I need to do this, good memories!

I set up VNC to only allow connections from localhost on my mother’s computer, and then forward the required port via SSH when I need to connect. SSH is set up to only allow public key authentication. Works quite well

I recently got my Linux-laptop in a heavy MS-based company. It is enrolled via Intune and I can access all company resourcws an MS365 apps through Edge.

Apart from having to use Edge for all of that, it is a great experience compared to what I am used to.

But it took a while and a lot of complaining about being allowed to use more appropriate tools for our job. But the bottom line is: ask for it. Tell them why you need it. When they say no, try again later, document why your current setup fails and why getting a Linux-machinee would work. Maybe you will succeed. IT here has gone from “we don’t use open source” (actual quote) to giving us Linux-laptops and setting up Linux-servers on OT. They grow from this also.

ThinkPad T14s Gen 5

Yeah, T14s Gen 5

Someone has obviously not been forced to work with Windows 11? :p

It’s a massive upgrade and miles better than what I came from, and while not ideal, I’m certainly not letting perfect be the enemy of the good here. Edge is just for those MS365 apps I need to work with once in a while (and a couple of other services that rely on SSO, most annoyingly GitHub). I’ll live

Also, I’m a KDE person, but so far I don’t hate GNOME.

Yes. Using it through Edge with no issues so far.

Internal team communication goes outside of Teams though (we self-host Mattermost).

ETA: No more issues than the native app under Win11, I meant to say.

Yeah, but it has also required many hard fought battles internally, and I can be happy with my coworkers and team lead for taking the charge in several of those. It helps having had multiple examples of their policies getting in the way of getting stuff done, and that we are able to accomplish our jobs when we get our way.

Worst part is that we’re not a terribly big company - but the IT department can still make it feel like I work in a multinational megacorp some times. I can only imagine what it is to actually work in one of those…

That was an intense intro, so I had to stop watching. Did he end up enjoying it and sticking with it?

Ah, right! I didn’t scroll past the Newswire-section because my brain parsed it as a “Related articles”-section with links to previous posts. I am no longer confused!

Sorry, what does this have to do with the post? I tried to find references to it but couldn’t, and now I am confused.

Since switching from Gmail three years ago to Proton, I’ve not had a single spam mail. I also use aliases most places so that I can disable it if I start receiving spam on one.

Nice - I’ve done a similar thing for my mom, except she was transitioning from macOS (but had used Windows a lot previously for work). So far she has had a package conflict that broke the package system (Signal was installed from their PPA) which raised a rather ominous error message for her (“Your package system is broken”). I could fix it easily as I had set up VNC via SSH, and that worked as expected first time I needed it, but it’s not something she would be able to do by herself. And I still haven’t installed Singal in a way that won’t break things later yet…

She still uses her old Macbook on and off, and there are some things she only has access through that machine. I want to set up better cross platform solutions for her. Especially file sync and images needs to be fixed, but I’ve not landed on a way to do that. I could set her up with an account on my Nextcloud, but I don’t like having access to her files and I also would not want to be liable for her files disappearing. Same with images. I use Nextcloud for images myself, have thought of setting up Immich. But same thing here, don’t really want to have access to her stuff (not sure if Immich can be set up to be E2EE?)

I’ve been running tge AIO container for several years now and it is running perfectly fine. I only enable whatever I use, so for instance no Collabora.

But for Collabora, while it should be good for single-person use, if you require some kind of collaborative simultaneous work, you should probably set up the high-performance backend. I did this at work for a NC-instance hosted via Hetzner and it works well when we tried it, but we don’t really use those kinds of tools much in our daily work.

It depends on what service - some, like Jellyfin, are accessed only from home IPs which are static (for music through Jellyfin I use offline mode to prevent too much mobile traffic), so I can add those specific IPs in the whitelist. Otger services I need to access from elsewhere, and I can add entire subnets (i.e. for my phone carrier network or VPN servers). Those change once in a while and that is annoying. Other services I want publically available.

Jellyfin especially still has some unsecured endpoints where it would be wise to take some.extra precautions. I think the risk some people seem to think this poses is a little overblown (i.e. rights holders finding your instance and reverse mapping your entire library and suing you to oblivion), but better not risk it.

What kinds of things are you planning to expose? What I expose I hide behind a reverse proxy with IP whitelists. Whatever I don’t need access to on the go I don’t expose.

I put encrypted backups (borg or restic) on a storage box from Hetzner. One local copy on a different drive and one remote. Keep your encryption passwords safe though, otherwise they aren’t worth much.

Oh, and I plan to report status of the cron jobs that run these backup scripts via MQTT and display backup status in Home Assistant. But haven’t started that yet. So far I dump the logs and view them occasionally.

I installed Mint on a newly acquired used Thinkpad for my mom, to get her used to it as her Macbook is showing signs of giving up. So far it was smooth sailing until one day the package system broke due to some conflicts (I had set up Signal via their PPA). I had already set up remote access so I could easily fix it for her in a matter of minutes, but she would never be able to fix it herself even though the instructions were clear. Other than this though, she enjoys it. But I still need to set up a couple of additional things, in particular file sync and some way of managing her photos.

My go-to! There’s a Python version, bpytop, as well - not sure why you would want that over the C+±version though.

Nice, thanks - I’ll check out Unfa! I hope to get started soon, but I tend to be slow starting these things, so don’t expect any DMs just yet - but I’m saving your post for future reference, so perhaps something will tick in eventually :) Thanks for the offer in any case!