I meant the OP more as a lament about it being hard rather than a quip about it being easy.

Though upon reflection it’s not the voice chat that’s a problem, it’s the fact that Discord is a lot of things, a chatroom, a VOIP service, and so on, and recreating all those things on top bolting on federation (which I don’t see as a desirable feature in this case) is what makes it so hard.

Update: I got Mumble working without a lot of grief. Their mobile client isn’t great though. I might try Stoat.

Federation just complicates things, as it’s just for a myself and a few friends.

I haven’t messed with Ansible in a bit. Do you mean playbook? Or is cookbook some other concept I haven’t learned about yet?

Try learning the language.

An iPhone. I’ve tried Android 3 separate times, a Nexus 5, 6P, and Pixel 3A XL, and I keep crawling back to pay the Apple tax.

Although the accessibility features have replaced several assistive devices that each cost several times the price of the iPhone, so it’s a matter of perspective.

Why federate if you’re just expecting a small group of friends to use it?

So no mini PC then? I’d have to build a tower I suppose.

Don’t own one yet. But I guess USB?

“unexploitable backdoor” is a contradiction.

There’s a reason why Apple is the poster child for accessibility. They control the entire stack from hardware to OS, and have an ocean of money to devote to what is effectively a tiny marginalized portion of their user base.

Open source is the exact opposite. Any given open source project (especially any given Linux distro) is standing atop a precarious mound of other open source projects that the distro maintainers themselves have no control over. So when accessibility breaks, the maintainers say “It’s not us, it’s GNOME”. Then GNOME says “It’s not us, it’s Wayland”, and so on.

Imagine I handed you a laptop without a working screen, then when you complain you can’t use it, I said “It’s not my problem” or “We’ll get to it eventually” or “I wouldn’t know how to help you” That’s desktop Linux when you’re blind.

Apologies if this comes across as a rant. I’m just bitter about the fact there’s all this free, privacy-respecting software out there that’s out of my reach, and I’m stuck selling my soul to Microsoft and Apple.

why would you go with a proprietary OS?

I’m happy with my Unifi network and security setup, especially the single pain of glass. I had assumed the NAS would integrate with that system, but it doesn’t seem to.

No longer true

Does TruNAS support this feature?

Related, will TruNAS work on a mini PC with an attached DAS?

I have a QNAP NAS in addition to the unas2 mentioned in the OP. Both have WD red drives. I also run Proxmox on an ancient laptop. How does virtualizing a file server work?

ZFS seems pretty RAM hungry and I don’t believe you can add new drives to an existing volume.

Social media as a whole, honestly. Way back in 2014 I read an article about the “social media cycle” (not their words IIRC). Basically, a new platform gets popular with teens and college-age kids, then their parents join, then the kids have to move to something else because they don’t want to be on the same platform as their parents. I could be misremembering. It was a comparison between Facebook and Snapchat.

Anyway, the Fediverse helps, but since fedi platforms are largely clones of their normie counterparts (Lemmy/PieFed = reddit, Mastodon = Twitter, PeerTube = YouTube) they inherit many of the same problems. I know I bring this up a lot, but on these platforms, content is the focus, but on traditional forums, people are the focus.

I don’t want a phone so thin and slippery I can’t hold it in my hand. I want a phone as thicc as an old gray brick Game Boy. When I drop it on the floor I want to have to replace the floor. I want a battery that will outlast the lifespan of the sun.

I’m not even a “regular user” per se, just not a software dev. I’m a network administrator working in a data center. I think a lot of FOSS devs think their users are like themselves, they love to tinker and don’t mind if their PC is a project. And sometimes I do like to tinker, but sometimes I need a computer to be a tool, not an end in itself, and desktop Linux rarely serves in that capacity.

I’m going to get downvoted for this

Open source has its place, but the FOSS community needs to wake up to the fact that documentation, UX, ergonomics, and (especially) accessibility aren’t just nice-to-haves. Every year has been “The Year of the Linux Desktop™” but it never takes off, and it never will until more people who aren’t developers get involved.

The concept confuses and infuriates me. I’m just going to stick a game console or Blu-ray player on it, but you can’t buy a TV these days that doesn’t have a bloated “smart” interface. The solution, for me at least, is a computer monitor. I don’t need or want a very large screen, and a monitor does exactly one thing, and that’s show me what I’ve plugged into it.

I don’t know you or your roommate’s current financial situation, but if they’re struggling to buy dog food there may be assistance programs, perhaps not for the dog, but for his own expenses, that can free up money for the dog.