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the way i understand it, it's mainly about user accounts. people will not make a new account for every website they go to, that's the reason these centralized platforms are so dominant. The idea with forgejo (as i see it) is to allow people to register on one forgejo instance, and use that login to contribute to any other forgejo instance as well without first having to sign up.

as far as i know, git doesn't really have a concept of user accounts. yes there's signing commits, but the actual access to the repo has to be handled outside of git itself.

Now, federating forgejo and allowing other instances to contribute is only one step removed to simply opening it up to the entire internet. but i imagine instance owners will figure out ways to prevent spam and abuse quick enough.

i use a feature phone / dumbphone that has an sd card slot. load up the sd card with music, and the player is super simple and works great for me. bluetooth earbuds work too, but the rechargable battery of mine died after owning them just a few months longer than the warranty lasted, so i'm back to using wired earbuds (with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter, do NOT buy the cheap shit from temu, get one that actually sounds decent).

the phone was like $50, and a prepaid sim card inside it makes it so i can use it as cheap backup texting/calling device too when i want to disconnect from all the bullshit the smartphone comes with for a while (still trying to get fully rid of smartphones but it's very hard these days)

it's somewhat vibe coded but the one i probably use the most is this one to swap between speakers and headset. the device name to look for is just put directly in there, it'd take some adjustment to run it on different machines. this is in my .bashrc:

# switch sinks
toggle_audio() {
  # Find headset sink ID dynamically
  headset_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "Plantronics" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Find speakers sink ID dynamically
  speakers_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "pci-0000_05_00.6" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Get current default sink
  current_sink=$(pactl get-default-sink)
  
  # Get current sink ID
  current_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "$current_sink" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Toggle between the two
  if [ "$current_id" = "$headset_id" ]; then
    pactl set-default-sink "$speakers_id"
    echo "Switched to speakers (Sink $speakers_id)"
  else
    pactl set-default-sink "$headset_id"
    echo "Switched to headset (Sink $headset_id)"
  fi
}

generally i try not to use too many custom things because for work i regularly work on all kinds of different servers and i've just been too lazy to set up some solution to keep it all in sync. someday....

the cursor locking still happens in a handful of games for me - most work perfectly fine but sometimes i do end up running something with gamescope with the --force-grab-cursor argument to fix it.

this is when running games with either steam or wine/bottles/lutris.

strange that it happens in virualbox, i would think it "virtualizing" an entire display would fix issues like that. does virtualbox itself "grab" the cursor, or allow it to go off the screen by default? sorry i don't really know virtualbox, never used it much

i'd argue yes. if it's just a plain linux vps without any additional services, you're still doing plenty of setup yourself.

I've just recently set up a blog usign Zola (https://www.getzola.org/) because i am looking for something where i'll actually keep making posts. not quite ready to share it yet, but if it keeps going well i might.

The reason i chose Zola is because it's easy to write new posts. it's also simple to setup and very lightweight. a single exectuable (set up a systemd service to start it when the homelab server boots), forward web traffic to it, choose some theme you like and make simple markdown files as posts.

The simple markdown files as posts was the main criteria for me - a small header with title, date and categories, and after that just... pretty much plain text write your post, as a markdown file on the server it's running on. No special login, no "publish" button, no fancypants UI with all kinds of fields to fill out and formatting options... just write. Zola detects itself it the filesystem changed and automatically reflects your changes on the site.

i'm having some decent success using cmus and a tiny wrapper script to save some typing.

i've had good success doing small edits with libreoffice (design? draw? idk what its called).

i'd rather see the DOGE discord server

for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don't want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won't actually move off it.

for teams i'm sure theres projects in development, i just don't know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there's lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.

android yes, but the entire google play ecosystem is not, and some things are very hard to do without being inside that ecosystem.

I'm using my fairphone without any google account (so no play store), and it works, but there are some obstacles. Luckily my bank still offers a good website and even uses some international standard for 2 factor auth, so i can do my ebanking without the app - which, like most companies, is only offered in the play store.

for public transport, i downloaded the app from apkpure (in hindsight, the aurora store would likely be the better option) and it works fine for buying tickets. this is just my lazyness, i could buy tickets on the website (but it sucks) or at ticket machines, but the app is super convenient.

for various other services i just refuse to install apps. parking payments, my insurance company, work (luckily i have a bunch of freedom at work, using linux on my work laptop too)... is all stuff that would be convenient but it's all just available in play store. it looks like aurora is a good option, but 1. i don't know how long until google kills it and 2. i want to completely stop being dependent on adtech anyway.

Plenty of distros do package closed source software that does who knows what. i wouldn't worry about it for now. if you are on a distro that takes a hardline stance on privacy, it was probably gone a while ago, but i don't actually know any such distros right now.