Thankfully this isn’t allowed for new devices being sold in the EU anymore. They are required to have a per-device individual password now. Hopefully this effectively causes the practice to at least become much less common globally. After all, if you’ve setup the needed manufacturing steps, there’s little sense in skipping them depending on a target region.

Or if you have separated your devices into subnets/VLANs. Which becomes more important as your get more hardware that you don’t really trust.

Yes, Assuming that renaming a community without creating a new one isn’t possible.

The best way would be to just rename to “steamhardware”, but losing everyone in the process is certainly not worth the rename for clarity.

Tailscale is WireGuard under the hood, if you didn’t know. It’s an overlay network that uses WireGuard to make the actual connections, and has some very clever “stuff” to get the clients actually to connect, even if behind firewalls without needing port forwarding.

Using WireGuard directly basically just changes the app you use, which may or may not help with your issues. But the connecting technology is the exact same.

And there’s heroic, but both aren’t the same thing as native platform support. Steam has game listings for games that are made for Linux and Mac. You install the official steam client and click “play”. No other platform has that.

There are more or less convenient ways to run the games from gog, epic, Amazon, … on Linux. But none of them have official support or even carry any native games at all.

I’d suggest looking into TeamSpeak, like others have mentioned. Trivial to self host, too.

Edit: to be clear, this would cover the voice call aspect of discord, not the chat channels and other community tools. While it’s can do text chat, it’s more of a side feature rather than core. I didn’t think it does images or video, but it’s been a hot minute.

I was actively avoiding EA for make years before this. Let’s just say this didn’t help. Imma grab some popcorn though.

but you can do everything without it.

yes but why would you? There’s a reason we use GUIs, especially when new to a field (like virtualization).

Teams actually works just fine. I’m my case installed from the AUR using the electron already present anyways. Zero issues. More specifically zero additional issues compared to Windows.

No, if you’re in the EU you get 1 year updates free.

Microsoft has already made this available many months ago to US and the rest of the world, but required the weird MS login and settings backup to OneDrive. This is against EU rules, and the ruling that it isn’t ok came like a month ago or so. Since then Ms has been scrambling to make this possible, but I know many people who didn’t have the option even a week ago.

If you’re in the US or most of the world (but not EU), you can enable 1 year of updates by logging in with Ms account + backing up settings once per OneDrive. This enables updates, and you can instantly undo both things again, which won’t undo the update status.

Mine are of course also on a VLan but with no Internet access unless they need it for everyday operation (like a radio, or the amplifier that can play Spotify).

We don’t use the manufacturer apps at all. Everything is integrated into (fully local) home assistant. No need to open a specific app to operate a switch, or a light. Everything in one place. Trivial and incredibly clear. Things that can be are of course automated.

Just because it’s a “smart” service doesn’t mean it has to connect to the Internet or a server or the manufacturer. If it does neither, it can’t be turned off by them.

All my devices run local-only protocols. Nothing leaves my house. The devices that would be proprietary were reflashed to tasmota (fully open source, local only). Others are either Zigbee or Shelly. While Shelly has a cloud connection, it’s fully optional and disabled by default (including automatic updates). The hardware is also supported by tasmota, and reflashing is always just 5 minutes of effort away.

There is absolutely nothing that any manufacturer has to do to keep my stuff working. I have to do a little something (keep my tiny server on, basically). But more importantly there is nothing any manufacturer can do to stop my stuff from working.

While it’s fantastic software, it’s probably a relative cannon to shoot at his problem. Maybe there’s a way around this, but I’ve found the necessary management, curation and bookkeeping that was necessary for it too be useful to be just way too much to be worth it. I mean it’s fun for some, including me to a degree, but not too this extent.

UnRaid doesn’t provide anything I am interested in, at all. Currently running TrueNAS for main storage and proxmox for virtualization, both ZFS based. If TrueNAS ever enshittifies, I’d run some bare metal Linux with ZFS. My workstations also run ZFS as the file system, making backups trivial. VM snapshots and backups of any system are trivial and take seconds (including network transfers).

I never understood why I’d even consider UnRaid for anything.

I had a blast with it. It’s also the only game in a very long time where I actually missed “the world” after I had completed it. It was the most immersive experience in gaming I had in about a decade. Performance issues have long been solved, if that was still a concern.

Yea I was wondering why the option to prolong updates hasn’t appeared yet for me. This explains it, and had been rumored. I wouldn’t upgrade to 11, and don’t mind keeping my win 10 partition around for a bit, as there are (thankfully rare) cases where I do need it.

Of course I have. Specifically RadioParadise(.com) is great for this, which I’ve listened to through winamp’s shoutcast as well (multiple decades ago). I’ve even been a supporter for all those decades at this point. But it’s a very far cry away from the personalized (discovery) playlists. The efficiency diffference for discovering music is orders of magnitude: I find maybe 1-3 songs a month compared to 5+ in a week for discovery playlists (somtimes less, usually more). You can even skip songs you don’t like on there, but that still doesn’t make up for it being universal and not personalized.

It’s nice as a palate cleanser, or when I don’t wanna put effort into selecting what to play. But I’d lose my mind listening to it for truly extended periods of time. The music is great, and the (human) selection is superb, but just by the nature of personal taste, I only like around 30% of the music I’d say.

I also get that, that’s why I up-voted every reply from you. I actually love seeing such completely different perceptions of the same situation. And I also just want to explain my reasoning and how I got there. Which is why my replies tend to be so long.

I’m aware it has no concept of artistic quality. But I also don’t care about the quality of music, especially if perceived by some journalist. I only care if I like music. Some of it is intricately composed, masterfully performed. Some is pop, or generic/simple house.

I have discovered entire genres with the algorithms you seem to think only give narrowing recommendations. Some people probably listened to those and something I liked.

Let me repeat again: I have discovered many, many artists for me that I literally would have no realistic chance of every hearing about in any other way. Ever!

As I said in my other reply, different people like different things. I don’t want an adventure. I want the passive experience. I do other things while listening to music (work, read, tinker, …). I almost always have some music playing, but rarely do I just listen to music (it does happen though). I’ll pick styles depending on mood or task, it’s like the rails that keep me on track while working (as an example). If I’m not listening to music, I lose focus.

I simply can’t do that with an article or other medium that requires my primary attention. I don’t feel a sense of fulfillment either, but increasingly annoyed that reading this thing about music is taking more and more time. Believe me when I tell you, it’s not for me.