Problem with plain Wireguard is if you can’t open ports on some devices to get a direct connection. It should be just fine with hub and spoke model, but NAT Traversal of Tailscale makes a huge difference. I can get a direct connection between 2 devices connected to mobile data and behind CG-NAT.
And also the config management if you have too many devices.

Hub and spoke, you just add new devices to Wireguard on the main device, and the new peer. Full mesh, oof.

But as far as configuring Wireguard goes, that’s pretty simple. And then there’s the weird stuff with MTU and fragmentation… but that’s not something Wireguard-specific.

I went with Google.

Edit: I am just saying what I went with. I didn’t have another fitting option.

I was just looking if something like that exists yesterday, but got disappointed. Nice timing.

My last 3 phones are just kind of pain software wise.
Moto G5s Plus - the Android 8 update (latest official) made it a slow horrible mess with frequent crashes and high battery drain. PixelExperience 11 fixed that.
Poco X3 Pro - told not to update to MIUI 13 due to instability. Many bugs I had to learn to work around. Left and right microphones reversed in software. Extreme power saving that doesn’t even spare alarms.
Ulefone Armor 24 - UI often crashes (Quickstep) including navigation. In some cases Android version updates don’t show up. The legend has it they sometimes provide updates after you e-mail them, stored on the Google Drive. Those updates do a factory reset, because of course they do. Alarm also has a chance of being killed, but lower than with MIUI. Charging with fast charger kills USB communication until reboot.

I don’t do updates anymore. Check the experiences online, and it’s all just new bugs, often pretty serious ones. So, if it somewhat works, and it isn’t absolutely clear that the next update would certainly fix something important, just keep it as-is.

TWRP could at least give me some peace of mind. I could just back up everything.

As a student, most things are more interesting than studying.

Unfortunately, this global version of panic stick is really lacking. The US market version is really just a rebranded shotgun, which is far more effective. Even the EU version is a bit better, it has a grippy rubber handle and comes with a 2 year warranty.

5G is fine when comparing with 4G. Just a step up. My issue with them is rather whatever is going on with VoLTE and VoNR. 2G/3G just worked for phone calls, but now you only get that guaranteed by purchasing a phone directly from the carrier. Hell, some carriers even blacklist or whitelist devices just because.
And in Australia phones are now getting blocked completely, even if they worked with VoLTE because the carrier decided they didn’t.. Hugh Jeffrey also made a video about that.

I achieve the same by disabling VoLTE and VoWiFi and setting the phone to LTE only in *#*#4636#*#*.

I love these service menus. *#*#3646633#*#* has so much stuff to permanently screw up on some MediaTeks. But also some useful ones like selection of frequency bands, or even specific frequency and cell id.
But yeah, some settings can persist factory reset, and some may even be illegal like Tx tests (verified that it does transmit garbage on selected frequency with SDR) or IMEI change. Not all settings are on all devices, and they may even be partially broken.

But yeah, these settings are don’t touch it for the most part (some are just huge lists of undocumented variables). Some don’t even seem to be resettable from the menu, I mean menus where you select one option, but by default they are unset. And the band mode selection on Moto G54 5G was… interesting. Rather than a nice selection menu, you can type in a number and select to add or remove it from a vector variable for 4G and 5G. Of course, nowhere does it list valid options or give a reset button.

And lastly a thing that serves me as a warning for future, when I was playing around with a leaked service program for some Realtek Ethernet adapter, I found out what eFuse memory is. There is no going back.

but I would never use public transport even if we had it.

Why is that?

2 and 3 check out with me, but 1st point is public transport only. Preferably trains + trams.
Although buses have the advantage that I can sit in the front where I can see the road, and they also tend to be less illuminated so I can see outside at night.
I wish there were dark carriages. Coach buses will have a few blue LEDs near the floor, but a train has to come with full sun worth of light.

From a deal on racknerdtracker.com (so RackNerd as the name suggests).
But their panel is a bit limited. If you want a custom OS that isn’t provided, you have to open a ticket with them to get an ISO mounted. You can also boot into recovery environment, but that is outdated minimal installation of Debian 9 without working APT. I was still able to use it to install Arch Linux from bootstrap image though. I just had to decompress it on my PC, create a temporary partition for it and scp it over.

And I am again mentioning Arch. It comes naturally.

https://racknerdtracker.com/ keeps all the deals that don’t expire.

Not at all. And that’s without whois privacy.
.com .net .org .us .me are $24.95/year
.meme is $24.99/year
.io is whopping $69.00/year

For quick graphical management I use FX File Explorer because it keeps the timestamps when moving files.

For something more I use… Termux. I like to sort things based on timestamps as well, but often I like to set some custom modification time, or copy modification time of a file being replaced (e.g. replacing old 128kbps MP3 for FLAC), and I don’t know of any other way than touch.
Similarly I don’t know what else to use for syncing directories other than rsync.
Plus, I can run SSH in Termux, that means Rsync-ing between PC and my phone is pretty easy.
And it also means I can mount the phone over SSHFS (granted KDE Connect already takes care of this).
I can also use GPG for encryption and decryption of files.
And Vim works fine for me for text editing too.
And now since I already have that, say I want to access some files on any computer. It probably has a browser, and Termux has NGINX, coupled with FancyIndex it gets pretty nice for file access. I like the Material theme.

Now, a bit of a disclaimer: BE CAREFUL WHAT ADDRESSES THE PHONE IS LISTENING ON
I set them manually rather than the typical default of all interfaces. Unfortunately, Android seems to have no firewall. I can easily reach things on my phone connected to mobile data thanks to IPv6. This may or may not be desired. Oh, and NAT isn’t for security either, so don’t think you’re safe because you only use IPv4. Perhaps devices behind same NAT aren’t isolated.

Edit: Example of the WebUI with Material theme (sorted by date because I was able to set the file timestamps):

I guess CRTs were fine. I used to play a lot with that. If it’s looking funny, use degauss and watch the magic.

It works fine with a mouse. I often use my 2-in-1 as a tablet. Instead of scrolling, it just does text selection, and neither does pinch to zoom work. After all, it’s just controlling a mouse pointer under X11.

The default should not be assumed.

It should. Typically it would be a choice between Mullvad DNS and the unencrypted whatever your ISP uses. People who care about DNS (like me) will change that right away (NextDNS in my case). People who just want something easy may not even know what DNS is, or may not care enough.

Doesn’t natively work under Wayland, unfortunately.
As-is, it’s not suitable for a touchscreen device.

And with MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 the window buttons are broken.

Interesting. I thought it was more like in Czech Republic. Buy a prepaid SIM, put it into phone, it activates with the first call and there you go.
When I checked one from T-Mobile, name and surname get automatically pre-filled in the personal data card, as “Anonym Anonym”, that is.

Why? Isn’t it usual for prepaid in the US already?