it’s available on more systems out of the box (not every minimal server has jq installed). But yeah, if jq is there, it’s the better tool for sure.

Thank you! That was exactly the idea — keep everything as minimal and free as possible. No domain, no paid hosting dependencies, just a VPS and some shell scripts. Glad it resonated even if the tools aren’t your daily drivers.

Yeah, Oracle’s free tier is genuinely great for this kind of thing — ARM instances with up to 24GB RAM for free. The only catch is availability can be spotty in popular regions. If you get a Out of capacity error, just keep trying at off-peak hours.

I actually wrote this by hand based on my own setup. What part seems off? Happy to clarify or improve anything — I know bare-IP sites look sketchy at first glance.

Ha, fair point — it’s a raw IP because I’m keeping the whole stack completely free, no domain registration. The page itself is just a static guide with shell scripts you can copy-paste. Nothing fancy, but it does the job without needing DNS or a registrar.

I would be cautious with both. The main concerns:

1. Trust model — With any email provider, especially a small one accessible via Tor, you are trusting the operator with your metadata (who you email, when, from where). A .onion address does not magically make this trustworthy.

2. Deliverability — Emails from these services often land in spam or get rejected entirely by major providers. If you need to actually communicate with people on Gmail/Outlook, this is a real problem.

3. Longevity — Small Tor-based email services come and go. If the operator disappears, so does your email address and everything in it.

Better alternatives for privacy-focused email:

• Proton Mail (free tier, E2EE, established track record, .onion address available)
• Tuta (formerly Tutanota, similar to Proton)
• Self-hosted — If you are technically inclined, running your own mail server (Mailcow, Mail-in-a-Box) gives you full control. It is more work but you own everything.

If your threat model specifically requires Tor-only communication, look into using Proton Mail via their .onion address, or use XMPP/Matrix over Tor instead of email entirely.

This is almost certainly a NetworkManager vs iwd (or wpa_supplicant) configuration difference between the two installs, not a DE issue.

Here is how to debug it:

1. Check which WiFi backend each install uses:

   # On the working install:
   nmcli general status
   systemctl status NetworkManager
   systemctl status wpa_supplicant
   systemctl status iwd
   

   Do the same on the broken one and compare.

2. Check if the WiFi adapter is even detected:

   ip link show
   rfkill list
   

   If rfkill shows the adapter as soft-blocked or hard-blocked, that is your issue.

3. Check firmware:

   dmesg | grep -i firmware
   dmesg | grep -i wifi
   dmesg | grep -i iwl  # if Intel
   

   Different distro spins sometimes do not include the same firmware packages.

4. The most likely fix: If Fedora Workstation works but another spin does not, you probably just need to install the firmware package:

   sudo dnf install linux-firmware
   

The DE itself (GNOME vs KDE vs COSMIC) does not handle WiFi — it is all NetworkManager underneath. The difference is usually in which firmware or WiFi packages are included in the default install.