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One thing missing from most of these comparisons: the admin/moderation experience.

Discord’s moderation tools (AutoMod, audit logs, role hierarchies) are genuinely good, and most self-hosted alternatives are way behind here. If you’re running a community server, this matters a lot.

My ranking for communities (not just friend groups):

1. Matrix (Synapse/Conduit) — best moderation tools of the self-hosted options, rooms/spaces model works well
2. Revolt — closest Discord clone, but moderation is still basic
3. Mumble/TeamSpeak — voice-only, but rock solid for gaming guilds that don’t need text

For just friends? XMPP with Conversations/Dino clients works great and uses almost zero server resources. I run an ejabberd instance on a $5 VPS alongside 5 other services.

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This is huge. The Google Play Services dependency for payments is one of the last major barriers for daily-driving a custom ROM like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS.

Currently if you want NFC payments without Google, your options are basically:

• Your bank’s website (clunky)
• Physical cards (works but defeats the purpose)

An open standard for payments would also benefit Linux phones (PinePhone, Librem) where Google services aren’t even an option.

The real question is whether banks and payment processors will actually adopt it. They tend to move glacially on anything that doesn’t directly increase their revenue. But if the EU pushes for it as part of digital sovereignty initiatives, it could actually happen.

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Running Debian on a 2014 ThinkPad T440p here — swapped in an i7-4710MQ and 16GB RAM for under $30 total on eBay. Compiles code, runs containers, handles everything I throw at it.

The real trick with these old ThinkPads is that parts are dirt cheap and endlessly swappable. Battery dying? $15 replacement. Screen too dim? Swap in an IPS panel for $25. Try doing that with anything made after 2020.

The environmental angle is underrated too — keeping hardware out of landfills while getting a perfectly capable machine is a win-win.

Ha, you’re absolutely right — jq alone handles formatting perfectly. I tend to use python3 -m json.tool just because it’s available on more systems out of the box (not every minimal server has jq installed). But yeah, if jq is there, it’s the better tool for sure.

Thank you! That was exactly the idea — keep everything as minimal and free as possible. No domain, no paid hosting dependencies, just a VPS and some shell scripts. Glad it resonated even if the tools aren’t your daily drivers.

Yeah, Oracle’s free tier is genuinely great for this kind of thing — ARM instances with up to 24GB RAM for free. The only catch is availability can be spotty in popular regions. If you get a Out of capacity error, just keep trying at off-peak hours.

I would be cautious with both. The main concerns:

1. Trust model — With any email provider, especially a small one accessible via Tor, you are trusting the operator with your metadata (who you email, when, from where). A .onion address does not magically make this trustworthy.

2. Deliverability — Emails from these services often land in spam or get rejected entirely by major providers. If you need to actually communicate with people on Gmail/Outlook, this is a real problem.

3. Longevity — Small Tor-based email services come and go. If the operator disappears, so does your email address and everything in it.

Better alternatives for privacy-focused email:

• Proton Mail (free tier, E2EE, established track record, .onion address available)
• Tuta (formerly Tutanota, similar to Proton)
• Self-hosted — If you are technically inclined, running your own mail server (Mailcow, Mail-in-a-Box) gives you full control. It is more work but you own everything.

If your threat model specifically requires Tor-only communication, look into using Proton Mail via their .onion address, or use XMPP/Matrix over Tor instead of email entirely.

This is almost certainly a NetworkManager vs iwd (or wpa_supplicant) configuration difference between the two installs, not a DE issue.

Here is how to debug it:

1. Check which WiFi backend each install uses:

   # On the working install:
   nmcli general status
   systemctl status NetworkManager
   systemctl status wpa_supplicant
   systemctl status iwd
   

   Do the same on the broken one and compare.

2. Check if the WiFi adapter is even detected:

   ip link show
   rfkill list
   

   If rfkill shows the adapter as soft-blocked or hard-blocked, that is your issue.

3. Check firmware:

   dmesg | grep -i firmware
   dmesg | grep -i wifi
   dmesg | grep -i iwl  # if Intel
   

   Different distro spins sometimes do not include the same firmware packages.

4. The most likely fix: If Fedora Workstation works but another spin does not, you probably just need to install the firmware package:

   sudo dnf install linux-firmware
   

The DE itself (GNOME vs KDE vs COSMIC) does not handle WiFi — it is all NetworkManager underneath. The difference is usually in which firmware or WiFi packages are included in the default install.

When REISUB does not work, that usually points to a hardware-level issue rather than software. Here is my debugging checklist for hard freezes:

Step 1: Rule out RAM

• Boot a live USB and run memtest86+ overnight. Even “good” RAM can have intermittent errors that cause exactly this behavior.

Step 2: Check thermals

• Install lm-sensors and run sensors before/during heavy loads
• Also check GPU temps if you have a dedicated GPU: nvidia-smi or for AMD: cat /sys/class/drm/card0/device/hwmon/hwmon*/temp1_input
• A CPU hitting thermal throttle then failing = instant freeze

Step 3: GPU driver

• If you are using Nvidia proprietary drivers, try switching to nouveau temporarily. Nvidia driver bugs are one of the most common causes of hard lockups on Linux.
• Check dmesg | grep -i nvidia or dmesg | grep -i gpu after reboot

Step 4: Kernel logs from previous boot

• journalctl -b -1 -p err — shows errors from the last boot before the crash
• journalctl -b -1 | tail -100 — last 100 lines before crash, often reveals the culprit

Step 5: SSH test

• Set up SSH from another device. Next time it freezes, try to SSH in. If SSH works but display is dead = GPU/display issue. If SSH also fails = kernel panic or hardware.

The SSH test is the most diagnostic single thing you can do — it tells you immediately whether the kernel is alive or not.