Your ps output doesn’t show systemd as running. The only output is the grep command itself.

If you want to play files over SMB, you can just open the SMB mount in the file explorer and double click it. On Windows you can mount it as a network drive (like V: for videos) so even non-technical users understand it. I don’t understand how mpv is easier for that use case.

With systems like Jellyfin and Plex, you can (and should!) turn off transcoding when streaming at home. The only times you should enable transcoding are when:

1. You’re away from home on a slow internet connection (or your home internet has slow upload speed); or
2. You’re streaming to a less powerful device that can’t handle the full bitrate of the video.

Transcoding is very useful, because otherwise you’d need multiple copies of the same movie to handle different environments. Transcoding can dynamically adjust the bitrate based on the connection speed.

If they want to try new distros, maybe try Fedora with KDE? Installing the Nvidia drivers isn’t too difficult.

For RTX 20 series and above, it’s recommended to use Nvidia’s open-source drivers. The instructions for how to switch on Fedora are here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Kernel_Open. Note that this is not Nouveau, which is a different open-source Nvidia driver not made by Nvidia themselves.

you can not properly control dependencies per project otherwise.

Says who? Use proto for your tooling (which lets you lock the version per project), and a lockfile for your app’s dependencies.

Devcontainers work fine without an immutable distro, too.

I always use wireless charging, and have a silicone plug in my phone’s USB port to stop dirt getting in there. Very similar to these: https://a.co/d/aFWuSI3 (just standalone plugs with no adhesive). I see some in the photo with adhesive to stick them to the phone, but that seems like it’d look ugly.

In the rare case that I need to plug something into it, the port is completely clean.

My guess would be that you’ve logged into all of the accounts in the same browser, and thus they all shared a common cookie or something similar (like LocalStorage) at some point. It’s a common tactic sites use to mark multiple accounts as being operated by the same person.

I’ve never used Arch yet still use their wiki quite a lot.

Sure, but there’s Linux features that use TPM too, although you probably don’t need them in a home environment.

It was a feature built in to the web browser, providing a website, file sharing, a music player, a photo sharing tool, chat, a whiteboard, a guestbook, and some other features.

All you needed to do was open the browser and forward a port, or let UPnP do it (since everyone still had UPnP enabled back then), and you’d get a .operaunite.com subdomain that anyone could access, which would hit the web server built into the browser.

This was back in 2008ish, when Opera was still good (before it was converted to be Chromium-powered). A lot of people still used independent blogs back then, rather than everything being on social media, so maybe it was ahead of its time a bit.

Depends on if you use any security features that require a TPM. If not, the older chips are fine, or some motherboards allow a separate TPM chip to be added.

For example, my employer requires TPM 2.0 for both Windows and Linux systems, since they store most encryption keys and certificates on it - including WPA2-Enterprise key for wifi, 802.1x key for wired Ethernet, SSH keys (in some cases), LUKS key for full-disk encryption on Linux, Bitlocker key on Windows, etc.

For home use, if you don’t use any of those features (or require strong encryption for them), the main thing you’ll miss out on is support for Windows 11, which is fine if you’re using Linux.

I’m sad that Opera Unite failed. It was the closest thing to self-hosting for regular non-technical people.

it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.

How old is it? TPM 2.0 has been standard equipment for nearly ten years now. It’s disabled by default on some systems.

Intel Core 8th gen and above, and Ryzen 2000 series and above, should all have TPM 2.0 built into the CPU (fTPM)

I haven’t seen any bloat on it, no ads in winkey menu

If you’re in the EU, that’s probably why. I think the bloat is only for non-EU users.

Dual-booting works fine. You can even have more than two OSes - for a while I was running Windows 10, Fedora, and Debian. Ended up sticking with Fedora.

base RAM usage down super low (50MB to 100MB range)

A base Debian system (minimal netinstall with nothing selected in the tasksel step) doesn’t use much more than this, or at least it didn’t in the last stable release. For https://dnstools.ws/ I have a few VPSes with 256MB RAM that run Debian and the DNSTools worker. They run fine.

I can’t even get push notifications working.

Which browser? Safari is notorious for having a lot of bugs around push notifications, but Chrome and Firefox should both work.

I don’t have any knowledge about this in particular, but as someone with experience working at big tech companies, you’re missing the most likely reason:

4. Everyone who worked on it was reorged to higher priority teams, and nobody is left to maintain the apps

A lot of teams are only 3-6 developers, an engineering manager, a project manager, and a designer. Other roles like content design and QA are often shared across lots of teams. Developers with experience building native apps might be needed on other projects.

And they harm platform consistency, etc.

Unfortunately, a lot of major apps aren’t consistent any more. Each app uses its own design language and its own UI widgets, rather than using proper native ones. Often they’re no better than web apps. I hate it and would rather just use a web app instead.

IIRC the WhatsApp app is a native Windows app using C++ and XAML, while the Messenger app is a React Native app.

You can still use the web version.