I’ve been super happy with Bitwarden for years now. But with their new CEO being a big Private Equity guy, I am wary of the enshitification risk.

I’ve been looking for an alternative that works on both Android and other platforms. I use my phone for a lot of random stuff, so my password manager working on my phone is essential.

Has KeyPassDX been good? Does it work with the same password database as KeyPassXC?

Classic enshitification arc. They were a fast growing startup that engineered really good printers and software. People, especially newbies flocked to them because their software was easy to use and their initial print quality was very good without any tweaking or tuning.

But they were backed by private equity, and had to start showing higher and higher returns, they started locking in users with their proprietary cloud services.

They’ve been locking users in more and more recently, and just a few weeks ago, threatened a user with legal action for posting AGPL code up on their own repo. The code enabled users to use their Bambu printers without needing to sign into Bambu’s cloud.

Now there is a big community backlash and Bambu is having to do PR damage control.

My Jellyfin server goes, “Burrrrrrr!”

Never been so happy to sail the seven seas! 🏴‍☠️🥰🏴‍☠️ Jellyfin FTW

I can’t speak for other fields, but I’ve worked in IT as a sysadmin for about a decade at a bunch of different companies, big and small.

I’ve never worked at a place that was close to “overstaffed” nearly every place I’ve worked we’ve needed at least 2-4 additional people.

Everybody was overworked, overwhelmed with tickets and projects, working 50+ hours a week constantly.

But upper management and executives love claiming that staffing is maxed out and needs to get more lean. Like, dude, our IT team is handling dozens of tickets a day, running 5-10 different infrastructure projects simultaneously, and keeping near-decade old equipment alive because we were denied our third budget request in a row.

Aaaaaand example #99999… Of why tech sovereignty is so important. The moment you start outsourcing your control, you become vulnerable to this exact kind of action by a company.

Everybody got sucked into the cloud “magic” for years, but now we are seeing the monster emerge more and more as proprietary technology enshitifies.

Luckily, there is a boom happening across the FOSS world, more and more people are finally waking up to the principles of software freedom and actual ownership.

May it continue to grow, as the corpos struggle and wither.

Lol, the poor suckers who ever paid for premium in the first place.

So true! Also, productive screentime has been nice. Instead of doomscrolling or mindlessly zoning out to video essays, I’ve been programming, doing some 3D modeling for 3D printing, working on some simple games, and reading long form articles from my own curated news feed.

Ublock Origin, NewPipe, and Grayjay, haven’t seen a YouTube ad in over a decade. 😌

Same, I’ve paid/donated far more for my FOSS than I ever did for proprietary software.

Insert the super fancy Tux for donating more for the FOSS than you would have paid for the proprietary software 🤴

Curse USB and networking, purge that unclean heresy from your computing! Embrace the third temple!

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!

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.

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.

KDE is my favorite, but I’m excited to try Cosmic once it’s a little farther along.

I also love Cinnamon, not because it looks great, or has a ton of customizablity, but because it is so stable. It’s been the best #JustWorks DE in my experience.

Those are the only two I use regularly. Xfce is nice once you get it customized, but it’s kind of a pain to get configured. I don’t have much use for sophisticated tiling, so tiling window managers are just curiosities to me. I’ve played with i3, Sway, Hyprland, and a few others over the years.

I wish I had a use case for them, but alas, all my day to day needs are handled just fine with basic Window snapping, tmux, kitty tabs, and occasionally using a second virtual desktop.

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