Cloudflare turnstile is also the only captcha system that works ok with most browsers and adblockers.

Especially Google recaptcha freaks out if you use Firefox or an adblocker or anything and asks you the hardest possible questions.

I don’t have any contracts with them and it’s usually about the same cost for USPS or UPS via ground for like a 12" square box for example. USPS might be like 5% less on average.

Even if it is, private companies cost the same

UPS and FedEx cost the same though.

Yeah games using UE are always worth waiting a bit on, so many of them run poorly, either low fps or stutters and other weird issues.

Always have at least 3 copies of any important data. Follow the 3-2-1 rule.

Data loss can happen due to so many reasons, the only safe option is reliable and tested backups.

If you really want better sleep quality probably a better way is stop using stuff with screens like an hour or so before bed. It’s not really the blue light that is the issue, it’s the endless content keeping our mind active.

Give your brain time to rest and relax!

The same issue as XMPP, tons of clients each with partial support for features.

Does rclone support Proton Drive? That’d be an option until an official client comes out.

Couldn’t tiling just be done with an app like how PowerToys FancyZones does it on Windows? That way anyone could just install it when wanted.

I’m amazed you find Element easier to use, their idea of cramming a pile of channels into a “home” that you can’t even see unless you specifically look for it is absolutely bizarre, and you can’t make voice rooms either, you have to enter a text chat and then start a ‘call’ which is odd.

Revolt seems like it would be a good replacement if it gets to a stable point.

Other than that everything else is nowhere within miles of being a discord replacement. The best option IMO would be a regular chat server like Matrix/Element or something, and Teamspeak or Mumble for voice. But you won’t have streaming, screen sharing, etc.

Everything like Element, Jitsi, and so on are replacements for stuff like Slack, they don’t have easy to use voice rooms or streaming or anything like that.

With federation between different Matrix servers, what’s the holdup? Why aren’t people leaving Discord?

Poor usability, confusing to get started on, your instance may just vanish at some point, annoying encryption system you have to verify new devices on, feels slow on both browser and in app, lack of features (ie; no low latency game streaming, rich presence, easily joinable voice rooms).

It also shares the same issue as Mastodon, where if your instance vanishes you can’t just log in with your account on another one and have everything ready to go, because the account is tied specifically to that original instance.

Overall as a fairly techy type user I still find Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc all pretty frustrating to use.

I’d say get a basic kitchenaid mixer and just cook on the stove (or induction plate).

Combining stuff especially with modern software generally does not go well.

It wouldn’t be the original audio, the AI would just be making up new content to fill in the blanks like it does with a photo.

That’s not really possible, once compressed the original audio is just missing entirely.

Lots of good recommendations here!

For user friendly software Veeam Endpoint, Synology Active Backup, and Duplicati would be my top 3. They all let you restore easily with a GUI that is easy to navigate, support email notifications natively for failures/warnings, and support VSS on windows without external scripts.

Kopia, Restic, and similar open source projects also work well on a technical level, but are about the farthest thing from user friendly as they require custom scripting to perform VSS snapshots before backup and send notifications after, and are not very easy to use for restoring files.

Yes we do get sort of blind to what the average non-tech person wants out of their computer, I certainly have plenty of Linux experience on servers, but that just doesn’t seem to translate across to being able to easily troubleshoot desktop Linux issues. I think because a server is a ‘set up once’ type thing, whereas running linux on my desktop feels like a constant battle with installing programs, and driver updates or new versions of a game breaking things.

IMO windows has vastly improved since W7. I can’t even remember the last time I had to troubleshoot a game or program not working properly. I have W11 on 3 PCs and it’s been extremely stable, almost every program other than games is installed via the winget package manager which also handles updates, and it doesn’t get that ‘windows slows down over time’ feeling that used to happen on 7, vista, etc… Obviously there’s some bloat to remove when you first install it, and a few annoying settings to change, but that’s not that big of a deal to me and I spend just as much time on a fresh linux install getting things how I want them.

As far as the GPU choice, right now nvidia just makes a better GPU IMO, with their DLSS and frame-gen that AMD so far can’t compete with. Shadowplay also works a lot more reliably than ReLive in my experience. I briefly had an RX 6700XT for a few weeks before returning it due to driver/software issues.

I spend enough time fixing IT things at work and on my selfhosted server stuff, I just want to get home, hit the power button on my PC and play some games or work on some code for a project without anything getting in the way.

Is proprietary software any easier than that though?

Yes, take nvidia drivers for example, on windows I just download the installer and run it and done.

Last time I tried to move to Linux desktop (attempted Fedora and then EndeavourOS) about a year ago, none of that worked properly. Installing drivers was not in any way straightforward, needing CLI commands and google, where every guide I found seemed to have a different method used to install them, I kept getting outdated ones, and I had no idea what I was doing.

At the end of all that I still didn’t have HW acceleration in my browsers, my desktop had screen tearing, gsync didn’t work properly in windowed apps, the GPU wouldn’t downclock fully at idle like it’s supposed to, I couldn’t figure out how to get shadowplay working, and so on.

And yes I do know this is technically mostly nvidia’s fault for not having as good quality of drivers on linux. But as an end user all I care about is that my stuff works properly without googling things, needing the CLI, and spending a lot of time on it.

Don’t you have to put in much more time removing all the spyware and bloat they put in and then spend all your time perpetually fighting against forced updates and applications being installed without your permission?

Definitely not, I don’t really spend much time at all. I haven’t experienced forced updates, my apps just update through winget manually when I want to. There are a few extra apps I don’t need on windows but those take a minute to remove, I can’t say I’ve ever experienced an app being installed without my permission other than edge I guess, but that replaces IE for embedded browser stuff so it’s kind of needed.

Most of my ‘admin’ time is spent on the opensource apps I use, generally on my self hosted stuff. But also just on basic things like backup software, Veeam is my primary backup which is basically a 1 minute set up with a few clicks through the GUI, but I’ve been trying out Restic too which requires writing my own scripts to handle backups, more scripts to handle pruning and such, manually installing them as services so they run properly, and writing my own notification system on top of that just to get an email if something goes wrong.

Opensource is great, but it’s usually extremely time intensive to get the same results, with lots of documentation, google, and just wasted time trying to figure out the basics.

Yep