Clearly the dark mode is the modern one! Jokes aside, I just realized that there THREE menu options on that toolbar: hamburger, kebab, and waffle! I realize they do different things, but no wonder people are confused by and scared of computers. Also, now I'm hungry!

It's still a good thing. It's an open specification, so anyone creating a design that is compliant can use software targeted at RISC-V. Just like you can buy USB-C flash drive from any manufacturer and use it with any OS that supports USB mass storage!

Nice, congrats! The camera and microphone switches are better than slide covers, they cut power to those sensors. It's kinda cool that it's become so standard for Framework that it's not discussed much anymore but it definitely deserves more attention. It was one of the many selling features for me when I pre-ordered the first gen framework (11th gen Intel).

I would recommend Tailscale for connecting to the home network. You could run it on each box if running it on the router is wonky.

I'm partial to Pop!_OS and their desktop environment.

VirtualBox is free and open source, the windows guest additions piece is not. However, they're both available for free download from the same site and they do not make any distinction between those two (at least at the time, haven't looked). They were waiting for companies to download the guest additions piece and going after them to shake down licensing fees. While I don't recall/know exactly, it seemed like they were almost exclusively going after companies they already had commercial relationships with to add more licensing fees to existing contracts. So yes, from my perspective they were shaking down customers after trying to entrap them with ambiguous free downloads. They had the legal right to do so, but it felt in bad faith.

Right? The zip ties even have trimmed tails!

Antennapod is a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) podcast app. The app is well designed with great features. You can also use it for playing audio books locally as well.

Apparently git let's you push two completely independent histories into one repo if you force push and will happily let you go about your business until you try to merge.

I found this out when an intern copied the code, initiated a new repo, worked off that repo, force pushed into remote, kept working on his branches. Absolutely not his fault, he should have had help. But I had to edit history and rewrite the parent of a commit to unite the family lines!

Fun to learn that you can create that problem and also there's a "way" to fix it.

Matrix (synapse server) probably fits the bill.

I understand why others are taking issue on your asking for free services. Maybe it could have been phrased better but not everyone has the life circumstances to pay for privacy respecting services, that's why I do like the freemium/donation models so those who are able can subsidize those who can't. Hopefully when circumstances improve more people can "pay it forward".

Here are my recommendations:

• Mail / Calendar / VPN / Drive: Proton free tier - 1GB shared storage and 1 VPN connection
• Chat / Messaging: Signal
• Community / Discord alternative: Matrix

"all the compiled languages are worse because you get errors before you can even run them" got a good chuckle out of me!