A great read!

I am a huge fan of lire (lireapp.com) - wonderful offline reading abilities. Great for long airplane rides!

That was a rule in some subreddits. I’ve found that, on Lemmy, de-clickbaiting headlines is generally appreciated.

I’m heartened to see a younger person taking an interest in vintage computing topics! *nix / Linux window manager customization (a la Enlightenment) is still a very active space (for instance, on Lemmy, look at the “unixporn” communities - SFW despite the name, featuring user WM customizations). I hope you’ll continue writing!

Nicely done. I was charmed by the perspective in this article, which struck me as at that of a systems archaeologist rather than someone who was there at the time using the interfaces. I cut my teeth on twm and CDE, eventually moved to fvwm, and then turned pro by becoming a SGI IRIX admin.

The diversity of window managers at the time was impressive; I’d liken it to cars in the 1950s and 60s with chrome, vents and fins in every possible configuration in stark contrast to today’s bland automobile designs. The Enlightenment WM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_(window_manager) ) was a particular favorite due to its customization possibilities.

Fellow satisfied Tailscale user here. Worth noting that one can host a custom control plane server if desired, which in theory removes cloud dependencies for Tailscale from the equation: https://tailscale.com/kb/1507/custom-control-server. Use of Mullvad exit nodes is optional ($5 / mo for 5 machines at time of writing). I’m not sure if TS’ native exit node feature can be configured to use other/sepf-hosted VPNs, but I suspect this is not supported.

Has every site adopted clickbait headlines as a default these days? Here’s the “AI report” in question:

“…The report, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, found that the promised AI gold rush isn’t paying off for most companies yet…”

By whose measurements? [citation needed]

And a cookie banner which features this text, along with a slew of abusive dark patterns for maximizing data gathering and compromising user privacy:

"We and our up to 179 partners use cookies and tracking technologies. Some cookies and data processing are technically necessary, others help us to improve our offer and operate it economically.

The processing purposes are storing or accessing information on an end device personalised advertising and content, measuring advertising performance and the performance of content, target group research and developing and improving offers; displaying external content (e.g. YouTube videos, podcasts, Twitter, quizzes), recommendations of own products and content, A/B testing, push notifications/communication, technically necessary cookies (security, login, forum)."

Edit: nuked the links, since they also seem to contain per user/session metadata!

I’ve been using Linux since the days of Slackware on floppies, and I still like Mint. It seems to just work – I’m not at all averse to “more hardcore” distributions, but would rather get on with my work. That being said, the Surface kernel is a nice piece of software and worth considering for an optimal experience on Surface.

Definitely doable! I’ve run several Linux distributions on Surface devices. I had good experiences out of the box with Ubuntu and Mint, and not-great experiences with Debian Bookworm (even with the Nvidia driver, it could never seem to work out that the external monitor on my machine was a primary. I did not try the Surface-specific kernel, however. Good luck!

Heh, no, Silicon Valley. Rather surprisingly, internet service was awful here for many years.

In other words, offering tiers of service which are symmetric or close the gap? For what it’s worth, I seem to be a poor technologist, since 5 gigabits/sec is vastly more than I need, but my ISP keeps encouraging me to upgrade to 7 gigabits. It’s nice to know that I could run a skyscraper or a medium sized subdivision if I wanted to, however!

The lack of down/up symmetry (at at 10:1 ratio, no less) is rather gobsmacking in 2025. Even here in SV, where internet service has historically lagged behind the rest of the world, I now have 5 gigabits of symmetric fiber service for a reasonable price.

Tailscale is also ridiculously easy to use for this purpose. The serve and Funnel features make secure self hosting really easy from your tailnet (one can easily provision certificates for nodes using Let’s Encrypt from the CLI: https://tailscale.com/blog/reintroducing-serve-funnel

I subscribed. Happy to support another homelab / self host community!