This used to be an issue, but has been resolved in most major applications. Are you on an “app” version of slack? Try updating it, or try using an up to date webbrowser like Firefox, or anything based on Chromium if you prefer.

With either a physical security key (which no “average user” owns), or a damn numeric pin, which is vastly less secure than a password of the same length.

The documentation you were looking at might’ve been the Matrix specification.

There is documentation on how to host a Matrix server, I’d honestly recommend using containers (maybe docker compose) for this one. It can definitely be confusing setting up a service like a Matrix homeserver for the first time.

As for other people finding it, you can (and should) make your homeserver invite-only. It’s also possible to disable federation, which makes the server self-contained. It will not accept incoming connections from other servers, nor make outgoing connections to other servers.

This does mean everyone you want to talk with has to be on your homeserver. There are probably better options available if you want to avoid Matrix’ federation issues, like Spacebar.

To scroll in menus or desktop, sometimes virtual menus for games requiring more buttons

Web push for notifications. Sure, there’s privacy implications, but it’s already near universal. There’s other options like ntfy.sh if you’re not limited to existing infrastructure. UnifiedPush also works well as a protocol for push notifications.

Everything else can be handled in-app. Password reset will have to be done by an admin, though it’s completely doable for a small selfhosted service.

Some of the downsides OP listed may or may not always apply, but there are always downsides. Either you have to set up your own email server (with extra maintenance burden), or your “selfhosted” app suddenly relies on third party infrastructure, like your email provider (or those of other users on your instance).

I’m going to assume you’re unable to see the embedded image. I didn’t add alt text, that’s my mistake.

Below “Besides”, there is a screenshot of a tweet by user @haydendevs stating “this is who you’re arguing with online” and an attached image of a series of dots connected by lines. This is the (overused) visual representation of a “neural network” in machine learning. The meaning of the image in this context is to state you are arguing with bots or AI online. I used this twitter screenshot as an attempt to make a joke of the fact the OP reads like AI-generated text.

I will edit the alt text in my comment above.

MPV is great, I use it all the time. It’s fully replaced VLC on my desktop.

It is not an “alternative to Jellyfin”. It does not offer many “comfort features” like (synced ootb) watch tracking. It does not transcode at all, and it doesn’t even run on devices that need transcoding most, like smart TVs.

These two applications fall into two different categories, and they will never replace each other. One is a media player, you throw mpv any video file, it puts it up on screen, great. The other is a media server, it allows you to sign in, browse your nicely organized library, and click play on the movie of your choice, very cool.

Even the idea of opening SMB or NFS to the entire internet just so your most technical of friends can manually download and watch a movie is insane compared to setting up Jellyfin. Reminder, not everyone has the connection to stream a full 4k bluray rip, transcoding allows those users to watch at all.

Besides,

That’s just Ubuntu, including their marketing strategy towards enterprise clients for desktop. (Without the pun in the name of course)

The RomM project does exactly that

when technical folks act like everyone and their grandma should run arch

As an Arch user, man I hate when people are like that. Arch certainly has a specific target audience. If you (the individual) are comfortable with a distro, and it works well for you, it’s a good option. If Arch isn’t that, then it’s not a good option for you. Some people don’t understand that even the “once a year single command” maintenance is too technical for most.

Having run Arch only the last few years, I don’t know how much it’s improved compared to say 10 years ago. I do know on most of my systems I don’t spend that much time updating or maintaining my Arch installations, usually just a yay, select which AUR packages not to update (the ones I have can have issues updating sometimes), wait for 15-ish minutes (depends how much I have to compile from AUR), and that’s it. From server to desktop, some weekly, others once every couple months. Although I would say it’s more than average, as I have a custom repository with some nightly compiled packages, which has its own issues.

The difference is rolling vs stable release.

Debian 13 is out, and it will stay exactly the same Debian 13 that it was when it released, even 5 years from now. The only changes are bugfixes, security patches, etc. No new features. This means you can basically do unattended sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade with no problems. By the time Debian 14 comes out, there will have been a ton of changes to upstream software, Updating from 13 to 14 might be a one-click fix, or it might take effort fixing configs and ensuring the new software works.

Arch Linux is rolling release, it does not have version numbers, and does not hold back a major package update just “because it changes things”. This means basically every update might change things, and that can require intervention. If the Arch Linux team is aware of required intervention, it will be put on the Arch News. This is often just one or two commands. The possibility of intervention being required means unattended upgrades are a no-go on Arch, but that’s pretty much it.

If you don’t update your system for say, a year, everything that’s changed in that time will change all at once. This is often still a few commands to fix, but could be more depending on what updated exactly. Updating regularly is reccomended, because it’s easier to tell what exactly changed between updates, and thus easier to track down where a problem originates from.

