Bravo! CosmOS does look pretty nice. If I had better hardware, I might try something like that. Right now I’m using Fedora Server because of the SELinux, copilot, and podman support out of the box.

I’ve noticed that, too, about the community. I think part of the reason for the friendliness is a desire to see the community grow. Self-hosting feels very grassroots.

Ooh, that is very cool! Do you think an rPi Zero could run Traccar? Mine is just collecting dust after I pulled it off my network because it couldn’t handle pihole traffic.

I guess that allure of rugged individualism attracts a lot of MAGA types to trades and small businesses. It’s been the opposite in education on the teachers’ side, but definitely adversarial with MAGA on the students’ and parents’ side. I used to teach current events, but I haven’t been able to do that for the last 10 years. Kids would find their way into your personal accounts, too, so I switched to federated platforms instead.

…get back ownership of my materials…

Yes, that was a red flag for me. Ever have your materials “removed?” I once lost a few Kindle books because Amazon pulled them off the shelves. After that, I learned how to strip DRM off the books and save them offline.

Ditto about the notes. Are you using any specific apps to edit them? I’m just using nvim with markdown plugins.

Piracy, basically.

Lol, you don’t say? Do you use something like Jellyseerr for requests?

Immich is fantastic. I’d been using Nextcloud for photos, but, like many monolithic software suites, it lacks many features. I’d also been using Spotify for notifications, but I’ve abandoned it and ran to Matrix. I’ll have to try ntfy.

HomeAssistant can be great, though it does require some yaml-fu for notifications and such. At one point I had it use TTS for notifications.

Dude, yes! Subscriptions are a scam. They hold your downloads at ransom.

This feels like the road I took. Subscription services are a scam, and I can’t trust sharing personal data on somebody else’s hardware. Eventually I’d like to host instances for federated services I already use.

Damn, got shot down, lol. I’m not advocating for churning out assignments; just for tinkering with editing and brainstorming. “Actually learning and doing things” is admirable. I’d rather be certain a student is growing instead of the clanker.

Yeah, there’s always a child-like fascination with technology. Do you ever feel like making it a career would’ve taken the joy out of it? My bro is IT and it somewhat did for him.

Hey, hosting your own LLM could work out for you in that respect.

Sorry to hear. On the upside, no one will be upset when the server goes down.

That’s the way to go! I’m sure you didn’t want to go back to Windows after a while. That was the start for me, too, back with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope.

Good luck! I just decided to rip the bandage off instead of going through my accounts. I’ve been self-hosting for several years now, and I have replacements for all Google apps. The only thing I’d been using it for was YouTube, but that site is definitely compromising for people with certain political opinions.

I had to install a redirect add-on while I held my breath.

Without the pay…

Proton and Privateemail through Namecheap.

I was using Nextcloud with OnlyOffice for a while, but since then, this is the setup:

• YouTube --> Invidious/Odysee/PeerTube
• Authenticator --> Stratum
• Google Passwords --> Vaultwarden
• Gmail/Calendar/Tasks --> Privateemail (through domain host)
• Google Drive --> Syncthing/SFTPGo (webdav implementation handles phone backups, too)
• Play Store --> Aurora and F-Droid
• Google Search --> SearXNG
• Google Home --> HomeAssistant
• Google Photos --> Immich
• Google Books --> Kavita
• Android Messages --> KDE Connect
• Google Maps --> Organic Maps or Magic Earth
• Google Meet --> Element
• Google Pay --> PayPal
• Google Voice --> Session
• YouTube Music --> gonic

All for-profit prisons already have these features, lol.

That’s a smart way of going about it. I threw caution to the wind because I stopped using my Google account for services years ago. We’ll see how that affects things in the future.