Humanius

My server has also not been liking the heat over the past month

Though in my case it’s because drive 3 is sitting in a slot that is possibly not getting enough airflow. It’s consistently running a bit hotter than the other drives in the system.

I really should get around to moving it to a different slot.

So that sounds to me that Americans should use a VPN to pretend they are accessing the website from Europe

The hobbies are photography and videography, and it depends a bit on how frugal I am being.

If I limit myself to buying new stuff? Not a whole lot. Maybe a camera body or a few lenses.
But if I shop around and get stuff second hand, then I could buy so many lenses and cameras that I’ve been meaning to try out.

Usually I do the latter

But being based in the United States it is still subject to American laws, and that comes with the risk of potential American spying and embargoes. Software from any American entity (be it coorporation or non-profit) comes with that risk.

In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough”. But I don’t think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.

Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement

Not all of them.

I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.

Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.

But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.

Then by all means keep that momentum going.
I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.

Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out Whatsapp

After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.

It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.

WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.

I have 24TB on my own server, and another 1TB (split halfway between me and my boyfriend) that comes with a Proton account I pay for.

The 24TB was about € 200 per drive, built out over several years.
3 x 8 TB + 1 x 8 TB for parity makes about € 800 total. The other hardware was leftover computer hardware I had lying around, so in total I think the server cost me about € 1000,-

I pay € 180 / year for Proton for two people, which is € 7,50 per person per month. That includes a mail server, 1 TB cloud storage (500 GB per person), VPN, password manager, etc.

The problem in this case is the Google Play Store, not Android.

Google is blocking Nextcloud from updating their app on the Play Store unless they remove this vital permission. But nothing is stopping Nextcloud from making their app available on third party app stores with the approriate permissions.

If you download the app from F-Droid instead, it should work correctly.

That is not to say that what Google is doing isn’t monopolistic. I’m just pointing out that you can bypass this restriction by not using their app store.

I’m paying €10,50 / month for unlimited calling / 500 texts / 18 GB of data. Thats is with Simpel in the Netherlands.

Texting is not relevant here since everyone uses WhatsApp (and more recently Signal), and I’ve never actually used more then 18GB of data in a month.

Hopefully there will soon be a fix for this, because like you said, it really sounds like something that should be able to be fixed relatively easily, lol.

I have one final question, which you might know perhaps… Where would one go to make feature requests for Linux itself? If I quickly Google this I find places to make feature requests for specific distros, but not for Linux as a whole.

I ask because I suspect this issue is more fundamental to Linux itself, rather than the individual distros I tried.

Edit: Or maybe I am misunderstanding, and this is something that does need to be brought up with the distros

Wow! Thank you for going through the effort of figuring out whether there was a solution for me. I really appreciate it!

And yeah… I could probably type all the characters I need to type through workarounds. But my problem is that I don’t think I should have to relearn how to type in order to switch to Linux. It’s a relatively niche issue I ran into, but I’m clearly not the only one running into it.

Which is a shame because I do want Linux to be more widely used than it is currently, and I think small annoyances like this are part of what is holding it back. It makes it more of a hassle to overcome the hurdle of switching OS.

The issue I’m talking about is unrelated to keyboard layouts. It’s how deadkeys are implemented.

The deadkeys are seemingly defined separately from keyboard layout, and there is no way that I could find to redefine them other than either turning dead key behaviour on or off in the keyboard layouts

So the keyboard I’m using is US International (with deadkeys), which is the standard keyboard for the Netherlands.

Certain key combinations should create an accented character, but certain other key combinations should simply print the accent followed by the character. Typing this way is essentially muscle memory for me, so if it deviates from what I’m used to it really trips me up badly.

Example:

', followed by e should type é (which Linux did correctly)
', followed by m should type 'm (where Linux typed an accented ḿ)
', followed by c should type ç (where Linux typed an accented ć)
', followed by ' should type '' (where Linux typed ')
', followed by [space] should type ' (which Linux did correctly)

I checked several forums, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to change this behaviour in Linux. Dead key behaviour is seemingly consistent between keyboard layouts, and it can only either be on or off?

Edit: It shouldn’t even be that complex of an improvement to the OS.
If they were to add a defintion as to how deadkeys are supposed to work as part of the keyboard layout file, this wouldn’t be an issue. I could just make my own “US Intl. with Dead Keys (NL)” layout and it would be fine.

When the keyboard doesn’t work correctly, that is not “just how it is” though…

I’m not going to relearn how to type accents for the sake of switching to Linux. The OS should just work correctly out of the box, or at the very least give me the option to fix the behaviour without having to go 20 internet forums deep and delving into the depths of the system files.

I tried Mint for four days before getting fed up with things not working as they should, went back to Windows for a week and then tried Fedora for two days again running into very similar issues.

Mint Cinnamon and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop.

I ran into various issues, one of them being (for example) incorrect behaviour of dead keys for accented characters. That problem was present in both distros, and I even went so far as to unsuccessfully edit system files to get the desired behaviour.