I mean that's just cinnamon with a debian backend instead of the regular ubuntu.

But Bonzai Buddy was my friend! He wouldn't do those things to me! He cared!

4G/5G cellular? So, in some ways you're actually easier to find. Your cell gateway is connecting to a tower which is logged and includes cell strength metrics. That gets compared to other towers and via trilateralization your location is determined.

Again, going back to what I previously said: there is a path back to you even if only for either billing or connectivity purposes.

I'm curious what companies like EA are going to do if this continues. If your customers cannot obtain the hardware to run your games, what do you do? Start releasing pixel titles or just hope for a whale?

I think 10% self-promotion is a very fair rule. It enforces the idea that if you are going to take from the community that you also give something back.

As someone who is partially self-hosted, I think that will help keep ads from muddying the waters when I'm searching posts for setup suggestions.

I worked as a network analyst for a provider for several years and during that time I'd say ~90% of the issue stemmed from sketchy apps/services that the user loaded from their end.

A lot of "free" VPN services will basically allow bad actors (the paid tier) to use your connection. A lot of IoT devices are also just openly available on the Internet to route through.

From the ISP perspective, we managed the roads, not your car. There is a push to blame the ISP as it's their network, but realistically how are they meant to provide security (in the context that is being asked) to any device that gets plugged into that network? We even had business customers demand we add clauses to contracts where we would accept responsibility for any malware they sent between sites over an MPLS setup.

In the end, a lot of people seem to want this impossible scenario of the ISP managing security for them but also not inspecting their traffic.

Ok, this I can answer personally as we did multiple cases of this happening (CSAM, bomb threats, etc) at work.

So, anonymity on the Internet is not actually a thing. Whether its an IP address or telecom switch or whatever, there is a path back to you even if only for either billing or connectivity purposes. So, for IP, we would receive a subpoena signed by a judge to hand over any and all information regarding the identify of the a given IP address (they include a long list of things whether applicable or not in the order so every potential base is covered). Once legal was able to review and handed it off to us, we take that and look at the DHCP logs to see that on a given date at a given time that the IP address was assigned as part of shelf A / slot B / port C. That shelf/slot/port combination is tied physically to an address/account. We provide the relevant logs and personal information of that user to law enforcement.

For bomb threats over the phone, telecom switches love to tell every other telecom switch who they are (again, connectivity purposes). So, when you make a call to a business/school doing that, their PBX is going to log to the millisecond when that call occurred and who the switch was. Again, subpoena and we pull the SIP logs. We can even provide the RTP/RTCP packets and reconstruct the phone call audio if the subpoena asks for that.

You can just look at the testimonies from others who have run exit nodes. The cost of your "free" VPN is that law enforcement will constantly be in contact and investigating you because your network/machine is being used to download CSAM.

There is no "oh don't worry, A.B.C.D is just a tor node, we can give it a pass". Every time that happens, it has to be treated with a full investigation.

You mention crappy security practices from the ISP but then mention the user's action (installing "free" VPNs). Why is the ISP on the hook for the user making terrible decisions?

What is the correct security practice in that instance? Fire the customer for being an idiot? Maybe just DENY IP ANY ANY on outbound traffic?

How do you protect somebody who is intent on running themselves off a cliff?

So, it's like Grindr for crypto bros? Nostr is a sex thing, right?

EDIT: I'm not judging. Love is love.

It would be like running TOR, but not a relay, it would be like an exit node.

That should be enough to warn anyone away from using them.

At it's heart, this is what @selfhosted is meant for:

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

I would say that members talking about paid/closed products they use (ex. "I connect to this via Tailscale" or "I use company ABC for hosted VPS") to accomplish something is fine, but marketing or job boarding (ex. "Looking for QA on my commercial product") is not.

It's a paid closed-source app

So, this is an ad.

this is 100% free

It's a paid closed-source app

I am not asking for participance

I am looking for beta testers

You are asking people to QA a commercial product for you. Are you paying them? This is a job advertisement.

Self-Hosted isn't a job board, though. If you're going to post job listings, there are better places to do that.

Implicit optional features to use local LLMs for STT is something that I think most reasonable people could get behind. Too many accessibility tools for the disabled sit behind paywalls and subscription models.

Pre-ordering digitally available games only helps publishers with their financial forecasting. The best case pre-order scenario for a consumer is "early access" by a few days, but that isn't benefiting the user as they run without day-1 patches and the whole concept isn't meant to help pre-order players just penalize non-pre-order players.

You can't turn any distro into another, and nobody is saying that. For example, you can't take NixOS and turn it into Arch. You can use Nix on Arch, though.

I think a lot of this is misunderstanding what distros are. Think of it in terms of cars. A Ford Focus and Ford Fiesta are different cars. But how different? They use the same engine, but they have different radios. You can swap parts, but at no point does that make either of them a truck.

For a lot of distros its much simpler though:

What is the different between Kali Linux distro and Debian Linux distro? Is the engine under the hood the same? Yes. Is the package management the same? Yes. Can you add the Kali repos to the package management of Debian? Yes (it's called a "Frankendebian"). Can you swap kernels between them? Yes

So, whereas NixOS and Arch can't be turned into each other, if you have two distros who are just using different "car radios", is there really a difference?

Going back to what the other user mentioned, in the context of how people ask the question, I don't think distro matters. You have new users asking "What is a good distro for playing games? Bazzite or CachyOS?" Both. It doesn't matter, they will play the same.

Kali Linux would also be a completely correct answer to that question. Even back in the day I had Backtrack 5 running Dragon Age 2. And for security testing, what is the best distro? The one that you installed your tools to. Distro A has 200 sec tools pre-installed, Distro B has 400 sec tools pre-installed, but both have the same 10 tools you actively use so they are the same. Arguably neither are the best because that means there is 190 and 390 tools present that are just bloatware.

So, hopefully you can understand how arbitrary the choice in distro actually is.

the argumentation is, that you have access to any part of the system and can change everything. What is the reason that you cannot turn NixOS into Arch?

Because you don't have access to any part of the system. Again, nobody is saying you can change everything. NixOS is immutable meaning that is locked down read-only and only the Nix daemon has access to write. It's a matter of declarative vs imperative configuration schema. It's how vs what. In NixOS, you tell the system what you want done. In Arch, you tell the system how to do it.

So, you can't change any distro into any other distro, but the likelihood of two distros having any meaningful difference is low to the point of being pointless to ask.

As another user already stated, the main reason distros don't matter is analysis paralysis. Most of the users asking for thoughts between distros are effectively asking which of two duplicates is better. Say you've narrowed the distros you want to use to Debian and Kali, what is the difference between them if you just want to play games? There isn't one. You can run proton on Kali just as easy as Debian (you'd even be hitting the same repo likely).