Don’t threaten me with a good time?

In the current job market, you know it was the other way round.

Because installing a native app requires an enormous amount of trust. Every native app running as your user has read access to all data created by every other app including browsers and their secrets like saved credentials.

The Linux ecosystem mostly got away with this by being too small to be worth targeting. But several recent events (like the attacks on the AUR) have increasingly shown that we’ve passed the threshold where that’s no longer true.

So, what am I to use when I don’t have the time to go through the source code of every new version of every single app with a fine-toothed comb? Well, browsers (while not perfect) have some level of sandboxing, doing an overall decent job of keeping websites’ (apps) data isolated from each other.

Switching to use web apps whenever possible meant (at least, in Firefox) giving up a lot of the functionality of native apps (like default file associations, dedicated entry in the taskbar, and so many others). They’re basically refusing to acknowledge the open web as a platform that solves a real need: providing security and escape from walled-garden app stores (which is the bigger problem on mobile). Instead they’re spending their funding on AI, and VPNs, and random other features nobody really asked for.

While I think it’s very important that there is more than one browser implementation in the world, I have 2 choices:

1. Use Chromium fork to get security and convenience and privacy.
2. Use Firefox (or its forks) to maybe get privacy at the expense of the other two.

Their absolute and stubborn refusal to implement PWA made me give up on Firefox recently.

I tried using Chrome for PWA only and using Firefox for my main browser for a while (to help their market share), but it made it very difficult because external links would open in Chrome.

I’ve found like 80% of sites I use are self hosted so I found it easier to just stop using websites with ads than dealing with Firefox 😞

First version of Kodi was released in 2002.

It’s now 2026, so that’s more than two decades of development.

If you mean limitations in the client, I discovered that there’s a Jellyfin for Kodi plugin.

Kodi has had decades of development. It’s super customizable, has every feature you can think of, direct plays every video format, and is fast.

Having it act as a Jellyfin client has been amazing and given me the best of both worlds.

Representatives don’t give a fuck what their constituents have to say on social media. It’s full of foreign trolls and bots.

But if you go in person to a town hall / public hearing on an agenda item, they know that you are:

• A real person
• An American
• Extremely likely to vote in the next election.

Source: I successfully killed a local zoning change by convincing my neighbors to go out and speak against it, despite lobbying from a large developer.

You didn’t mention a lack of ads. They remove all the ads when you subscribe, right?

I remember specifically buying an Nvidia GPU in 2009 because their proprietary driver was awesome and could do multi monitors properly using their proprietary X11 extension called TwinView

$$$

Consoles are a shrinking market. If they were offered money by TV manufacturers to cooperate with putting more ads on it, they most certainly will.

And I suspect Microsoft/Windows will too. Apple might not, though.

In the US

FTFY. The long term outcome for this is that the world stops revolving around the US. For better or for worse

Yeah they now expect you to use their native protocol for sharing audio on the network.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Sharing_audio_devices_with_computers_on_the_network

Yeah initial setup requires their app (once).

But you can use their app without creating an account, which is such a breath of fresh air compared to everyone else.

https://reolink.com/

Offers all the features Google/Amazon do, but without the subscriptions.

Plus they joined the open home foundation, so they’re unlikely to enshitify.

Yep. Tailscale uses wireguard under the hood so that setup sounds exactly the same.

The Cloudflare tunnel is free. They don’t seem to have a traffic cap either. They’ll charge you if you want to use a non apex domain (e.g. subdomain) or if you need their more advanced bot detection/defense products. But a basic/standard setup like what us self hosters have is free.

Yes, and yes.

Their Android app feels like an exact clone of the Google Photos Android app.

To access it remotely, you can use Tailscale like someone else mentioned. But you need to have Tailscale installed on everyone’s phones.

You can also use a Cloudflare Tunnel to allow it to be accessed over the Internet without exposing anything from your home network directly to the Internet.

The latter is useful when I want to share a secret link to a photo album after hanging out with people so everybody can upload the photos they took to one place (something I used to do a lot with Google Photos)

Does everything Google photos does. Their app looks/feels exactly Google’s app, including sharing links. Assuming you’re running it on reasonably powerful hardware, it does all the same face recognition and ML based search that Google photos does.