reinar

lmao, Germany of all places. This country is designed for people to live paycheck to paycheck, earlier it was at least somewhat justified by social security, but greedy government fucks don't know where to get money anymore.

Turns out many middle eastern toilets can’t handle toilet paper.

It's more about toilet paper than plumbing. Toilet paper has to easily dissolve in water, otherwise you can clog any toilet, be it western or eastern.

yeah, in a few well-marketed cities you usually find on postcards. "Europe has great public transportation, I was in Munich last week...", right, because whole continent = one city.
In majority of the cities and countryside it's either get a car or get fucked.

10% is too low. Usually they won't be against paying you the same they are paying your current employer for your services, so you can safely do 20% raise ( your employer charges more, of course, but there are other costs involved to set up and run the operation).

with arch it's relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that's it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there's nothing to break.

every time I've tried "out of the box" desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it's been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.

that's just because the USSR ruined them...

Germans still pay solidarity tax lil bro... USSR was one of the most talented entities in fucking up entire countries for decades to come, politburo was producing most vile, scheming and backstabbing ruling class ever to imagine. The very same people were running privatization and scraping all the social security programs in place, your boys from the West in Yeltsin's team were simply lacking and couldn't keep up.

I run flood together with qbittorrent, looks great everywhere.

yes, goes well together with Voyager. From app subdomain I route mobile clients to Voyager and desktop to Alexandrite, feels amazing.

communities

it's a band-aid, popular instances will be still under pressure to serve end users. Ok, they got the message through push from some other server instead of their user submitting it directly and the instance is not responsible for pushes to community subscribers (which is something, but not much, actually), however in the end it ends up stored locally and users still will be sending requests to popular instance to get their content if they are registered there.

users

not happening. It's a problem to change even username (and requires federation consensus first implementation-wise, it's not only lemmy around here), changing user's server will need fairly complex extension for id redirects or update propagation or something.
https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/changeable-usernames/830
In general it's the same problem with migrating communities - you need to somehow update all the existing subscriptions across the federation.
I hope to be corrected on this, but this doesn't look too good.

I'm not shitting on lemmy and activitypub in general, it's a step in the right direction, however there are a lot of by-design issues which makes them prone to the very same problems as non-federated websites.

Lemmy is not truly distributed at this point, there are few well-known instances which are bearing the load and the rest is just sipping stuff through activitypub subscriptions.
If this thing will become even remotely popular with current architecture they have to follow the same path donations -> commercial or die. Serving a lot of users costs money, serving media content costs even more money. It's not a problem at the moment, but it will be.

ActivityPub is not a magic bullet, it's just a spec on how servers talk to each other. To truly involve each and every server in sharing the workload there's a need in something on top of that, or even better - replacing that since w/o active participation of client apps in load balancing it'll be the same reverse proxy shit in the end.

you need to set up port forwarding not only with your vpn provider, but also with gluetun:

https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/advanced/vpn-port-forwarding.md

good way to accidentally lose the data.

in case of any forensics your drive will be copied first and master will be not touched, any decryption attempts will be executed on copies - so kill switch is effectively useless.