Freetube = seriously good.

Obligatory mention of Kagi (which is actually brilliant).

Immich is the must for self-hosting photos. Bye Google.

I reckon Kagi is the best search engine out there. It's paid though. Second I'd have Qwant followed by DDG.

Currently running NixOS with Debian and Arch containers in distrobox. Certain apps in NixOS (e.g. Calibre) don't respect the scaling in Gnome, but work perfectly via distrobox. Btw, there's a nice GUI for distrobox called Boxbuddy that works really well.

Get a room.

You could try Clipious from FDroid. It's my fallback for ReVanced.

I hadn't considered this. It's interesting stuff. My old doctor used to just Google stuff in front of me and then repeat the info as if I hadn't been there for the last five minutes.

If private companies were more efficient than the public sector then you'd want to privatize the armed forces. The fact that no serious person argues for this tells you all you need to know.

If you've got a spare USB stick laying around then you could install Ventoy on it (https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html) and run Linux in a live environment. Just (1) install Ventoy on the USB (this will wipe it, btw) (2) download any live Linux ISO (Mint has one of these) and put it on the USB (3) change your BIOS boot order to USB first (4) reboot and select the Linux you want to test drive from the Ventoy menu. (5) When you're done, just shut down, unplug USB and reboot normally.

This is the part that bothers me the most, I think.

Same thing happened to me. That was The Day I Dumped Google.

Yeah, the personal backup and sync. Sorry, I didn't think to make it clear.

Ah sorry man. I didn't spot it.

Immich is on a par with Google Photos, imo. It's self hosted though, so not for everyone.

I'm using Immich in Nixos. It's simple. Takes about 10 mins. You need to set Docker up in your configuration.nix then set Immich up using docker compose. Let me know if you need a hand getting it going.

Thanks a lot. Tailscale is out, unfortunately. Because the server also runs Plex and I need to use it with Chromecast on remote access (it's an old CC, so can't add tailscale to it). Looking into Cloudflare and port forwarding. I've just signed up to NextDNS though, so don't want to add another layer of DNS stuff to my mix.

Ah, I very much did not know that! Ok, I'm off to investigate Tailscale a bit more.

Kagi is fabulous. You can also use nextdns to block ads from getting in. They have a generous free tier and the unlimited is cheap. I have it on my router = ad free house.