I read that as the animal mice, and I was wondering why Meta was hiring mice.

As per usual, the answer is “depends on your threat model”. For a lot of sensitive communications, the centralised design and therefore ability to correlate metadata is a no-go. But if you’re just using it e.g. as a WhatsApp replacement to message your friends, it’s fine. It’s still the most polished and normie-friendly e2ee foss messenger.

Do you have the skills to self-host? If so, you can host any number of cloud storage services: Nextcloud, Immich, Cryptpad. You could even host a Forgejo instance (the software Codeberg runs on) although it’s really not intended for storing the kind of images you’re talking about.

I am guessing, though, that you are probably not a very technical person, and self-hosting might be out of the question for you. In which case unfortunately your options are a fair bit more limited. There are free hosted Nextcloud instances—Disroot hosts one. Or you could go with something like Proton Drive. If you’re open to proprietary options then there’s several very widely used options like Dropbox, Google Drive, Mediafire, etc. But if you’re posting here, you probably don’t want those.

If you want to learn more then do LFS. I don’t think Gentoo teaches you much more than a manual Arch install. But very few daily drive LFS. It’s hardly practical. Gentoo is daily drivable but if you don’t care about compiling all your own packages then I don’t think it’s for you.

I’d say just do LFS on an old laptop or a VM.

Who said this person was on the “left”? In any case, who cares. I don’t care about winning people over to the “left”. I’m a communist, and history has shown that proletarian revolutions aren’t primarily composed of politically active “leftists”, socialists, etc. Revolutions are made by working class people acting out of self-interest, whether or not they’ve attained a socialist/communist consciousness (and often times, they haven’t).

Yay

I only use flatpak for one Python program because it has a lot of runtime dependencies I don’t want to bother with. I generally wouldn’t use flatpak.

People have their preferences for UI and UX. I use Aerc because I like modal editing (ie being able to write my emails in vim) and keyboard nav. Using a desktop email client rather than webmail client from a provider gives me that freedom.

Besides, I don’t actually have a webmail client I can use lol. I host my own email and host the IMAP server but I don’t host a web interface.

I know about Tailscale. I don’t use it because I want my VPS to be exposed to the internet; some of my services are supposed to be public. And those that aren’t, have their own authentication systems that are adequately secure for their purposes. I just don’t need Tailscale so I’ve not bothered with the setup.

I’ve had my VPS exposed to the internet for a while and never been pwned. No professional experience. Use SSH keys, not password authentication. Use FDE if physical access is in your threat model. Use a firewall to prevent connection on internal-only ports.

Vaultwarden will store your passwords encrypted (obviously) so even if your database does get stolen, the attacker shouldn’t be able to read your passwords without your master password.

Had no idea Qt had 3D rendering… GUI designers get more creative. Let’s see a 3D email client.

Is there any evidence that they would go after random FOSS projects that aren’t hosted or developed in the relevant jurisdictions? Don’t comply in advance.

Signal is fine for normal/social chatting. It is centralised which makes it much harder to obscure identifying conversation metadata, and I wouldn’t recommend it for comms with a state threat model. I like SimpleX for addressing those issues.

If you just want to chat to friends and nothing else, I probably would recommend Signal for the most polished experience and most widely adopted open-source private messenger.

The middle ground is the middle ground between user freedom and corporate control. Which is not a spectrum you want to be in the middle of.

This is like getting a pay rise that’s below inflation. That’s a pay cut. And this is a loss.

And I’ve installed apps with adb install file.apk, your point?

Pretty sure they meant a smartphone with a desktop OS installed on it (eg Linux phones), not just “phone that looks kinda like a laptop but still uses Android”

Conversations move through different topics.

The origin of inefficiency as resistance comes from people in concentration camps deliberately doing poor jobs at forced labour as a form of resistance. If you’re posting on Lemmy right now you can do a lot more than inefficiency. The people who had to resort to inefficient slave labour as resistance could only dream of what you can do.

Most people who build software from source do it for reasons other than trust. Could be for fun (I imagine the main reason why people do Linux From Scratch), could be for the same reason that compels some people to use Gentoo lol. OP didn’t say what their motivation was.

edit: nvm, in other comments OP has said they’re concerned about an xz style of backdoor. In any case, I would still be interested to read about someone trying what OP is suggesting.

Omg I never knew about ctrl+L. Life saver. I have no idea why Linux file pickers/file browsers don’t seem to have an editable (and copy-pasteable) path field.

Not anything concrete. Windows is kind of nostalgic for me as I only used it as a young child. But there’s not a specific “I wish X was on Linux”.