Thomas

KDE Connect has been mentioned before. You can supplement this and other tools by using a VPN so that both endpoints can see each other even if the underlying network does not allow this. My preferred solutions are Tailscale (managed, cloud-based) or Headscale (for self-hosting).

Yes, XMPP with proper TLS on the server side and Conversations or one of its forks (preferably fetched from F-Droid) using OMEMO encryption should be good enough. If you are brave or paranoid, give Tox a try: https://tox.chat/

Maybe the first question is what your budget is, both regarding money and time. For example, you could buy a pre-configured NAS from Synology or QNAP, which requires less technical skills but more money, or a home-made solution reusing used components (but fresh disks for reliability). Depending on your electricity costs, you may want to choose a low-power solution or something which you power off when not used. For storage, maybe a three-disk RAID5 is a good compromise. For backups, plain S3 cloud storage encrypted via restic is a good idea.

Well, you have Finland in the north-east, Ireland in the north-west, and every land border faces a Euro-zone country. Few other countries can claim the latter.

If at all, you want to use Gentoo’s ebuild system, which can be seen as some kind of superset of PKGBUILDs. I guess one could write a Python script that “dumbs down” ebuild scripts to PKGBUILDs for simple packages (excluding complex stuff like kernel, KDE, …). The main challenge, as pointed to before, would be maintaining a table mapping package names between distributions in order to get the dependencies right.

Those would be harvested to train LLMs even without asking first. 😐

Yes, one of the factors that contributed to the demise of Windows Mobile was the lack of backwards-compatibility for apps between 7, 8, an 10.

ArchLinux’s pacman with ILoveCandy option enabled.

Die Älteren unter uns werden sich noch an den Wechsel von DM zu € erinnern, als in Restaurants die Währungsymbole ausgetauscht wurden, aber die Beträge gleich blieben.

Many projects accept donations, for example for server costs or travel expenses (conferences, meetings). You can setup recurring monthly transfers to projects whose software you use most often. Examples are the Free Software Foundation for various GNU tools or the KDE project.

Seemingly not mentioned so far has been “Battlestar Galactica” (the 2000s version). Less about exploration, more about survival, with action, character development, and philosophical/religious questions.

Backups serve different purposes and if encryption by malware is a threat, you have to do backups differently, as opposed to, for example, hardware failure, where your NAS is a valid approach. To protect against encryption malware, you must make your backups inaccessible. One example are read-only backup media like DVD-ROMs. Another example is to make regular backups on tapes or HDDs and lock them up somewhere. You only take them out after you have wiped all computers that were affected by malware.

restic

#Peertube got already mentioned, but just serving video files may already suffice. Modern webbrowsers are capable of playing videos. Some tweaking of parameters may be necessary when encoding them. Also, no frills such as dynamic adoption of bitrate/quality or high-level stuff like commenting, likes, or subtitles.

Leider führen kleine Supermärkte oder Discounter wenige bis gar keine alkoholfreien Biere. Wenn man eines haben will, muss man immer zum Fachhändler (Getränkemarkt). Und trotz Biersteuer sind alkoholfreie Biere nicht mal merkbar billiger.

Ah, ein Störtebeker-Fan 😀

Persönlich ziehe ich Weizenbiere vor und kann das Bernstein-Weizen empfehlen.