Sure, it’s fine. But if I’m only publishing text and photos, and I don’t need tons of specialized plugins, and I’m dealing with things myself - then personally I will go with a static-site generator every time. It’s at least as fast, and more secure by design.

Did not know that. Useful.

Full DB-driven monster for a few bytes of text. Sledgehammer to crack a nut if you ask me. But sure, this is the obvious answer.

Even more interesting IMO: what are the options that do not involve self-hosting (thus avoiding the PITA of babysitting a domain and server security)?

Sarcasm: 9/10 for effort

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The valid answer is that the Chinese police state has no authority over individuals in the West and is unlikely to share information with Western law enforcement given the geopolitical situation. In narrow terms, that makes for an inadvertent privacy win for individuals in the West.

But the problem you describe is certainly real (whatever other seem to think here) for countries in China’s sphere of influence, in Asia, Africa, Latin America. For them, China is already selling off-the-peg solutions for mass surveillance. If your country’s homegrown dictator gets his hands on this stuff, it’s going to be harder than ever to get rid of him.

For us the problem is rather that China is pioneering and normalizing practices that will certainly be adopted and copied one day by our own police forces with our own technology.

An individual has no privacy to protect if the laws are wrong, and laws cannot be changed by individuals.

Bro doesn’t need DE to watch videos. Bro doesn’t need DE to do anything.

Most laptops will be more or less fully compatible

If by “most” you mean only the ones over 500 bucks. Chromebooks have almost completely taken over the bottom end of the market (which is more than adequate if you’re not gaming) and Chromebooks are not compatible with Linux unless you enjoy getting your hands very dirty.

Desktop environment? Who needs a desktop environment?

But surely the average Zuckerbook user is not so dumb as to miss what this graphic is describing - a crazy utopia where they could talk to people on TikTok and Xitter as well as Zuckerbook?

The government does not “own” Meta. Words have meanings.

And then some of them learn that downvoting is obnoxious and toxic, while others never grow out of infancy.

Possibly it’s about personality types. I was only going on my own experience. Of always being told by a chorus of experts “Oh no you don’t want to do that!” and ending up being terrified to touch anything. When I now know that I usually had nothing to be afraid of, because dangerous things tend to be locked down by design, exactly as they should be.

it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can’t trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there’s no way I’m wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

PS: Sure, people don’t like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you’re talking to - OP didn’t understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.

The fact that you’re even saying such things as “time constraints” or “to learn new software” suggests an attitude to computing shared by about 0.01% of the population. It cannot be re-stressed enough to the (sadly shrinking) bubble that frequents this community: the vast majority of people in the world have never touched a laptop let alone a desktop computer. Literally everything now happens on mobile, where FOSS is vanishingly insignificant, and soon AI is going to add a whole new layer of dystopia. But that is slightly offtopic.

It’s a good question IMO. Choosing software freedom - to the small extent that you still can - should not just be about the freedom to tinker, it should also just be easy.

The answer is Ubuntu or Mint or Fedora.

This is a just a style thing, EN-GB vs EN-US.

I assure you I am not a robot

No but definitely an American.

The opposite is also dangerous, i.e. believing reflexively in heterodoxies and conspiracy theories. But your point stands.