Always eat your greens!
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…
No web ui, just the direct CLI interface.
For my team, I have set up lab accounts on the host machine and configured the SSHD daemon to drop them directly into their designated lab container when they use that account and key combo.
Nothing fancy.
Apparently, you can use Curve Pay, which is a UK-based virtual card manager and wallet which works with NFC tap to pay.
There’s a blog post by a guy last year who posted about it. Idk anything about tap to pay third parties, so look into that at your own risk.
I’m currently in the process of deploying a Linux lab environment at my current workplace actually.
Check out Incus if you haven’t already. Incus Containers
It’s a community supported fully open source fork of LXC. It supports full system Linux containers as opposed to Docker-style single application containers. It also supports full QEMU virtual machines of you need them.
It’s likely going to replace my entire traditional type-1 hypervisor setup in my home lab because of how much lighter weight it is. My most lightweight VMs are typically still 2GB of RAM, things tend to get funky when I go below that. Whereas my clean install of a Debian 13 container on Incus was using around 90MB. In these crazy times, anything that uses RAM 10x-20x more efficiently has my attention.
It can also do all the typical hypervisor back end stuff, HA clustering, automatic container snapshots, userspace isolation, virtual networking, static and dynamic resource limitations, etc.
The daemon runs on all major distros, but you can also build and use their IncusOS, which is an immutable distro-fied Incus deployment that is optimized out of the box. (Although I’ve had great results just running it as a daemon on a basic Debian installation.)
It’s super easy to learn and get going, and it’s working perfectly in the early tests for my team as a Lab environment platform.
What issues are you having with GrapheneOS? I’ve installed it on several different devices and it’s been super easy.
I’m constantly shocked how poorly Windows 11 runs on brand new high end hardware.
My current job has expensive enterprise class HP laptops, brand new, Nvme drives, the newest CPUs, 32GB RAM, blah blah.
Nearly every day, my corporate VPN app just shits the bed. The tray window that pops up to connect just goes black and never shows anything. I have to open task manager, end the process, wait 30 seconds for it to autostart to then authenticate.
My WSL instance constantly fails to start and I have to run a Powershell command to fix it. Programs won’t maximize won’t open when I try to switch to them until I do it 4-5 times.
Everything is slow and clunky even when I have almost nothing running.
Meanwhile my 8 year old low end Thinkpad with 8 GB of slow DDR4 RAM and a 2.5inch cheapo SSD runs fine with Linux Mint thrown on it and I frequently go 4-6 months between updates.
Everything you described falls under the umbrella of Capitalism.
Capitalism will always result in this sort of devolution, because it rewards this sort of behavior.
Constant GDP growth fuels capitalist enterprises because valuations go up and Capital is expanded. That incentivizes governments to make access to Capital easier and regulations on growth looser, which the firms themselves favor in terms of lower taxes, cheaper loans, larger capital markets, etc.
How many business leaders lobby, vote, and push for higher general taxes, stronger labor rights, stricter regulations, and more expensive loans?
The only time you’ll see them doing any of those things, is when it directly hurts one of their major competitors.
This makes perfect sense within a Capitalist framework, because private ownership of the means of production and increasing profitability are literally the core of Capitalism. So of course Capitalists will always tend towards what makes the most money.
All the worst traits of modern Capitalism, (Everything is a subscription, planned obsolescence, shrinkflation, extreme litigiousness over patents and copyrights, ads in everything, predatory pricing & monetization) are the logical result of a Capitalist system.
Of course they are, same with undersea data centers (for different reasons).
But it doesn’t matter. In the late-stage capitalism we find ourselves in, you don’t need a real product, nor a promising prototype. You don’t even need a good idea, you just need the promise that you’ll come up with a good idea soon. That’s enough to get the investors drooling, the shareholders hyped, and the gullible idiots engaged.
And you only have to maintain that long enough to pay yourself and your insiders some fat checks. Then when inevitably, reality barges in and people start to realize it was all bullshit and pipe dreams, you’ve already cashed out. If your PR team is good, the media and your sycophantic fans will praise you as a visionary who was simply, “ahead of their time.” And you can go on to rip off more people.
It’s basically Patreon scams but with billions of dollars.
One of the reasons Linux Mint is so great, all the awesome things about Ubuntu under the hood without any of the trash 😊
Netbird and Pangolin too.
Breaking News! Multiple forks discovered in kitchen, exclusive coverage tonight at 11:00!
Don’t feel bad about the distro you land on, especially not Linux Mint. It’s the #1 distro I recommend to completely new Linux users.
I use it myself for any computer that I want a #JustWorks experience on. The Cinnamon desktop environment is super stable and easy to use. And so far, Linux Mint is the only distro I know of where you truly don’t have to use the terminal for anything even kernel updates/rollbacks, alternative driver installations, and major version upgrades.
The Mint team is wonderful and they’ve created a fantastic product.
I like good GUIs. There are GUIs that are clean, responsive, well designed, and full-featured.
Sadly, that is rare nowadays, regardless if the software is FOSS or not.
It seems like for proprietary software, the corporate approach is to design slow, boring GUIs that lack most/all advanced functionality. It’s designed for dumb users who just want to click and swipe.
FOSS on the other hand rarely has full or even part time UI/UX devs due to the cost. So often the GUIs are clunky, messy, and a horrible pain to navigate. The upside is that they usually have extremely deep features, but good luck finding them.
If I have to pick, FOSS all the way, but I wish I didn’t have to. There are a few FOSS programs that have very nice UIs, Bitwarden, Protonmail, Musescore, Godot, and many are getting better, but the landscape is still rough out there.
As for CLI, I prefer it for some things, it’s just faster depending on the function. I find myself operating with a hybrid setup now days. I have become proficient enough with the command line that I can switch seamlessly between my GUI environments and the CLI-only environments. I don’t really think about it much anymore.
Free Options:
Cheap Options:
I’ve been liking vanilla Debian more and more lately. It takes a bit of time to set up properly, and there are some drawbacks for certain software stacks. But in general, rock stable, no muss, barely any fuss.
Once it’s set up, it’s awesome for workhorse servers.
And as long as you don’t need anything cutting edge, it’s not bad as a desktop OS. I used Debian12 with the Plasma DE for a while at a job I had and it was very usable. A few weird issues, but nothing terrible.
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.