I’m currently about halfway through setting up a home server on an old/refurbished Dell PC. It has enough compute to transcode if needed, but no more. I’ll have to upgrade the storage to set up RAID. For software, I am running xubuntu, which offers the benefits of the great community and documentation of Ubuntu. It is very beginner friendly, but is a bit simpler and lighter than gnome. I’m running everything I can as Docker containers.

Hi, I’m your customer base.

I’m a complete novice, no network or coding experience, but not afraid of computers either. I’m pretty worried about messing up something serious due to lack of knowledge.

In the end, I didn’t choose Synology or the like due to:

• lack of robust community support. I’ve noodled around with Linux for years and learned that community support is essential.

• price. I’d pay 10% or 50% more for a good pre-configured system, but not 3-4x more (which is just the general feeling I get from Synology)

• lack of configurability. I’m still not sure what I would like to do (and be able). I know I want to replace some storage services, replace some streaming services, control my smart home, maaaaybe access my files remotely, and probably some other stuff. I may want to have email or a website in the future, but that’s not on my radar right now.

If there were some plug-and-play hardware/software solution that was still affordable and open, it would be a good choice for me.

I can think of a few apps that do this. It is certainly possible. I think it is ethical; if someone is not participating in the open source community, they miss out on the benefits. I think most people involved do contribute in some way. If someone just wants to use Google for the benefit of ease and discoverability, then they can pay for it. You’re still offering an ad-free app (presumably) and adding use value. It’s perfectly reasonable to suppliment the cost of development in is way.

If you live in a big liberal city with a lot of tech people, then you probably have a really well organized team creating detailed maps. In that case, there’s no reason to think that Google is any better than osm. In a lot of cases it’s worse, especially for walking and cycling.

If you’re in a smaller, poorer city or a rural area, there’s a good chance that 80% or 90% of the addresses are just not there yet. Compare this random park in Berkeley, CA with labels for individual trees to this neighborhood in nearby Stockton, CA, which is assuredly more than 3-4 houses.

OSM usability really depends on where you live.

Image tool box doesn’t seem to be able to arbitrarily rotate or add text. Some nice features, though.

Open Video Editor doesn’t seem to be able to combine videos. I’m thinking something like CapCut, which allows combining photos, videos, and audio. It would be an ambitious project to be sure, but it seems like it should be doable.

Great to hear! Can you name one for me?

If you live in an area that’s missing the data, it doesn’t matter how good the app is. I regularly upload in my area, but it will be years before it is reliable as a primary app. I usually search in Organic Maps first, then in Google Maps. OSM gets me where I need about 10-20% of the time at most. Google Maps is about 99%.

There are multiple front-ends for YT Music. Song Tube is good, Libre Tube is good, Inner Tune, Musify, Vibe You, etc. I haven’t used them all so I can’t testify to them, but it is a deep bench.

Some apps that I don’t understand why no OSS exists:

• Teleprompter app that allows you to read a scrolling script while recording video

• basic photo editor to crop, rotate, color correct, add text

• basic video editor to crop, clip, and combine video

• visual voicemail

And just for fun, here are some OSS apps that are better than any non-free alternative: SD Maid, Firefox/Fennec, Aurora Store (OSS front-end for a very proprietary Google store), RTranslator, Syncthing, OSS Document Scanner.

Just getting started but yeah, I have basically no technology background. Mostly I’m too stubborn to know when to quit something so here I am lol.

Lots of apps have slight modifications in F-Droid. Like Telegram for instance.

The folks at F-Droid have said that Signal would certainly qualify, but Signal doesn’t want multiple channels out there. F-Droid is just honoring their wishes.

There is also a way to get realtime notifications from k9 if you prefer.

If you have a huge number of photos, LMK, I’m working on setting up my server now and there are a few tricks to share with getting your photos from Google.

If you’re considering self hosting, Immich is an amazingly complete replacement for Google Photos.

Firefox has a pretty good password manager built in.

I use k9 mail, which I really like, although a lot of people like FairEmail (both FOSS)

Also check out YouApps in addition to fossify for a different suite of useful, well designed apps

Love to see it! I think with Google ranking the core privacy functionality of Chromium we will see more new browsers being forked from FF.

What is grade?

Speed as I understand it is the physical speed the drive spins, and is directly proportional (?) to the read/write speed.

How does a beginner know which is which? What should I look for, and how do I know if it’s a good investment or overkill for a home setup?

I think docx is actually an open format now.

What is language tool?

I haven’t used the Samsung keyboard in years so I don’t know what the comparison would be. I do think that for the most part, FOSS keyboards lag a couple years behind Google, Microsoft, etc. This is one that looks promising, but is still a long way off from a “complete” app.

I guess it depends on how much you care about privacy. There are a number of private keyboards now to choose from, but if you trust Samsung (Google, MS, etc.) with your keyboard data then it may make it worth the upgrade in features