NebLem

Linux Foundation is also the host for the Servo project.

Hopefully all the drama around this can motivate more creators off ByteDance, Meta, and Alphabet platforms and onto fedi platforms like PeerTube and Loops.

A better critique would be lack of ability or safe routes, since many workarounds are needed to allow kids and those physically less able to get around by two wheels.

The vast majority of adults travel within 10km of their homes for most errands, which is definitely possible to hit with an analog bike. Ebikes can enable making double that distance easy.

That being said, even in actually rural areas where you are biking on a narrow shoulder with 50kph+ traffic next to you 20km each way in 0°C temps, many that don’t have other options still bike, so really it’s a preference for comfort/safety not lack of ability stopping most.

Bikes and retirement aside, I’d recommend knowledge - career skills, but also handiness skills. If you can do simple repairs like replacing a door, changing the flap on a toilet, painting, preventative stuff like changing your air filters, simple electronics (replacing a light switch), etc you’ll save thousands on repairs as a homeowner. Today there’s almost nothing that you can’t find an in depth video tutorial on, but if you really don’t feel comfortable with basic tools most community colleges have cheap classes as do some hardware stores. Volunteering, even just to help friends with their projects, can be an amazing way to learn too.

Great advice in the other comments, so I’ll only add this - with this being your first house, if you can afford it, do a multifamily unit or a property that can be used as multifamily. Nearly everywhere is in a housing shortage, so you’ll be able to get a good win win with some renters that can help pay your mortgage faster while they have an affordable place to live. Best if the units can be fully separated so less drama.

A few problems of chat only:

1. Time differences mean you’ll likely only socialize with a limited group and miss out on cool people and discussions not synchronous to your active times.
2. Ephemeral nature of chat discussions make it hard to keep track of long running efforts where today’s discussions could benefit from knowing the previous discussion points.
3. Chat apps tend to be closed networks, which might make it difficult to reach the people you’d like to interact with.

None of these are show stoppers, and there are benefits to limiting your digital presence.

That all being said: Real friendships tend to require a lot of work and most people can only usually put the work in for a handful. In general, keeping in touch with those you want in that handful is best as follows: real world in-person > 1:1 synchronous video/virtual world/chat > group chat platforms (discord, etc) > letters > emails > blogs > microblogs.

Outside of those few, its good to still get out and do social networking regardless of the technology. For people I want to collaborate, collaboration platforms (Codeberg, etc) and messaging can work great if in-person doesn’t work for whatever reason (typically time & distance). For interesting online acquaintances, filtered blog/microblog feeds seem to get the best time/benefit ratio.

It’s also really good to do event based networking, such as hackathons, board game nights/bars, and community service. Letting people find you has its benefits too, I recommend looking into the IndieWeb on how to best do that if you want to be found.

You really should encourage your contacts to use more secure channels than Twitter dms, especially for illicit behavior.

If you are a major contributor in a niche community, you can publicize your move with info of how to keep following you and syndicate links to your content on your desired platform for a set time then leave. On your desired platform let followers from Xitter know how to follow you (email, rss, bridgy, etc) if they don’t want to join your desired platform.

If you are mostly a content consumer or have FOMO, use a bridge not an account. DM all the friends you want to keep of where to find you then leave. Bird.makeup is a great Xitter bridge for the fedi.

In either case, there isn’t a reason to keep am account there.

Linux Mint and PopOS are usually listed as friendly distros and are derivatives of Ubuntu without Ubuntu controversies like Snap. Mint even has an alternative direct Debian base skipping some Ubuntu packages, so might be ironically closer to old Ubuntu in that flavor.

If you’re open to going non-debian, Manjaro is often sold as the more user friendly Arch. (Edit - a recent Manjaro controversy has people recommending EndeavorOS instead for an Arch wrapper. I’ve not tried that one myself).

Debian or Arch aren’t bad to use directly either and are far more newbie friendly than they were a decade ago even if not as out of the box opinionated as their derivatives.

Hashtags work on other fedi platforms, many people subscribe to lemmy communities elsewhere.

And have presidential immunity.

The Light Phone looks pretty neat and I like the idea of a more minimalistic device (especially with e-paper), but it’s pretty unique hardware and a custom Android that needs jailbreaking to update if the company stops supporting it.

It also looks like the third iteration won’t have an e-paper display, so I’m not sure the beneft of that version will be against a ultra power-saving mode / locked down Android or a mobile Linux on much cheaper hardware.

Fairphones due to having pretty long lasting hardware are common early targets for LineageOS and PostmaketOS devs, so yeah definitely a good choice for longevity.

Google pixels are the best mainstream longevity alternative due to developer adoption in the non-Google Android communities and mobile linux communities. Pixel 1s are still getting updates to latest Lineage Android, though I’m sure it has to be super slow. Graphene only runs on Pixels.

Librem 5 or the PinePhone would probably be your best bets if you want an out of the box mobile gnu/linux.

Yeah you’d probably have to rig something with a usbc to 3.5mm to cassette adapter if you want corded, though someone with better skills than me could slice and solder the two adapters together to make one adapter.

Anyone make/find a non-google export yet?

Specific to Ubuntu, not very open for collaboration, and operated by the company who owns the Ubuntu trademarks. Additionally they’ve made it unnecessarily difficult to install non-snap versions of many popular packages. (they removed non-snap versions from upstream Debian repositories).

Really Starlink should be absorbed into and ran by the UN. We only have so much LEO to use, one company is bound to become a monopoly and LEO is the world’s not any nation’s property.

I haven’t used Pixelfed, but does it fail to work with with microblogging fedi platform content so bad that you feel you’d have to use Mastodon? Outside of the group/community/threadiverse federation issues in Masto and Lemmy not letting you follow accounts, I my understanding was everything worked pretty well talking to eachoter.

Game engines and servers are great candidates for developers to collaborate their ideas into FOSS projects, but the model is harder to sustain for complete works.

While internet games can have subscription models where you pay them for doing game master type activities, moderation, and access to a hosted game server, static games are more like static art where you run into issues getting food and housing when you make your work output available for free. Crowdfunding / patreoning (in the larger sense of the word, not necessarily the app) creators / collectives can be a way for that to work, and we need to support more creators trying that model if we want to see more of it.

We really need to push for more right to repair laws and things not produced by the copyright holder (say for 5 years) should lose all copyright protections.