4get.ca has been great for me.

Ah good to know. I’m using Hyprland on my main device, but never even considered installing anything other than the default on the Garuda box.

Not immutable, but I slapped Garuda on a 2016 gaming laptop to give it a second life and it’s been great for the most part. I got a bit fiddly with it and had to fight my way through some partial upgrade issues, but know I arch based distros better and it’s stable as can be. I honestly don’t update it that often since it just serves are my TV box, and I’m seriously considering swapping to a Nix install now that I’ve mostly stabilized my package list for the purposes of gaming and video encoding. Proton is one of the only things I think get regular updates on that device, but those are entirely handled by Steam, so immutable is very attractive to me for a gaming only system.

I’ll also add that my primary device has arch on it and I do most of my gaming (but also work) there. It’s great, and I can’t help but feel a lot of the distros that are “made for gaming” suffer from a lot of the issues that windows does. They are trying to be preconfigured to work with any and all hardware. This leads to bloated package lists, and just extra guffins to work around as you trouble shoot. I’d say my arch install took a bit longer to get gaming super stable, but I’ve also had to fix much fewer issues compared to the Garuda install.

All the people mentioning Bazzite are making me eye it to replace Garuda tho.

I’ve integrated a Boox e-ink tablet with my Linux system using syncthing. Note taking is a treat and can be done right onto PDFs or e-books.

I use foot, it’s very bare bones, but I’m using zellig to get all the QoL features I could want!

Yeah, I was running it through Tailscale too. I’m definitely closer to a newbie than I am a self hosting vet, so there’s likely some fault of mine that made things not run so well.

Yeah I had my eye on this a few months back when I was looking for a FOSS windows Remote Desktop alternative. Between the security issues, and generally struggle to get it working well, I eventually went to a sunshine/moonlight combo for shockingly high performance screen sharing that can even handle basic gaming if need be.

I took degoogling as an opportunity to review and purge a lot of accounts and actually hold myself to going through the GDPR data removal requests and all that. I refreshed passwords and emails of accounts I actually wanted to keep, and pretty much ditched the rest. If the account never made it into my password manager in the first place it clearly wasn’t very important, so it can bounce around cyberspace forever I guess.

Dreams of Code on YouTube has a video for a full start to finish arch install specifically including full disk encryption. While my computer is far from “slow” it’s also nothing crazy, and other than adding a second password to my bootup process, the decrypting really doesn’t take long.

Amazing! Thanks so much for the info!

Syncing freetube with syncthing?? I use both of those, but I didn’t know there was some way to keep freetube synced across devices. What does that setup look like?

Not a proxy, but cryptpad is a fairly good alternative.

I think I know two Destiny 2 streamers that have mentioned it. That’s about it because that is the only online “competitive” game I play. To be clear, I daily drive it for all the other protections it provides. Mullvad just struggled with speeds when I gamed, so I couldn’t just leave it on. Proton didn’t have a noticeable impact so I could just leave it running.

There’s some games that use peer to peer connection that can expose your IP if the person on the other end cares to do the digging. In some competitive games people that are trying and caring way too hard will use this to say DDoS people in order to win games. While I’m probably not good enough, or well known enough for people to be doing this, you’ll hear streamers mention it happening to them every now and then.

I daily drive Proton mostly because of speed for gaming, but I keep a mullvad account handy for special occasions. I have zero interest in the full Proton stack, I don’t want to centralize my data like that. Especially once they joined the AI train, I’m glad I kept my VPN and email separate.

I host my own private git server and use Unix Pass for my password vault, FastMail for email, Syncthing and SMB for file sharing, don’t really use crypto so I couldn’t care less that they added a wallet. The VPN interface on mobile and Windows/Mac is fine. I’d love to see the Linux options improve, but I just use OpenVPN profiles and it works well enough.

Thanks so much for all the additional info. The inclusion of donation based platforms and some products that are just degrees of removal from big corps rather than totally free of them were some my primary concerns. Thanks for all the details!

Also how can you have a section on books and library access without mentioning Libby is a shame. The apps carries so much weight as far as bridging the gap between public libraries and primarily digital customers.

While this seems like a decent starting point I’ve got a few issues with this list. As others have mentioned there is little in the way of justification for these suggestions, and while I happen to agree with plenty of them, I’d personally like to see more reasoning, if not to appease people that already have opinions then to help newer users understand their options.

On the topic of newer users I think an aggregate list like this should include a basic rundown on what adoption/migration/onboarding looks like for these services. Demystifying that process can lift a lot of the perceived weight non-“power users” might feel when faced with the leap from corporate platforms.

Overall I think this is a good resource, and at least gives people some starting points, but it’s not without its flaws.

Ah, so being on Hyprland means I can’t really gain access to this, right?

I’m using Wayland, where do I find this settings gui?

Another Fastmail user. I’m happy with it. The unlimited alias and masked emails are nice. From what I can tell I’ve only ever gotten emails from things I have directly and explicitly given my info to, so I’m assuming my email address isn’t being sold around resulting in lots of spam.