Depends entirely on the device. On most desktops, you should be able to. On a lot of laptops, this may leave them in an unbootable state (due to GPU option ROMs).

Check for your specific hardware before removing factory default secure boot keys.

This is heavily sensationalized. UEFI “secure boot” has never been “secure” if you (the end user) trust vendor or Microsoft signatures. Alongside that, this ““backdoor”” (diagnostic/troubleshooting tool) requires physical access, at which point there are plenty of other things you can do with the same result.

Yes, the impact is theoretically high, but it’s the same for all the other vulnerable EFI applications MS and vendors sign willy-nilly. In order to get a properly locked-down secure boot, you need to trust only yourself.

When you trust Microsoft’s secure boot keys, all it takes is one signed EFI application with an exploit to make your machine vulnerable to this type of attack.

Another important part is persistence, especially for UEFI malware. The only reason it’s so easy is because Windows built-in “factory reset” is so terrible. Fresh installing from a USB drive can easily avoid that.

I’m running on postmarketOS, SailfishOS includes significant proprietary components, besides firmware. Like the user-interface. My Android daily driver is already running strict FOSS-only ROM and apps (with an exception in firmware), there’s no reason for me to switch to sometbing proprietary.

Yes, it’s called Sober. It is not official, and may lose functionality at any time due to updates to client-side anti-cheat.

Nobody is helping Google do anything, phone OEMs develop their own private spin on Android (for example, Samsungs OneUI). They make sure their device works in their OS, nothing else.

Depending on your bank, you may be able to use their website.

The “no apps” isn’t “that big of an issue” (at least for me), as there’s Waydroid available, and it’s just standard Linux with all the desktop apps right from Flathub. There’s also plenty of webapps available.

There’s tons of other issues with Linux mobile, like general usability, battery life, responsiveness (especially when receiving calls or notifications), and hardware support.

The biggest one I’m running into is sleep states. I can either have 4-ish hours of battery life, but if my phone is charged, I get notifications, alarms go off, and calls come in immediately. Or I can have about a day idle battery life, but have to check my phone before any of that stuff comes in.

There’s also the fact I use my phone for media a lot (Jellyfin, Lemmy), and the experience isn’t great on Linux mobile. “Apps” integtate less with each other, and video playback is kind of a mess. (For example, I can’t “share” on a photo from Lemmy to send it to a friend on Matrix).

While Mint is an Ubuntu-based distro, it tries to un-fuck the worst of Canonical. Other Ubuntu spins with a different desktop environment don’t do this, like Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. They end up as just Ubuntu on a different DE, with all the decisions made by canonical.

Base Debian might work, but afaik, is “not as beginner friendly” compared to Mint.

Movies like Terminator have “AGI”, or artificial generalized intelligence. We had to come up with a new term for it after LLM companies kept claiming they had “AI”. Technically speaking, large language models fall under machine learning, but they are limited to just predicting language and text, and will never be able to “think” with concepts or adapt in real time to new situations.

Take for example chess. We have stockfish (and other engines), that far outperform any human. Can these chess engines “think”? Can they reason? Adapt to new situations? Clearly not, for example, adding a new piece with different rules would require stockfish to re-train from scratch. Humans can take their existing knowledge and adapt it to the new situation. Also look at LLMs attempting to play chess. They can “predict the next token” as they were designed to, but nothing more. They have been trained on enough chess notation that the output is likely a valid notation, but they have no concept of what chess even is, so they will spit out nearly random moves, often without following rules.

LLMs are effectively the same concept as chess engines. We just put googly eyes on the software, and now tons of people are worried about AI taking over the world. While current LLMs and generative AI do pose a risk (overwhelming amounts of slop and misinformation, which could affect human cultural development. And a human deciding to give an LLM external influence on anything, which could have major impact), it’s nowhere near Terminator-style AGI. For that to happen, humans would have to figure out a new way of thinking about machine learning, and there would have to be several orders of magnitude more computing resources for it.

Since the classification for “AI” will probably include “AGI”, there will (hopefully) be legal barriers in place by the time anyone develops actual AGI. The computing resources problem is also gradual, an AGI does not simply “tranfer itself onto a smartphone” in the real world (or an airplane, a car, you name it). It will exist in a massive datacenter, and can have its power shut off. If AGI does get created, and causes a massive incident, it will likely be during this time. This would cause whatever real world entity created it to realize there should be safeguards.

So to answer your question: No, the movies did not “get it right”. They are overexaggerated fantasies of what someone thinks could happen by changing some rules of our current reality. Artwork like that can pose some interesting questions, but when they’re trying to “predict the future”, they often get things wrong that changes the answer to any questions asked about the future it predicts.

Firefox is able to do this for basic PDF annotations. It’s not very extensive, but it’s very simple to use (and you probably already have it installed).