That is very unlikely to change by 2027 though.

The “and more” part is the problem for me.

I think it’s about printers being required by law to (covertly) watermark copies as such, and make it somewhat traceable. This is supposedly to prevent duplication of protected works (books?) but also to prevent someone just using it to print money (badly, probably).

To my knowledge all major brands incorporate something like this.

Wikipedia article about the technology

The one point that has basically been solved is NAT traversal. Thanks to Wire guard, Tailscale and the like. The relevant parts are open source and can be used basically as a library.

I don’t know how recent your experience is with installing Linux, but there are no “hacks” required, haven’t been for many years. In 99.5% of cases everything just works, including sleep & suspend. This is just incredibly outdated or just plain bad advice. There is no tech-savvy-ness needed to use it either.

I’ve installed it for as tech illiterate people as you can imagine and told them “just use it like you have before”. They had a few questions where the answer would usually be “well what did you do before”, told em to try and that was that. I personally found the PCs to feel faster, but that’s my own comment, not theirs. I don’t think they noticed.

These days, you can install any of the gaming focused distros (Bazzite, CachyOS, Nobara, …). And you didn’t have to do anything. It just works, and works well. Steam is either installed or suggested initially. Really trivial.

That really depends on how the VPN is setup and configured on the company side. And possibly how the applications it their servers are configured as well. In our case, absolutely nothing breaks and it just works.

I know that isn’t the point of your comment, but what issues do you have with Logitech hardware on Linux? I have just mice from them, but honestly an embarrassing amount. I just use Solaar and I can configure all I need? I also have always only used the onboard memory (so I can move them between computers), and don’t really use macros though…

Yes, in serious. I’m personally not much of a Lego collector and/or builder, but two close friends of mine are. They were big Lego fans and collectors for most of our lives (decades). I’d say 10-15 years ago they started to complain about declining QC and just generally lower quality. Molds were clearly used for much longer, parts having worse tolerance and either not fitting well or being lose. Then the creative side also got worse, with kits just not meeting previous standards either. Clearly just being cranked out for the sake of releasing something, often under license (Star wars, marvel or whatever).

Then when the patent ran out, some (select few) of the alternatives started to gain favor. Unfortunately I don’t remember who, but I can ask next time I see either of them. Not saying everything they make is great, but actually less problems with gas parts, and some kits are apparently just like old Lego.

Self hosting BitWarden still means it’s accessbile for them and/or from them. You also have no way to audit their security from what I understand. VaultWarden is FOSS, if you want to, you can go check. And it does get checked by people with the competence to check this do every now and then. [Edit: I forgot that BitWarden is actually souce-available as well, while not being FOSS that’s still better than most solutions]. I just prefer full FOSS whenever possible. I prefer it not be a black bos I just happen to run on my own server.

If you self host VaultWarden, the instance can just be not accessible from the internet, and only from behing a VPN. Obviously this is inherently much safer. If that’s possible with the self-host option I don’t know, but even just for licensing the local instance will have to be able to reach their servers (possibly be reachable from their servers, too). I did see they got an “offline deployment” option for air-gapped servers, but haven’t looked into what limitations that entails.

Additionally, you’re still within their licensing model. So for certain features you need to have a not-free account (like even just more than 2 people).

And like others said, VaultWarden is much lighter on resources in general and you aren’t limited in what you can and can’t do (users, collecitons, auth-options, …).

Your first point is debatable. You still have to trust them to be that secure, and you can’t verify that. If they are ever breached, it’s literally the worst case scenario. You can self-host their solution, but only in the enterprise tier (6$ per user per month). Also BitWarden is a target woth attacking, I am not. BitWarden hosts thousands of instances worthy of being attacked individually. A personal VaultWarden instance of “Mike and Molly Peterson” isn’t exactly an attractive target. I do think they are pretty secure, but a single mistake with these stakes can have immense consequences. LastPass was also breached repeatedly, with a similar buiseness model.

The second point about electricity wouldn’t be true in my particular case, as the server for self-hosting it is running anyway. Running VaultWarden or not doesn’t change the power usage noticably. Obviously this is different for someone who doesn’t just have a server at home running anyway.

Side note: I’m not actually running a personal VaultWarden instance, as my personal requirements are being met just fine with KeePass files. We do run an instance at work, but it isn’t world-accessible (internal access only).

If does need ports to be accessible in order to receive anything. So check the firewall.

They have for a whole. Their whole business model was having a patent. When that ran out, the predictable happened.

I mean their quality was already going down hill in the lead-up to the patent end. Everyone else being allowed to compete on even ground just showed how bad their quality had actually become.

the form factor is easy to get around

Why did you just ignore everything I wrote, but you still replied to me? No, it isn’t easy to get around. You can use a server to game, but the server mainboards and CPUs expect and work with differently configured memory (registered DIMMs). All the AI infratructure uses that type. You can’t use that memory in a normal PC. Wikipedia reference if you’d like to read about it, but a relevant quote:

[…] the motherboard must match the memory type; as a result, registered memory will not work in a motherboard not designed for it, and vice versa.

You would have to un-solder all the chips and remanufacture new memory modules, and nobody is doing that, especially not at scale. It might be an actual buisness model to do that once the bubble pops, but it isn’t a problem that’s “easy to get around”.>

It no longer works as a shortcut, but the actual bypass still works. In practice the command line you have to enter just got a bit longer is all.

At least last time I needed it, to that still worked fine. It’s been a few months.

If you can, just self-host vault warden (compatible with bit warden and supported). Gets your data out of the cloud entirely.

I haven’t used it myself, but there Limo, a Nexus compatible mod manager for Linux. Seems competent.

I wish there was one. Thunderbird has given me nothing but issues. KMail is lacking basic features, as does evolution. I obviously haven’t tried them all, but this already took long enough and I’m tired of it.

You can’t put the kind of memory used in servers (registered ECC dimm) into normal/personal computers. It’s not just that the ECC won’t work, they don’t work at all.

That’s different with unregistered ECC dimms, those will work (at normal spec speeds), but the ECC part will just be unused. These are in the minority though for servers, in practice they are more used in workstations.

First my context: I’m also running multiple Proxmox hosts (personal and professional), and havea paperless-ngx instance (personal/family). I tried Firefly, but the effort required to get it to a point where it would be if use to me was too high, so I dropped it. Haven’t used n8n.

For the setup I’d just use the Proxmox community scripts, if you haven’t heard of them. Makes updates trivial and lowers the bar to just trying something to basically zero.

Paperless-ngx I actually use, cause it means I can find something when i need it. It’s all automatically ocr’d and all you have to do is categorize them. With time, it’ll learn and do this for you. You can (manually) setup your scanner to just directly upload files to the “consume” folder and it just works. PC/server power is near irrelevant, it just means OCR takes slightly longer, otherwise it’s a web server. You can run this just fine on a raspberry pi.

I don’t have any real automation setup, so I can’t really comment on that. My advice is to just install it, see what it does and how it feels. Try to anticipate if and how much automation you need. Many aspects of all this are of the “setup once” variety, where once it’s working, you don’t have to touch it again. Try to gauge if the one time effort is worth it for you, then go from there. As I said, it was fine for paperless for me, but not for Firefly (but I might need to revisit this).