When they were installing the alarm at my house I noticed that the main guy had nextcloud on his phone and it sparked a nice conversation about privacy. He has no technical background but managed to self-host it on his old laptop with one of those distros that have an easy UI for self-hosting (don’t remember which one exactly). He’s a pretty cool guy.

So, when do we start building robots to preserve humanity?

Ok, I had no idea they were the first to do that lootbox shite, I’m not into multiplayer games. That could be considered worse than allowing third party DRMs, since it pretty much introduced kids to gambling.

That has to be one of the dumbest articles I’ve read in a while.

While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.

The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.

The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn’t always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there’s an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.

There’s barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it’s all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.

Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?

If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I’d say it’s allowing third party DRMs on the store, it’s a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn’t have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we’ve already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.

While I’m sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that’s why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.

Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.

Got myself an Eaton as many of you suggested. The fan is noisy af but I can probably replace it, other than that it’s perfect.

It’s extremely easy to set up with docker, I’ve been using a self-hosted instance for about 2 years now. Contact me if you need help setting it up or if you just want to test it.

Hardware requirements depend on how many users will be using it, I use an old i3 NUC as a home server and it can easily handle a room with a dozen people, especially if it’s just audio, it gets heavier on the CPU if a lot of them have their webcams on but generally speaking if you have a decent internet connection you’ll be fine.

Follow these instructions: https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-guide-docker/ You will need to set up HTTPS unless you’re already using a reverse proxy.

Italy - 35€/mo, 1Gbps down, 300Mbps up, unlimited. Goes down at least once a month though, openfiber sucks

As far as I know this is no longer a problem if your system supports hardware video encoding for the video codec (vp8/9 or h264 based on server configuration and browser support).

That’s completely false. The connection between users and the server is encrypted with HTTPS and you can even turn on end to end encryption if you want. Jitsi doesn’t even work over unencrypted HTTP.