I went a step further and am paying an accountant to handle this mess, using my favourite libre email client to contact her. I know, it's a privileged position.

That's what I do, /music

XMPP. It just works, requires very little resources, is stable and has decent clients.

I would go with Snikket instead of Prosody if I had been starting now.

Conversations on phones, Dino or Gajim on PCs, plus a conversejs install on the xmpp server, to allow web access when needed.

Conversations is easy for the family to figure out.

Exactly, one of the last products not sold in single use plastic packaging yet gets shat on

It is very good test for the ability to research, I think. The amount of people who painstakingly went through some video tutorial on PHP and are now developers is insane. I'm sure there's place in the market for them (writing Wordpress themes/plugins, for example), but it's hard to find a programmer with ability to think these days. Not because people are more stupid, but because every other person is a programmer now.

I install ncdu on any machine I set up, because installing it when it's needed may be tricky

Now another 7 years and 24 "please rebase this old code" requests before it's merged

Yaay, space for 24 more apartment buildings!

IDA Pro (a disassembler) is closed source but came with a license that allowed disassembly and binary modification. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.

Gitea.

I used raw SSH for years but occasionally I had to share accesss to a repo with sonebody else, and the whole dance with creating an unix user and giving proper permissions was only fun for the first time.

How much time do you think it takes to design a new phone?

A week, because a car takes 5 years and a phone is 1/250 the size of a car?

Try LSD. It's like being a kid again.