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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Agreed. It’s an uphill optimization battle. We’re now in a world where you need 6GB RAM to chat on Discord while scrolling Facebook.

    Ubuntu and its apps (particularly Firefox) are incredibly efficient and respects your hardware resources. I can write a web page with a 5MB RAM footprint. It’s when you open the New York Times that your swapfile gets face-slapped.

    Funnily enough, an Ubuntu server will run on a half-eaten potato. I’ve got 16GB in mine, and I’m running servers for LAMP (Nextcloud and Wordpress), NTP, Samba, Mail, Jellyfin, tor, XMPP, CUPS and a few other things. It typically uses around 2GB at idle.


  • There are more barriers to digital sovereignty every day.

    My wife hit the 15GB Google limit last week. Holy shit.

    Her phone storage was full, so:

    • Photos were silently removed from the device and uploaded to Google Photos.
    • Once it was full, it locked her out of Google services. It even locked her email and took forms offline.
    • It then demanded payment to get access to her files.

    Google Photos is ransomware by definition.

    I ended up doing a takeout, and found that all the photos had the exif tags stripped and I had to re-merge them from a .json file that sat next to it. Otherwise they had no timestamp/location data and no other software would index it.

    Fixing the mess required me to alter my photo import program (written in C) and use some scripts I found on github. It was a full weekend project.

    I can see why a lot of people will just pay the ransom.