Wish they handled it better, but I knew about this a while ago, and the price is more than reasonable.

A decade without a price hike is extremely generous, especially at how cheap their plan was.

They are a FOSS company that makes a fantastic product I’ve been happy with for years, I’ll gladly pay less than $2 a month to support them. Their server code is licensed with the AGPL, the strongest copyleft license there is, which gives me a lot of confidence.

Worse case scenario, they enshitify down the road, we are protected via the open source implementations. We’ve seen this many times in the past, Red Hat > Alma & Rocky Linux, Citrix Xen Server > XCP-ng, Terraform > Open Tofu.

Pay for your open source software, folks 💖

That’s a big one too, should catch lots of malware in that!

Yeah, those two look like they should be studying for their civics midterms, not cosplaying jackboot goons.

Tomb is a great little app that can do the same.

Tomb app

“My friend says the story is stupid and no one would want to read it.”

That’s not real constructive feedback. If your friend has actual critiques of your concept, that’s one thing, but just saying something seems stupid is meaningless and carries zero weight.

Don’t let people live their life and your life too. If you’re passionate about an idea, try it and see if it works. Worse case scenario, it fails, and you learn from it and get lots of practice for your next idea. Which still might be bad, but it will almost certainly be less bad, and same with the next, and the next, and before you know it, you have hundreds of hours of practice and experience and you’re creating real cool stuff.

Also, sometimes ideas are good, but you currently lack the skill to execute them well. That just means you need to increase your skill level. An idea that fails badly when you first start out, might turn out fantastic 5 - 10 years down the road.

Film directors/writers sometimes talk about this, where they had an idea or a script for a movie that they wanted to make, but they didn’t have the budget and necessary experience to do it justice early in their career.

TL;DR Your friend’s “feedback” is worthless, if you’re really passionate about this idea, go for it. Worst case scenario, you gain a bunch of experience trying to make it.

The Mullvad integration allows you to use Mullvad as your VPN for internet browsing while still being on your tailnet.

So normally, running two different VPN services can cause a bunch of problems, if it even works at all. Tailscale’s Mullvad integration fixes that.

Tailscale by itself is an overlay network. It’s literally a second network that your computer is connected to, but instead of it being a physical network with wires, switches, and routers, it’s a virtual network, a network that runs as software.

So imagine your computer right now at home. You plug into your router, and you have a local IP address, something like 192.168.1.20 right? If you run ipconfig on Windows or ip a on Linux, you’ll see your network adaptors listed with what their current IP address is. So if you’re running Windows, you’ll see your physical network adaptor listed with the IP address of 192.168.1.20

When you install Tailscale on that computer and log into your account, then run that command again, you’ll see a new network device listed, and it will have a totally different IP address, like 100.89.113.14

That is your Tailnet IP address, it works just like your “normal” IP address, but instead of it being a physical Ethernet adaptor on your motherboard and plugged into your home router, it is a virtual adaptor (software) running on your computer, connected to the Tailscale network, which has servers all around the world.

When you install Tailscale on a new device, say an old computer that you are using as a Minecraft server. That computer will get a new IP address on your tailnet, say 100.94.65.132

Because both of those machines were added by you to your own Tailnet, they can see and talk to each other by default. Meaning you could run a ping command from your home computer to your Minecraft server’s Tailscale IP, and it will respond.

Because this runs on the internet through Tailscale’s servers, you can do this from anywhere. That’s the “VPN” type functionality you are talking about. No matter where your home computer is, you can still access your Minecraft server because it is on your Tailnet, just as if it were still plugged into your router right next to you.

This is how I access my entire home lab from anywhere in the world. For example, I have a Jellyfin media server (like Plex) that I have a bunch of movies, TV shows, anime on. It’s running Tailscale and is on my Tailnet. I have Tailscale installed on my Android smartphone too.

So if I am staying at a hotel in another state, or visiting my family on the other side of the country, and I want to watch a movie or show that I have on my server all the way back home. I just run the Tailscale app on my phone, then open the Jellyfin app and I see all my home media right there on my phone and can watch it flawlessly. Even though I am at my parent’s house, on a totally different internet connection, 500 miles away from my home.

No, Tailscale is an overlay network. In it’s simplest form, it can act as a VPN. But it does much more than that.

Tailscale installs a virtual network device and allocates IP addresses to any device you install it on and sign in with your tailnet. Think of it as a virtual meshed LAN that runs on top of your physical network.

Tailscale becomes your control plane and provides advanced access control options for all your users and devices.

I use Tailscale and share out that server machine’s tailscale IP with just my gaming buddies.

But if you wanna live dangerously, you can port forward from your router to your internal mumble server.

GrapheneOS, love it.

I’ve got a Mumble server running on a little Linux container in my home lab.

Easy to set up and configure, very stable. Nothing special, it does what it is supposed to do, be a low latency, stable voip system, and it does great.

Waterfox on Mobile has been working well for me so far.

I’ve been using Graphene for several years and I love it. I could never go back now, Google android feels so incredibly bloated and invasive by comparison.

Double check your backups just to be safe, and then go for it. It’s not hard to revert if you hate it. There is a big of a learning curve, mainly just using the alternative app stores like Accresent, F-Droid, etc.

But once you spend a bit of time getting your apps installed and your system set up the way you like, you’ll love it.

Awesome to hear!

+1 for Linux Mint, it’s what I recommend to 99% of newbies. It’s simple, stable, and friendly.

It’s my #1 “just works” distro

Why not both? 🤓

I am constantly impressed with the level of general idiocy of end users when it comes to stuff like this…

I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.

My current job has expensive enterprise class HP laptops, brand new, Nvme drives, the newest CPUs, 32GB RAM, blah blah.

Nearly every day, my corporate VPN app just shits the bed. The tray window that pops up to connect just goes black and never shows anything. I have to open task manager, end the process, wait 30 seconds for it to autostart to then authenticate.

My WSL instance constantly fails to start and I have to run a Powershell command to fix it. Programs won’t maximize won’t open when I try to switch to them until I do it 4-5 times.

Everything is slow and clunky even when I have almost nothing running.

Meanwhile my 8 year old low end Thinkpad with 8 GB of slow DDR4 RAM and a 2.5inch cheapo SSD runs fine with Linux Mint thrown on it and I frequently go 4-6 months between updates.

I mean, it’s intended to be an insult because the implication is that Reddit sucks.

I personally never understood the “Redditor” insults.

Reddit is just a forum directory with an infinite feed. You can find cringey weirdos but there’s also subreddits for potted plants, chess, home improvement, etc. which are pretty mundane and low drama.

I left Reddit for similar reasons, but I still use it sometimes for troubleshooting and advice in the IT/Programming space.

Haven’t had a Motorola in many years. Hopefully this works out well and we get a really nice piece of hardware that isn’t subject to the whims of Google.

Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.

Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.

Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.

How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?

The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.

This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.

All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.

Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).

But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.

And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.

It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.