You could replicate this workflow by replacing iCloud with Nextcloud and Time Machine with Timeshift.

The iOS app for Nextcloud allows the automatic upload of photos, you just need an account with a Nextcloud provider (or just host your own instance).

Timeshift is preinstalled on a bunch of distros, including Linux Mint, and can be installed on all other major ones. See https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift for details.

Not necessarily. Both have their drawbacks. It takes longer for new hardware to be supported on Debian and setting up a Nvidia grafics card is more complicated

You should try pangolin. It uses Traefik instead of Caddy under the hood but it automates approximately 80 % of setup. It’s what I use for my setup.

https://fossorial.io/

Distro: short for distribution. Linux is not an operating system. It’s a piece of technology (specifically something called a kernel) you can use to create an OS. Those Linux based OSs are referred to as distros. We are usually not calling them “Versions” because the Linux Kernel is also frequently seeing updates and that would just cause confusion.

Debian and Ubuntu: Popular distros. Ubuntu tends to be a bit more user friendly than Debian and was the default recommendation for new user for a long time. In recent years its popularity among enthusiasts declined because of a series of unpopular decisions, mainly the adaptation of something called snaps which is not completely open source and takes a bit more time to launch apps than alternatives. Debian on the other hand really values stability. Updates arrive less frequently than on other distros but undergo really rigorose testing.

You are right. I’ve corrected my comment

There’s also qobuz for your more mainstream music needs. And you can always use a YouTube downloaded like yt-dlp together with a music tagging tool like MusicBrainz Picard.

I could be completely wrong, but the fact, that you stated, that Telegram doesn’t receive messages without the tray icon leads me to believe that they are doing background services wrong. Because the status icon in the tray is supposed to be exactly that. The service itself shouldn’t be tied to that.

Is the new UI broken or are app developers just not implementing it into their apps or what’s wrong with the current situaltion?

Both, kinda. The new UI relies afaik on xdg-portals to get which apps are running in the background. Therefore only flatpaks should show up; but they should show up automatically, without any tweaks by the devs.

Also the UI only displays that an app is running in the background. It can’t communicate any type of status information.

https://join.piefed.social/try/ says they are hosted in Europe. I assume they are using Cloudflare only for DDos-protection?

. In our settings, we find that: 1) Extreme forms of “feedback gaming” such as manipulation and deception are learned reliably; 2) Even if only 2% of users are vulnerable to manipulative strategies, LLMs learn to identify and target them while behaving appropriately with other users, making such behaviors harder to detect; 3) To mitigate this issue, it may seem promising to leverage continued safety training or LLM-as-judges during training to filter problematic outputs. Instead, we found that while such approaches help in some of our settings, they backfire in others, sometimes even leading to subtler manipulative behaviors. We hope our results can serve as a case study which highlights the risks of using gameable feedback sources – such as user feedback – as a target for RL

For a lot of people it’s not even “going back”. They are either to young to have experienced the old web or did but bounced of it. There is a sizeable group of people out there, who went online for the first time not despite facebooks privacy invasive profile building but because of it.

Lemmys default web UI doesn’t have a endlessly loading newsfeed. That’s a intentional design decision to help users spend less time on the platform. Because spending to much time on social media is bad for your mental health. So having friction points is a good thing.

Except the competition doesn’t do that. So what is your average social media addict to do when they hit a friction point? They won’t close the browser. Instead they will go back to the commercial platforms.

Some people like junk food. But creating addictive social media yourself isn’t a good option either

Found in the comments under the article:

It’s actually not. It’s open core (a.k.a. 80% open source with its AGPL licenced community edition and proprietary with the enterprise edition that adds a bunch of stuff on top)

I never had a problem with LibreOffice. But I also never encountered a situation at school where “advanced” MS office features where required. So, pure luck, I guess.

That being said, LO is not the only the only office suite for Linux. All of these have better MS Office support than LO:

• OnlyOffice: for the most part web based, but there is also a desktop app that wraps the web app into a local container. Free & open source, integrates with nextcloud.
• SoftMaker Office: Proprietary, paid solution, that advertises with having the best MS compatibility on the market. Based in Germany. Usually €99, currently €70 (or a €30 annual subscription)
• FreeOffice: Free but proprietary. Feature reduced version of SoftMaker Office (Comparison)
• WPS Office: Free but proprietary. Chinese, I had some problems with it when I last tried it to install years ago. Maybe they fixed them since, IDK

The universeal blue family of operating systems also comes with Homebrew, the Linux port of the popular Mac package manager. The idea being that flatpak is for GUI apps and homebrew for the cli

Update: Yesterday the German government introduced a constitutional amendment that would protect the Constitutional Court from some of this. It’s not perfect but it is still pretty good and it has the necessary 2/3 majority to pass

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-moves-to-protect-top-court-against-far-right/a-68403671

That sort of depends on the type of electoral system. There are a couple of systems that are not fptp but do produce a winner for each district such as “open list” and “mixed member”.

Gerrymandering doesn’t do as much harm in those systems as it does in FPTP but can still be an issue

In the case of Germany: a lot less, but it’s not impossible.

The German equivalent to the supreme court is the Bundesverfassungsgerichtshof (BVerG, federal Constitutional Court) and in stark contrast to the highest American court, it is not an appeals court. A lower court might refer a case to the BVerG, or ask it to clarify a constitutional question, that has come up during a trial but most case don’t even have a theoretical path to Karlsruhe. Political parties and NGOs may also go to directly in front of the Constitutional Court to protest the constitutionality of laws.

New justices are confirmed with a 2/3 majority which means that you need to convince roughly 30% of the opposition to vote for your candidate. That in turn leads to more moderate candidates put forward. Justices are also limited to one term of twelve years. Outside of that a justice may be removed from office by the German federal president* if 2/3 of BVerG justices vote to impeach their colleague.

So far so good. Unfortunately there are some weaknesses in the entire setup. The law responsible for needing a 2/3 majority to elect a justice can be changed with a simple majority. A right wing government could also expand the court by introducing a third senate and pack it with their appointees. But that requires them to get into power first.

German late night show Die Anstalt did a segment about that problem a while back: https://youtu.be/ljjZ6AZsmGk (Video in German)

Tldr: the highest German court is not going to stop a fascist government from doing fascism but it is also not working to put the fascists into power, the way the US supreme court is.

• Yes Germany has a president. The role is largely ceremonial though as he isn’t head of government