Second this. Also link to relevant Cory Doctorow article for those interested: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/17/free-as-in-freefile/

Personally, last year my taxes were somewhat complex, but I filed my taxes using the fillable electronic forms alone anyways; IRS actually nicely corrected mistakes I made on the tax form and sent me back a check… For most ppl you can probably just go to a random free provider as suggested by the IRS.

No need to use TurboTax for anything unless tax situation is super complex & you can’t/don’t want to read the IRS instructions

I daily-drive Organic Maps, works very well, uses pre-downloaded maps, & allows OSM contribution. Ofc it’s reliant on OSM so may not work perfectly depending on the location

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

Ah… I do use mailbox.org and I’ve self-hosted with docker-mailserver before.

I agree, selfhosting mail is a really big pain, and at least where I live most ISPs don’t open the ports necessary for mailservers, so I had to spin up my own server & it was more expensive than just using a mail provider. Could potentially be the cheapest option if I could host it from home & just use a RasPi or something

I’m happy with mailbox.org; the Standard Tier price is 2.50 Euro/mo if paid in full if that helps. Probably not the cheapest option especially since it’s not unlimited, but they do allow domain matches at Standard tier or above, and there are other goodies like calendar/video conferencing/cloud storage & stuff.

Daily drive Gnentoo, not sure if I could ever wholeheartedly recommend it since it’s not really accessible for beginners…

If I need a VM I’d probably spin up an Arch or Alpine since they are relatively minimal & are not that difficult to set up once you’re familiar with stuff (well Arch is one-command setup now). For servers… pretty much Debian always since that’s what everyone supports

Stability-wise… I guess it depends on what type of “stability” I want? If I meant stability by having stable programming environments then it’s not compatible with having new updates, Debian probably would be best for that. If I meant stability by the system not breaking too often, then most rolling release distros are probably fine? Arch/Gentoo have a lot more room for user error which is probably where most of the instability comes from, but otherwise they typically don’t have too many issues I believe. Fedora is great but there’s been some issue with RHEL going close-source, so I guess some ppl won’t want to support that endeavor

Yes and yes! Couldn’t contribute that much but I try to

I think having a highly important FOSS project that is not controlled by a company known for shutting down many of its beloved products (I’m talking about you Google) is pretty nice…

Also I think map quality is location-dependent. I live in a large metropolitan area in Southern US; OSM is usable, but there are no house/building numbers, and a good number of businesses are missing. In contrast I think the map is a lot better in Chicago which is a lot more pedestrian-friendly? Also, when I looked at Germany it seems OSM is on-par or better than Google Maps… in fact one of the larger rental websites use OSM instead of Google Maps (imagine Zillow doing it in US lol)

I stand my opinion on this… Some people are defederating Meta because they are anti-capitalist; these are the same admins who defederated mastodon.cloud as well as instances from Medium/Mozilla/etc on moment’s notice, so I think they will certainly defederate from Tumblr. Most people would probably want to at least wait & see since Tumblr isn’t as nefarious as Meta is