That’s rad! Thanks so much for sharing that! Definitely gonna give this a read. Very much appreciated. :)

portforwards every experimental piece of garbage across their router…

Man some of those “It’s so E-Z bro” YouTubers are WAY too cavalier about doing this.

But it was kinda cool to be able to SSH from Thailand back home to Sweden and browse my NAS, it was super slow, but damn cool…

That feels like sorcery, doesn’t it? You can still do this WAY safer by using Wireguard or something a little easier like Tailscale. I use Tailscale myself to VPN to my NAS.

I get a kick out of showing people my NextCloud Memories albums or Jellyfin videos from my phone and saying “This is talking to the box in my house right now! Isn’t that cool!?” Hahaha.

I’m almost glad I had to go that route. Most of our ISPs here in the U.S will block outgoing ports by default, so they can keep the network safe sell you a home business plan lol.

Yeah I’m honest with myself that I’m a security newb and don’t know how to even know what I’m vulnerable to yet. So I didn’t bother opening anything at all on my router. That sounded way too scary.

Tailscale really is magic. I just use Cloudflare to forward a domain I own, and I can get to my services, my NextCloud, everything, from anywhere, and I’m reasonably confident I’m not exposing any doors to the innumerable botnet swarms.

It might be a tiny bit inconvenient if I wanted to serve anything to anyone not in my Tailnet or already on my home LAN (like sending al someone a link to a NextCloud folder for instance.), but at this point, that’s quite the edge case.

I learned to set up NGINX proxy manager for a reverse proxy though, and that’s pretty great! I still harden stuff where I can as I learn, even though I’m confident nobody’s even seeing it.

Edit: A little bit of a cathartic rant to people who will understand lol. I love you all. <3

Echo chamber or not, I’m happy to finally be back on Lemmy and see some damn community positivity about Linux for a change. It isn’t perfect but it’s beautiful and it’s worth it and it’s ours.

It’s a resistance instrument over ever-entitled, creeping corporate control over our lives, it’s not “better Windows”, it’s just better.

I just got super bummed out reading a bunch of those bizarre “Normal people can’t be bothered and it doesn’t instantly just work with a single button push so it’s too complicated and everyone will hate it forever.” Tirades… You know the ones…

The kicker… That was after I stumbled from an unrelated link into /r/linux !!, when someone was asking how to help people not be “so scared” to try Linux.

Huge, angry posts about how it can’t stand up to proprietary capital-ware, and asking users to click a button or type a word “is just too much.” It’s freaking sad.

I dunno if the reddit brigading just got super bad or they’re all self-loathing over there. But it was weird. And bitter.

I’m happy with our operating-system punk movement, where we invite artists and gamers and coders and family members to learn something and have their computing experience back, since we can’t go back to the 00’s when computing was an activity and the Internet was a place.

The servile corporate wageslaves who disregard their rights and throw a fit whenever they need to troubleshoot something, can keep their bloated service-appliances and their self righteous corpo-simp attitudes, whilst loudly announcing “tHe DeSkToP iS dYiNg” and “aNdRoiD iS LiNuX.” They can keep it.

Meanwhile we welcome the curious, and the seeking, and those wanting something more.

I don’t care if we’ll never get “critical mass adoption.” Part of me hopes I never see Linux getting talked about in mainstream TV news or something, because that’s when the grifters will descend like vultures and corporations and states will be wanting a piece of it.

But hey I’ll gladly take the time to help someone discover it and enjoy it as much as possible so it can be even greater than it is today. I’ll gladly release my work to be Linux compatible and donate to software that changes my life for the better every day.

I’ll gladly troubleshoot a little, and be patient, and donate when I can, and report bugs, and share what I’ve learned. Because we’re in this community together, and Open Source belongs to all of us, and you’re doing a great job.