Ah, I see. That sounds like a completely fair scenario for using something a little more automated. Thanks for sharing.
Arch seems fine and I'll probably stay here for at least another few months, out of laziness if nothing else. If I'm not completely happy I'll probably end up back on Tumbleweed which is my usual daily, but I can't say I've had any problems that would drive me back immediately.
I guess I used a whole lot of words to say what you just did in just a few sentences. Thanks for summarizing my thoughts. Just out of curiosity though, why EndeavourOS? See this is also something that tripped me up. I see quite a few Arch spinoffs that all claim to be easier versions which naturally lead me to believe Arch itself was complicated. Which again is probably a community/communication problem and has nothing to do with the OS itself.
The Gentoo install isn't hard, it's very methodical. But it is a much more in-depth process than Arch, that's for sure. Granted these days Gentoo seems to only do Stage 3 installs which is half the system in a tarball anyway. The way people spoke about getting through the Arch install I was thinking it would be a step-by-step process like Gentoo is. It's really not.
Sorry if I wasn't clear about that. My essential thinking with the NAS was: Cloud is nice, but how vulnerable are you if the Cloud provider turns evil?
With Apple and Google, you're basically screwed and there is nothing you can do.
With a NAS, you own the server. You don't rent it. You own it. You can hold the thing that stores all your private data in your own two hands.
So what if the data center I host my backups on becomes evil? Well, then they find a bunch of encrypted blobs they can't access while I move my backups to a different host. I'm not sure even the server hosting you're talking about is as secure as that. What if they become evil? How much access do they have to your data? All "evil" takes is a single policy change from a suit who has no idea about actual tech. It happens all the time.
Maybe that comes off as paranoid, but with all the data breaches and enshittification happening lately I feel much more secure having my data literally in my own two hands and a built-in defense against evil policy changes/government overreach for anything that must be hosted externally. Coupled with Tailscale for remote access I believe this as secure as you can get.
And again, Synology was my choice for ease of use, but you can build a capable NAS from an old Optiplex on ebay for 200 bucks + drives.
I don't really understand your comment.
PC breaks? House burns down? My data is encrypted in a datacenter. My account gets cancelled? My data is on my NAS.
I don't store much data on my PCs or devices at all. Any data that is there I treat as transient. The NAS acts as permanent storage. So if the devices die, I can quite literally restore them to the state they were in within hours of their death from the NAS. If my house is hit by a tornado and my NAS dies, my data is safely encrypted in an external location. I've lost nothing. If my NAS, devices, and Wasabi's data center are all hit by tornadoes at the same time we have bigger problems to worry about. If that ridiculous scenario happened your server would not be immune either.
I'm not seeing the advantage of your rented server vs having backups in the cloud. Is it because the server will keep running? But if you've lost your devices in a fire you still can't access it whether it's running or not. When you replace your device you can then connect to your server, but I can simply download my data again. HyperBackup Explorer is available for every platform and can do a full restore back to a NAS, or individual file downloads for anything else.
I felt this "prison" very strongly with iCloud. Don't get me wrong, I think iCloud functions exceptionally well. It's an extremely well integrated cloud and works seamlessly with all Apple products. It's just that after a while I start to realize just how much of my life was sitting on Apple servers and what a dependency I had on Apple, hoping they are the good guy (narrator: they were not, in fact, the good guy) or at least, not as bad as the next best option (I feel Google has legitimately become evil at this point). I was constantly reading about security and getting myself worried, etc.
Finally I just bought a NAS. Synology is my current choice, but use whatever you prefer. A NAS can replicate anything the "cloud" can do, it's faster, it's safer, it doesn't rely on the good graces of any cloud provider. YOU hold the access to your data. As it should be. I still use the "cloud" for my backups with HyperBackup sending encrypted backups to Wasabi, but that is a different matter. Even if Wasabi decided to be evil, my data is encrypted before it ever leaves the NAS and Wasabi could never see my raw data like Apple/Google can.
The only thing holding people back from this, I guess, is price. Apple charges $0.99/month for 500gigs, while just the NAS itself with no drives will cost you several hundred. But man, not being worried about the latest cloud drama, government overreach, privacy scandals, etc is worth every cent. A Synology NAS with Tailscale is just about the safest place to put my data. All the Snyology mobile apps even pass the gf test for features and ease of use. I recommend a small 2-bay NAS to everyone I can.
Turn off the cloud, and take your data back.
Reading those comments in the threads OP posted reminded me how childish and toxic Reddit is. I haven't touched Reddit since this whole thing began and I've really been enjoying my time here on kbin. People actually communicate here. Those threads are typical Reddit downvote dog piling bullshit. It's so stark to me now after being away from it for awhile.
If you upvote a post it will put it in your Favorites. You can access favorites by hovering over the hamburger menu just to the left of your username in the top right corner. To upvote without putting it in your favorites, you can use boost instead. This is essentially how you save posts on kbin.
Thank you for your clarification! I don't know any of the legal specifics of this stuff and I very much appreciate you taking the time to help educate me and anyone else who needs it. I can only give a conceptual argument based on the history I've seen with these companies, but not any sort of specific knowledge of law.
The gist of what you're saying, and what we've actually seen play out recently, is technically they shouldn't be able to do this, but they're going to lawyer it in such a way that they'll get away with it unless/until someone actually sues them which is prohibitively expensive. We have recently seen class action suits against Meta, but realistically the damage has already been done, the money has already been made, and they go on with finding the next cash cow. Even a multimillion dollar settlement is a drop in the bucket, simply the cost of doing business for these people.
Sure, but you can't get investors interested in a bot. You can sell them a platform though. Meta will make the flashiest UI the fediverse has ever seen and sell that to investors, while harvesting and selling everything on the fediverse whether you use their platform or not. The only possible way to keep your data out of Meta's hands is to defederate anyone and everything associated with them. I know it sounds tinfoil hat, but honestly evaluate how Facebook does business and then imagine how ripe ActivityPub is for that sort of exploitation. If I used Facebook I have agreed to allow myself to be data mined, but if I use kbin I have not agreed, and yet, Meta can still do it if even one mutual server has agreed (or been paid) to federate to both platforms.
I feel a little lame quoting myself, but I was just having this discussion elsewhere so I'm just going to copy/paste my thoughts rather then thinking of a different way to say it this time.
Say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They'll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn't even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it's Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It's like an absolute wet dream for them. They don't even have to coax people to use their own platform!
If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they'd have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn't on board with this, it'll cause a huge fracture to form.
Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they've unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.
Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you've ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.
I'll just add that Meta will state that anything on their server is their property, and Federation will put your data directly on their server, even if you're not a member of their platform.
I think your experience is more to do with nvidia + Wayland than anything OS specific. Although I think other distros have done a lot of patching and coding around nvidia's incompetence to get Wayland to work better and I think Arch doesn't really do this sort of thing. Definitely seems like you unwittingly took on a project.
I also use nvidia but I have no desire to move to Wayland any time soon. X11 works just fine unless you get into esoteric setups like multiple monitors with different refresh rates. My first boot into KDE with Arch was completely broken and I thought "okay, here comes the hard part" until I realized it was defaulting to Wayland. Changed it to X11 in sddm and it's perfect. I use my ForceCompositionPipeline script on login and set kwin to force lowest latency and it's smooth as butter.
Wayland is the future but nvidia is definitely gatekeeping that future. I've got a 3080 in this machine that is going to last a pretty long time I suspect, but unless nvidia can manage to remove head from ass I see AMD in my future.