themadcodger

Yeah, seconded on Tailscale. I love how easy it is to get working. Only fear is the recent announcement of venture funding and future enshitification, but right now it’s amazing.

Yeah, I didn’t want to be not supportive of your choice of distros, but my immediate thought was not Ubuntu… I use it headless for some homelab servers, but nowadays as far as desktops go, Ubuntu is not it.

Someone below mentioned Aurora, Bazzite’s sister. I currently use Bluefin, which is another of Bazzite’s sisters, also on Framework, and it has been pretty set it and forget it. They’re all “atomic” desktops in that it’s hard to be able change the underlaying important parts of your computer, while you have free reign on all the bits that aren’t important to keep the lights on. Updates happen frequently, but don’t touch your files on top, so it’s always the latest, and if something does break, you can easily boot up into the last image you were on.

If you’re not looking to tweak your computer too much and just want it to run, I’d recommend Aurora or Bluefin depending on your desktop preferences.

The self-contained webxdc apps are a pretty cool bonus to what already feels like a normal chat app. I primarily use Signal, but given the current climate of governments trying to force backdoors in to encrypted apps, and the fact it’s a US server, I wanted a decentralized backup. And email isn’t going anywhere, so it seems like a good option.

Kinda, but that’s the gist of it.

Yeah, that’s when I first used it too, it had to go through your email. Now it just uses the email backbone to send messages back and forth. Also, self-contained webxdc apps you can use with people in your chat, which is kinda cool.