They’re agreeing with you…

I use libvirt to do all my kvm/qemu stuff on my server. Using cockpit-machines web UI as a frontend. On my workstation if I ever need a VM I usually turn to Gnome Boxes for simplicity

On the topic of struggling to connect to self hosted services without a VPS or domain: check out mesh VPNs like ZeroTier or Tailscale. I access all my internal services over Tailscale these days and it’s super simple

ZFS for my server’s root pool and main storage pool. Ext4 with snapraid for my media pool. Currently btrfs on my desktop and ext4 under vanillaos on my laptop (not sure if I could partition it manually to use btrfs but I’m considering that for snapshots)

By default Apple holds your iCloud encryption keys. So if you message somebody who uses iCloud without advanced data protection turned on then that encryption isn’t worth a whole lot, they can unlock it and have given up that data many times

As somebody who has used graphene for a long time, it certainly comes with sacrifices compared to stock android or iOS just by the nature of being a non-stock OS due to Google’s integrity stuff. The biggest thing I miss from my iPhone is putting my cards into my phone’s wallet and using tap to pay. Graphene can do concert tickets, boarding passes etc but not full GPay functionality. However that’s my biggest gripe. I still use iMessage for group chats that I’ve had for years where people won’t migrate; I host a BlueBubbles server at home and it forwards it all to my pixel. Never had a yubikey so I can’t speak to that issue unfortunately. I wish you the best of luck in finding workarounds or converting back, whatever is best for you. Remember that privacy is about balance; clarify your threat model and your social needs and work to find an appropriate compromise

I’ve loved Linux for college. Studying CS and Math, graduating soon. Just know your requirements software wise and be prepared to find workarounds or dual boot if necessary. I never had to dual boot but I was able to use Google docs or the browser version of office for anything requiring office formatting or collaborative work. I also couldn’t download some testing software on Linux (respondus lockdown browser 🤢) and used a school desktop in the library to run that when necessary. I love my workflow though outside of those niggles and couldn’t ask for a better research and development OS

I use ntfy on graphene and it works just fine. I had to fully disable battery optimizations but that was it

The equivalent of i3 on Wayland is Sway; it’s even compatible with i3 config files, it’s a true successor. Hyprland is popular because of the eye candy and its rapid adoption of features which patch over some of the gaps in Wayland functionality. However I think those advantages have become fewer and farther, I personally use sway and if I wanted the visuals I’d use the swayfx fork

I use my home server for everything. It’s an i5-13500 system, 48GB of RAM, an RX6650XT, and currently 14 drives all packed into a 4U case.

I virtualize my desktop on it, just passing through the GPU, P-Cores, and 16GB of RAM. That’s my primary dev workstation at home, and also my gaming machine (which runs sunshine for streaming games). I also have a Mac VM set up with OSX-KVM and minimal resources for Bluebubbles.

My drives are set up in several pools. I have two SSD pools: a boot pool running ZFS for the host server system (Debian), and a VM/Container ZFS pool for docker container images and configs as well as the Mac VM. I also have a whole NVMe SSD dedicated to the workstation VM. Finally, I have two large HDD pools: A mergerfs/snapraid setup for media storage (4 drives) and a large ZFS pool (5 drives) for important personal data like pictures and documents.

Services I run:

• Ente
• Jellyfin
• Navidrome
• Kavita
• Bluebubbles
• HomeAssistant
• MollySocket
• Searxng
• Piped
• Cockpit
• Samba
• Prometheus/grafana
• qBitTorrent
• Homarr

Always looking for new self hosted stuff to try! I’m thinking of getting into the *arr stuff soon but I’m a bit intimidated by it. Also I’ve got a Raspberry Pi 5 on the way that I’m gonna use for Jellyfin, moonlight, and music streaming to my living room TV

FOSS for everything on my laptop and server, except discord and Spotify, but I’m migrating away as much as possible. I have a Pixel 7 with GrapheneOS and use mostly FOSS there too, but have Google play installed to the sandbox for some social media apps. Not perfect but pretty good and improving

You should look into Gadgetbridge for your smart watch needs. I don’t think it’s compatible with that watch but if you get one that does work with it, it allows you to use it pretty much like normal but without any proprietary companion apps

They do. However the browser isn’t even gonna have an alpha release until 2026

It also compiles packages with newer architecture feature support than mainline arch. All of its packages are compiled for x86_64-v3 and x86_64-v4, as compared to the x86_64-v2 of standard arch. This improves performance at the cost of older CPU support

Linux can be secured on much deeper levels than windows, by default yes it lacks antivirus but its also much less necessary given the software distribution model of Linux vs windows. But ClamAV is a decent antivirus that I use on my Linux server. Never felt the need for one on my workstation/laptop

its open source and well audited, so no I don’t think they have it backdoored. they get all the info they want from people using google play services at a privileged level, running chrome, and using their other dozen services that come bundled with stock android

You could also just run android apps on Linux using Waydroid or Anbox and avoid having to use a neutered spyware system