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opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon
opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon
I did back of the envelope math a while back where if active users of large self-hosted communities (such as /r/selfhosted) put $5/month into donations to the most used self-hosted software projects, ~20 projects could get ~$75,000/year of income. Not enough to build a company around, but enough to live well on in many parts of the world as a sole developer or enough for a maintainer to pay for other developer contribution.
I think the open source community fails to organize around the fact that development and maintenance isn’t free, but that as a massive user group, it takes minimal contribution from each to make an impact. Can better messaging and “structure” break the free rider problem?
Thanks for sharing. Anything in particular that was broken, or just a bad experience overall? I thought about spinning it up for family group video chats, but I guess I can cross that one off the list.
I don’t have experience using it, but it is worth looking at BigBlueButton.
Tumbleweed is generally the place to be. I think it is easier to target for packagers and is the basis for most of the interesting stuff going on in the distro. The immutable versions (now named Aeon and Kalpa) use something like a stripped down Tumbleweed at the core, with applications mostly containerized. Think tight rolling core that has strong automated tests and rather safe, with applications mostly isolated in Flatpak to prevent library conflicts and such.
Did you check the opensuse community repos? Search here: https://software.opensuse.org/ - lots of stuff that isn’t included in the core / official.
Nothing gets solved overnight. I realize that f-droid isn’t the be all end all, but hey, be the change you want to see in the world. Maybe Aurora is a stop-gap, but maximize your use of f-droid alternatives and support the developers however you can. Be active in alternatives to the big-tech sites, like posting in beehaw communities.
Poaching something I posted on Reddit /r/selfhosted at the beginning of the year:
Back of the envelope math. Assuming 30,000 active users here on /r/selfhosted x $50/yr = $1.5M / 20 -> $75,000 per year. In other words, if /r/selfhosted gave $50 per person per year, “we” could contribute $1.5M to open source projects we use. Some projects probably wouldn’t know what to do with resources and/or don’t have the infrastructure in place to receive anything, so not a panacea. But for the well organized and developed projects?
It’s sort of wild if you think about it. There are probably 10-12 very popular self-hosted applications with a very long tail, but 20-25 probably captures a very healthy cross section of use. Not every project or developer can accept monetary donations or use them effectively. But $75,000/year is median household income in the US.
There are almost certainly many more open source software and app users than there are self-hosted people - I’d imagine the self-host people are a subset. So what if we add open source software and mobile apps to the collective pool we could financially contribute to - again, $50/year/per able user - maybe the number of supportable applications goes up to 50 or 80.
Leading the thought experiment to a logical conclusion - if 80 open source projects received $75,000/year in donation income (at a minor cost to those able to pay and none to the vast majority), enough in most parts of the world to support a person and possibly a family, we would have more amazing, privacy respecting options. It doesn’t necessarily solve everything, most people naturally free-ride, and organizing many small contributions at a massive scale isn’t a solved problem itself. But, my point is that users collectively have way more power than we realize.
One other thing I forgot to mention - transparency of the lead developer and service provider is overlooked, imo, as a criteria for picking a secure messaging client. That background information on jami wasn’t terribly clear to me when I looked a couple of years ago; it does seem better now.
It is a nice p2p, e2ee messaging app/service that doesn’t use phone numbers, e-mail or other domain addresses as an identifier. I think it used to be GNU Ring, and can be used as a SIP client.
If it’s mostly about motion detection and false positives, it’s hard to avoid the object detection stuff if you aren’t doing that already. I stopped using Blue Iris before it started integrating object detection and I can’t speak to it at all. I liked the setup I had with ZoneMinder, Zoneminder Event Server, and the associated machine learning hooks, but the developer behind the event server and ML stuff left and it isn’t particularly well integrated. I like how quickly and comprehensively Viseron (https://github.com/roflcoopter/viseron) has progressed. Very sleek software, engaged developer, uses YOLOv7, and even supports an openvino backend. Well worth a look.
Blue Iris is terrific software. I’m curious though - what tended to go wrong with the alternatives?
I would note that ChromeOS is mainstream with normal users and it is effectively a well curated, highly-opinionated Linux distribution. Distros like opensuse Aeon and Kalpa, and Fedora Silverblue, are going from well established platforms into the highly curated, highly-opinionated direction as well. Limited set of options that work well out of the box not prone to breaking, and explicitly not for tinkerers. I tend to think that if Linux is ever going to reach mainstream users (outside of ChromeOS), it will be through these bulletproof, opinionated distros that put bubble wrap around the user.
I have a server at home, so this might not apply to you. But I used this software (https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx) to proxy the rtsp streams from cameras. It makes the streams available over multiple formats, so I stick the webrtc stream from the security cameras into a little, super simple html page I threw together. Bookmarked, on my android home screen, and I’m one click from seeing all of my cameras streaming while I’m on LAN.
Then I wrote a simple bash script to call ffmpeg to take a snapshot from each rtsp stream every x interval. I rewrote the landing page to show a table of those snapshots and each image is a hyperlink to the direct webrtc link to that camera’s stream. And the html page refreshes itself every x seconds.
I’m happy with this approach so far. The streams are now easily available on Android, Windows, Linux devices, no app beyond a web browser required.
What I plan to do next:
Make the web server and proxied streams available over my mesh VPN so that the landing page and cameras are available from outside the LAN.
Start throwing images at doods (https://github.com/snowzach/doods2) to identify objects, and pass the detection and image to a messenger like xmpp or matrix or telegram or even an irc channel to push an alert to me.
Headline sort of buries the lede of how important those two were to building lxd and supporting the container ecosystem on linux. Sad to see. I have been using lxd on my home network and vps instances for years. Disliked when the project moved to snap-only distribution, but at least other projects picked up native packaging. And it doesn’t seem like lxd is going away, which is nice. But Canonical explicit seizure of control withers confidence I had in the long-term viability of the software for my own use.
For grocery, KitchenOwl. And you can add custom items. Doesn’t really work as a todo list though.
Looks very nice. Lots of self-hostable paste share software, but very little with e2ee.
Is it text only? xmpp should be lightweight and smooth sailing. prosody configured to never expire messages would give you a forever archive on the server. There are good mobile clients, plus web/pwa and native desktop clients.
Notification works like any other message. http upload is just the method the client uses - it’s more or less transparent to the clients involved. It’s still sending and receiving as you would expect from a messenger.
Two ideas:
xmpp works, but the domain needs to resolve correctly. I’d just use a free domain that you point at the server LAN ip, plus an acme client that can do a dns challenge. Prosody is pretty bulletproof and very lightweight.
deltachat + email. Set up a little IMAP server for the lan and use Delta chat to create a messaging over it. Or just use an email client.
Discourse is offering an AP plugin - not sure what it does: https://github.com/discourse/discourse-activity-pub