spectra.video is good, I’ve been on there for like a year. The admin is active on fedi and keeps the instance updated.

The thing is Photoshop does a lot of different stuff, like photo manipulation, painting, and pixel art. But it’s not really the best at anything besides photo manipulation probably. So it depends on what you want to do with it.

Been using Inkscape for about 15 years, probably the most enjoyable software I’ve ever used!

Krita is good for illustrating and painting

This is exactly why I’m also not that interested in Bluesky. It’s not decentralized in a way that makes it resilient to a Musk-style takeover.

PDSs are cool, Mastodon can learn something from Bluesky’s tech stack. But Mastodon made the right choices from the beginning to be decentralized for resiliency.

You gotta clean it off a little sooner after watching porn

Switched my parents from an iMac to an old Dell Optiplex running Elementary OS. It worked pretty well but there were some glitches with Pantheon DE and OS version upgrades required a reinstall, so I switched them to Fedora after a couple years. It’s easier for me to support because I run Fedora on my laptop. Everyone’s happy now. There is always some amount of tech support to do but lately it has been very low. I even helped my dad upgrade the RAM over the phone once, that was fun.

Make sure to check if it actually ran from the cron job, cron is a finnicky tool

I use Borg Backup, automated with a bash script that Borg provides. A cron job runs the script at the desired frequency. I keep backups on different computers, ideally I would recommend one copy in the cloud and one copy on a local machine. Borg compresses and encrypts its backups.

Edit: I migrated a server once using the backups from this system and it worked great.

Love Inkscape, using it for 15+ years.

I sure hope they fixed the bug from the last version where it would crash if you had a drawing tablet plugged in while opening the app. That has been a huge nuisance for the last few months.

Edit: They fixed it, god bless.

Like many GUIs it makes it so you don’t have to remember and type a bunch of commands to carry out basic tasks. I especially find it convenient for checking logs. But no unique functionality compared to CLI. So it’s a matter of preference.

Using OSS in your product and giving the OSS devs resources to improve their software, instead of trying to take over their project? Did Valve not get the memo that big tech companies are supposed to be evil?? Oh right, they have a monopoly on video game distribution and all of their products rely on DRM.

Arch isn’t unstable. Users mess it up by installing a bunch of random crap from the AUR or fiddling with system files.

SteamOS addresses this by making the root level filesystem immutable and guiding the user to install containerized (flatpak) apps.

Yeah it’s total accounts, total monthly active users is more like a million

Look at the Steam Deck as an example:

• Linux is preinstalled
• Integrated hardware and software
• Immutable OS that is very hard to bork
• UI is Windows-like which is familiar to the target market
• Good value for the price
• Offered by a well-known and well-liked brand
• Marketed and advertised to the target market

We need more Linux devices like this to gain market share.

Fedi client app developers need to design fedi client apps in a holistic way to include a custom server (as with Mammoth’s moth.social) or create an account for the user on one of a curated selection of other servers, without forcing the user to choose one.

It’s a severe problem with trying to grow fedi that general users are expected to understand how servers work and make an informed decision about which one to join. General users don’t care about this topic and will quickly turn away when it is forced upon them. That’s why the client app needs to handle this for the user without making a fuss about it.

These apps also need good discovery features and feeds with posts that are trending generally and for specific topics. Then devs need to make money with those apps somehow, then they need to market those apps (at this point, it goes beyond just “devs” and expands into an organization with a marketing department, etc.).

Then, hopefully fedi’s inherent advantages of interoperability and resilience will naturally cause people to choose these user-friendly, effectively marketed fedi client apps over things like Instagram, Tiktok, etc. After all, if it can’t compete on its own merits with all other factors being equal, there’s no point to it for most people.

It’s a hard user experience design problem to create an interface that presents all possible types of posts, content and interactions in a sensible way. This “kitchen sink” approach is kind of what Facebook does and as a result its interface is messy and cluttered. That’s not to say it’s impossible or wrong to do things that way, just difficult and unpopular.

On the technical side, it’s really hard to make a client app that works with multiple server softwares, because they all have different sets of features.

In the current world of fedi software development, it would be a single dev or a small, likely unpaid team that would have to make the equivalent of several different client apps combined into one. I don’t anticipate such a large and complicated project being completed until the devs can make a decent living doing the work.

I think it should be really clear to everyone now that the Steam Deck is exactly the kind of thing that Linux needs: nice hardware with a well-integrated OS that is designed to be user-friendly and has some guardrails to prevent you from breaking it.

Some of my fav quotes:

“Ads in an operating system that you’ve paid for from a company that owns ridiculous amounts of money is so offensive.”

“data, it’s like the new gold to people”

“I got the confidence to really jump into Linux after the Steam Deck.”

[regarding the terminal] “You just see text going across the screen, they’re working at lightning speeds.”

“I’m kissing convenience goodbye, I just want control.”

Nextcloud may be a bit overkill for your use case, but it does have a very good video chat function. It’s also pretty easy to deploy as a snap package or with the AIO docker image. A downside is that the other person has to have an account on your instance and log into it to join a call. However this is not necessarily difficult to arrange.