my point is, we have already examples with years long headstart that shoulda replaced the unrepairable solutions - framework and fairphone. this thing is only relevant if it can replace existing solutions, like the current crop of use-once-then-throw-away printers.

them two demonstrated they didn’t even make a dent in the market, they just made the famous xkcd comic afresh relevant.

we don’t need a $1000 repairable framework; it’s repairable only with expensive framework shit that isn’t globally available, and - save for RAM, SSD, Wifi - is proprietary. so that whole “repairable” thing is just academic, and more of a sales slogan.

what is globally available are hundreds of thousands of discarded thinkpads, infinitely repairable machines of superior build quality, with cross-generational parts compatibility available worldwide that can be had for cheap. only thing is, you can’t make tonsa money from that.

we don’t need a $700 repairable fairphone with the same premise - only fairphone parts that with shipping cost stupendously - when there are millions of competent discarded devices that can be had for less than 10% of its price and whose parts are globally available for pocket change.

so, to apply this analogy, we don’t need another printer when there are oceans of discarded tanks in the form of old deskjet and laserjet printers, made in the olden times when planned obsolescence was just bad business; wanna opensource something, do it with the most common breakable parts.

as I’m writing this, I’m looking at a HP Deskjet 1280, a 20-year old fucking tank made outta steel and hard plastic that’ll outlive us both. its cartridges are forever refillable and the only thing that breaks here are some rubber bands that cost pennies.

finally, printer demand is in sharp decline, and thankfully so. reams of paper being daily wasted on nothing by businesses around the planet should soon be a thing of the past.

I am illustrating how two decades old stuff is still usable and you’re being obtuse.

ai;dr

I really don’t know how to make this simple concept any clearer - there is NO need to make ANY more printers, of ANY kind, be they bio-compostable or not, running on angel tears and rainbows or whatever.

I dumpster dive and over the past six months I got five ancient printers (10-20 year old) that got thrown out, laser, inkjet and multifunction ones. all of them perfectly usable, work fine, easily serviceable (never done that prior to getting them), refillable with the cheapest options available. I struggle to see any application for which those things aren’t good for.

having ANOTHER printer getting manufactured and sold when all the printers we’re ever gonna need are already produced and out there in the world is a thing that’s sorely not needed.

there is so. much. shit. already about, we don’t need another one, like this thing and fairphone and framework and whatever. we’re drowning in already produced things, nerfed by their manufacturers into bricks that can and should be repurposed by opensource solutions.

but that’s not where you can make money, so they’re instead latching onto trends, like “open” and “repairable”, both of which are nothingburgers.

a infinitely small percentile of users actually need the newest & best, the rest of us are fine with decade+ old hardware that can serve us a decade more.

just gave it a cursory look, will look further, thank you. couldn’t find the details on client load/traffic; we can’t burden these people with excessive network traffic just because it might be needed one day.

supporting 400+ laptops from previously tech-illiterate users in the field. we tried everything for remote patching and fixing things and nothing worked universally. that includes stuff shipped with them (ssh, Gnome and Plasma RDP, VNC, etc) and 3rd party FOSS things. wireguard-ing all them laptops for remote access introduces buncha complications at this scale.

only thing that works: bring it to the “shop”, ansible script to exfil home subvolume, install fresh ubuntu (working on replacing that with debian), patch snap and bunch of other annoyances, restore /home.

seeing as how you only got grams and co. to take care of, wireguard + ssh is the only low-overhead, works-most-of-the-time solution.

honestly, you should give less info. what’s your hardware? what PSU? drivers? X11, wayland? what’s that “running again” business, what was the issue before?

took one look, said needs an external video/voice provider (e.g. zoom, jitsi,…), said bye.

dual booting is an advanced scenario especially with a hostile OS like Windows and it doesn’t soundlike you got the expertise to fix shit. if your livelihood/education/etc depends on it, you should steer clear of such an adventure, unless you’re in abject poverty.

get a $50 decade-old laptop and use it to run either of the OS, exclusively. it will give you a fallback solution if something breaks and you can figure out how to run that cancer on linux without endangering the primary rig.

because it has the best (not one of the best, the best) UX of any of its brethren and normal people are super forgiving about them non-important things once they get used to the fluidity and glitz of weirdov’s app.

I have first hand experience with forcing (apt term) normies to use XMPP and Matrix clients in a corpo setting and am witness to the abject horror they experience when they clash with the dogshit apps these lunatics claim are production ready.

your premise is flawed. using AI to do this shit is like using a twin-engine F-14 Tomcat’s afterburner to clear the snow from your driveway. and to get you started to ditch your shovels and shit and help your muscles atrophy, Northrop-Grumman is subsidising the insanely humongous fuel bill and maintenance for the first year.

it’s not sustainable. it’s not ethical. it’s fucking disastrous to the environment, local and at large. and it tends to blow up the house you’ve built, for no fucking reason.

it’s known that google doesn’t want you to use email, they want you to use gmail. same as how all those fucks co-opt standard protocols (XMPP, ActivityPub, etc.) and then defederate it and make it their own walled, proprietary thing.

I ran a slew of geo-dispersed mail servers for a decade+; not really spam as it’s willing recipients but essentially not that far from it, either. also fully compliant, experimenting with voodoo-adjacent tips for improving deliverability (none of them work). so glad to be out of that racket.

anyhoo, you can utilise mailchimp/sendinblue/etc as they have a direct pipe into gmail/outlook infra and are not subject to any of those harassment tactics, which is basically payola. the prices last time I was involved with checking things weren’t that much better (worse in fact, if you add the costs of running all that shit) than transferring everything to gmail and friends, which is their ultimate goal.

I mean, you do you, but if you’re gonna go the FOSS way, you kinda hafta ditch google and especially its “AI” bullshit.

otherwise, that’d be like you turning vegan and going to a steakhouse and be all like “what salads y’all got”

more like 1000:1.

you know these cats? because the site is joke; like, check out the faq. and says “we” a lot, who’s that? who’s moderating spam and scams and abuse and such? how are they financing the infra? the name, dios mio…

in case you didn’t know, jellyfin has support for hosting your books, and if you install the OPDS plugin, any compatible reader (librera, moon+, etc.) can pull books directly off the server and open them for reading.

I use it reluctantly and only to un-fuck the fucked up search. if there were a good search engine I wouldn’t use the thing.

I’m outta that racket, but way back when I used flutter/Dart, specifically because multiplatform support was a must and having dedicated Android/iOS/web devs wasn’t in the budget. no idea how the landscape is now, I imagine react native is the thing. as to performance, it was way faster than the alternatives of its time (meteor, ionic, etc), but still laged a bit behind native app development.

I type in four languages and I’ve tried 'em all, nothing close to Gboard exists. I was willing to give up a lot of comforts in order to switch to a free software version, but the drunken sailor typing from 2015 is a deal breaker.

so, install gboard, choose languages, block all network traffic (A15+) and updates and that’s it.