Honestly I’ve really enjoyed Zorin. It’s made life simple when it comes to migrating friends and family to Linux. Specifically the way they handle fonts and scaling in office programs when opening Microsoft files. It’s been easy to get my wife to get off of windows after they started bombarding her with adds on her fuckin desktop screen.

Out in middle of nowhere Ohio, the only options are satellite and I’ll be damned if I’m doing to give Dish or Hughes net more money for worse speeds. Starlink is it until they actually run fiber out here.

Microsoft is hardly one to be involved in this. They’re just as bad in different ways. But. As far as search goes, I think it’s incredibly simple to change search engines but the problem is Google doesn’t give users that choice up front when installing chrome but even if they did most people don’t give a shit and will just use Google anyway.

I use Amazon kindle to have my books synced across everything but I only use a burner Amazon and make sure I have my epubs backed up on a calibre server just in case they kill that account. Never buy digital shit from Amazon especially. They always pull this kind of thing.

Thanks for the info. I’ve got. Sonarr radarr and prowlarr set up with qbitt right now and jellyfin. I’ll have to do some digging this weekend.

Is there any links/guides on how to get into the usenet side of things? I’ve been using torrents forever but people keep saying usenet is safer.

How many drugs have you taken today?

I was maybe 10 hours of work into a small side project and I just said fuck it and started over in Godot. No reason to use Unity unless you are a studio that’s deep into development or supporting a game that’s already out.

Automated book grabbing is very hard imo. I’ve tried readarr and a bunch of other things. I settled on just manually downloading what I want and sending to kindle. There isn’t going to be a good automated setup until indexers get better for ebooks or readarr somehow adds support for irc downloads.

I really like Alexandria on desktop and there’s android support on the roadmap on GitHub.

Second stremio. I use the torrentio addon without rd but always with vpns. It’s a backup for me for when my main nas goes down so I don’t want to pay for rd.

Mostly Meet. My family is mostly on android and it comes pre installed and built into the phone app most of the time so it’s really easy to get the older family members to use. I did have to have my Parents download it on their iPhones but they didn’t fight cause video calling the grandchild is important lol.

I’m not the guy you asked but I do the same thing. In the tailscale dashboard you can set up a default DNS for every device that is connected to your tailnet. They support nextdns and a couple other things. I have mine pointed to my personal adgaurd home server that is within my tailnet and it works great. I used nextdns for a while but didn’t want to pay for it. It also worked great with tailscale.

I can’t be bothered to self host a search engine. I just stick to duck duck go and I’ve tried some whoogle instances but I just prefer ddg at this point.

OpenBooks by Evan buss on GitHub. It’s an irc based downloader and I have been able to find even the most obscure stuff with it. At least so far.

This looks really promising for me. Is there any chance of opds support? I couldn’t find anything on the GitHub page.

I’ve noticed that the compact mode doesn’t show ads.

Last commit looks like 4 months ago. Is this being actively worked on?

They use bing results but they most certainly weren’t bought by Microsoft. They have a deal with Microsoft to use their results without tracking. At least to my knowledge. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

I’m wondering the same. ddg has been great for me.