Lack of trust, for the most part. I’ve been screwed over a few too many times for me to rely entirely on someone else. Whether it’s Audible claiming I never bought an audiobook I knew damned good and well I did buy or seeing someone else getting their life made difficult by Google, Apple or Microsoft, or “friends” and family making life difficult, I’ve learned the hard way over the years I can’t rely fully on anything not under my control.

What would you advise i do?

If you can afford to and if what you are looking for is even available (for non-DRM’d download) through legal channels, I advise purchasing the content legally. (Yes, I know what community I’m commenting in… :D ) Doing so supports the artists that make the content.

Otherwise, I would check and see if what you are looking for is on Youtube or in Anna’s Archive. You can download things from Youtube using either yt-dlp (give it a Youtube link) or spotdl (give it a Spotify link and it will download the song, album or playlist from Youtube and tag the songs using Spotify or Musicbrainz metadata). The current addresses to Anna’s Archive can be found on their Wikipedia page.

I also like Usenet, currently, for a lot of the more esoteric, hard to find elsewhere things (like TV shows that don’t have DVD releases and aren’t on Youtube). Just a heads up if you go this route, the Usenet provider “Eternal September”, while free, does not provide access to the groups where binaries (things like video, music, epubs, and pdfs) are posted. They only provide access to the discussion side of Usenet, which has been largely dead for the last 10-15 years. Generally, Usenet access is fairly cheap, as are the nzb trackers needed to download binaries from Usenet.

Torrents don’t require a VPN, however, torrenting does broadcast your IP address for all the world to see if they decide to look. A VPN is used to obfuscate your IP address to minimize the odds of trouble with your ISP, the rightholders (who might sue) or depending on where your are, law enforcement. Just don’t ever use the “free” VPNs that are out there. They tend to be honeypots or malware vectors.

People not seeding things has made bittorrent pretty much useless for anything not currently popular. The only thing I use bittorrent for nowadays is speeding up the download of larger downloads, like Linux install disks. Works well for that. But if there’s not at least 15 seeders for the file your looking for, you may never actually be able to finish downloading the thing.

what did you do when starting out?

I’m getting to be an old fart. I was using Napster (early predecessor to bittorrent, now long dead), IRC and random ftp and gopher sites on a dialup modem in the late 90’s and into the mid 2000’s. Dial-up BBS’s were fading out into obscurity, and I hadn’t really heard of Usenet (even though that was during it’s hayday) and Bittorrent hadn’t been invented yet.

There’s not really an algorithm. Closest is sorting by Scaled or Top. The “algorithm” really just boils down to following communities you like and blocking communities and users you don’t like.

If you go into settings you can unset the “Show Read Posts” setting which will do what it says on the tin.

I would take a look at TeamSpeak or Matrix.

Of the two Matrix is probably the closest to Discord.

What the actual fuck.

Fair enough. My wife calls it the “Half Assed Red Pasta”. 😀

I have a simple goulash that has been a goto for a bit.

1. Toss 1 pound of ground meat ( any kind) and 1/2 pound of any veggies (usually chopped bell peppers and onions for us) you want into a 12 inch skillet and cook until the meat is just about but not quite browned.
2. Add a medium sized jar (28ish oz) of red pasta sauce and about 80% of the same jar filled with water to the pan and mix thoroughly.
3. Add roughly half a pound of pasta, any kind.
4. heat to boil, reduce heat to low and cover.
5. Cook until pasta is done, roughly 11 to 20 minutes depending on the pasta.
6. Add shredded cheese to taste and stir until melted in.
7. Serve.

Feeds 2 - 3 people depending on how hungry they are. Might consider adding a heavy side dish if I need to feed more people, but a 12 inch is the largest cast iron I have. Takes about 20 to 40 minutes including waiting for the skillet to heat up.

Too large a recipe for a 10 inch. It will fit but, likes to slosh over the sides.

Originally, I made this with ground beef, but nowadays ground pork is far cheaper. Costs roughly $3 per serving.

I’m sure there are flakes that can do that, but I just use the config file, adding things as I find I need them. Flakes weren’t really all that well documented when I first installed it so I never messed around with them. Out of box though, it was fairly decent for relatively simple needs. If I remember correctly, the graphical install could set you up with any of a half dozen different DEs out of the box.

One heads up. While NixOS is a Linux distribution, it is radically different design philosophy from every other Linux distribution I’ve ever used. In some ways better and far easier to setup and maintain, and sometimes, as headache inducing as Gentoo or Arch. Once you have it setup to your liking, though, it has proven incredibly solid and hard to break.

Here’s a redacted copy of my configuration.nix file. I really need to clean it up, reorganize, and remove things I’m not using anymore, but it’s what I’m running on my desktop. Basically hasn’t changed since KDE6 came out something like a year ago. I think the last change I made after that was when I finally added flatpak support.

https://pastebin.com/8G7Hv4y2

Might take a look at NixOS. Releases every 6 months and you can pick your DE.

Possibly. I don’t remember that being an option when I was setting things up last time.

From what I’m reading it’s sounding like it’s just acting as a slightly simplified DNS server/reverse proxy for individual services on the tailnet. Sounds Interesting. I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to use on the backend (what happens if Tailscale goes down? Does that DNS go down too?), but for family members I’ve set up on the tailnet, it sounds like an interesting option.

Much as I like Tailscale, it seems like using this may introduce a few too many failure points that rely on a single provider. Especially one that isn’t charging me anything for what they provide.

In my case, most things that I didn’t explicitly make public are running on Tailscale using their own Tailscale containers.

Doing it this way each one gets their own address and I don’t have to worry about port numbers. I can just type http://cars/ (Yes, I know. Not secure. Not worried about it) and get to my LubeLogger instance. But it also means I have 20ish copies of just the Tailscale container running.

On top of that, many services, like Nextcloud, are broken up into multiple containers. I think Nextcloud-aio alone has something like 5 or 6 containers it spins up, in addition to the master container. Tends to inflate the container numbers.

When others in your particular nitch are not posting. You may have a slightly better chance to trend that way.

Try looking for themes. It’s in settings. Just named a bit different as it does more then shift from light to dark.

Nice! I hadn’t thought of that.

It’s kinda an ethos thing that goes way back, and Microsoft keeps giving us examples of why it can be a bad idea. Essentially, it boils down to the idea that YOU should be in control of what your system is doing.

Most distros can (including Raspberry OS), and many of them will check for updates automatically, but none that I can think of will install updates automatically unless you purposefully choose to enable that function.

Raspberry OS is, imho, is not really representative of the desktop Linux experience. It’s a bit like Gentoo or Arch. Great OS’s, for their intended use cases.

While RPis with Raspberry OS can be a decent desktop replacement in a pinch (I’ve done it), it’s more intended for learning and experimentation.

If you’re intending to use it as your primary computer, I’d recommend using Ubuntu or Fedora. And running the OS on an USB3 external solid state drive.

With modern UEFI, it’s controlled by both the OS and the UEFI

I haven’t used Windows in a long while, but there is a setting in KDE that allowed me to disable the power button’s short press function and I think the long press as well.

Came in handy for me when my cat decided to start laying on top of my tower. Every now and then she’d decide to slap her paw down on the power button and abort whatever I was working on.

I was cursing the change away from mechanical toggle, and that button’s position on the top of the case, when she started doing that.

I would think they first would have to actually release the feature.

I’m also on SDF’s Mastodon server. Fairly small and largely general purpose. Seems to have pretty good uptime.

Burned, was probably a Linux ISO about 15 years ago. I still prefer to buy physical media (CDs and DVDs), just haven’t had a need to burn any in a while.