IP white lists and firewall exceptions will help, but exposing ports on your home router is almost always a bad idea, especially for something as trivial as a game server.

I would highly recommend Tailscale. It’s free for up to 3 users, and if you have more friends than that, I would have them all sign up with free accounts and then share your laptop device with their tailnets.

It’s very easy to setup and use, costs nothing, and will be far more secure than opening ports and trying to set up IP white lists, protocol limitations, etc.

Tailscale creates something called an “overlay network” it’s basically a virtual LAN that exists on top of your real network and can be extended to other people and devices over the internet. It’s fully encrypted, fast, and like I said, very easy to set up.

Really sad about this, because Rust Desk has been the absolute best remote access tool I’ve ever used in the IT world, and that includes many different professional tools like Ninja& Teamviewer.

It’s so clean, easy to install and run, fast and low latency, handles multi-monitors great, runs on mobile, Linux, Windows, etc.

Such a shame that it is mired in controversy.

The process of enshitification is what I was referring to. Discord got super popular by providing users with lots of value for zero cost.

Now, in order to increase profits, they are reducing the scope of features they offer, and increasing the cost of the features that remain.

This will continue to slowly get worse, as users are more locked into Discord’s ecosystem and userbase, they will be further pressured to upgrade and pay more money for less stuff.

Discord’s enshitification continues.

Artificial scarcity at its finest. Imagine recording a song digitally, then pretending there are a limited amount of copies of that song in existence. Then you sell an agreement to another person that says they have to pretend there is only a certain made up number of copies that they bought, and if they allow more than that number of people to listen to those copies at rhe same time, they will get sued for “stealing” additional pretend copies?

I hope everybody can see how this is the insane and pathetic result of Capitalism’s unrelenting drive to commodify everything it possibly can in the pursuit of profit.

As always, the solution is sailing the high seas. Throughout history, those who created or saved illegal copies/translations of literature and art were important to preserving and furthering human knowledge.

Many incredibly powerful people, empires, and countries have tried very hard to suppress that, but they keep failing. You cannot suppress the human drive for curiosity and knowledge.

It’s pretty incredible how well it works. I installed Arch with Plasma 6 on a 2015 T450 thinkpad and it was so crazy how fast everything was.

Felt like a brand new machine, almost a decade old, and bottom of the line specs for that model, but it still ran cutting edge Linux like it was meant to.

My other desktops are even older, but it’s the same with Debian 12 and Plasma, they are super responsive and stable. It’s pretty wild to see a desktop that’s over 10 years old feel smoother and snappier than Windows 11 on a 3 year old, enterprise grade laptop.

It’s important to acknowledge that desktop Linux was much jankier even 5 years ago. I don’t think Windows 7 & Windows 10 would have been worse experiences on average than desktop Linux back in their heyday.

But times have changed pretty drastically. Desktop Linux has improved massively across the board. With so many applications going into the cloud and becoming web-based in recent years, Linux is more viable than ever.

Combine that with the fact that Windows 11 has become so bloated, so clunky, and just straight up unpleasant to use and maintain.

Historical precedent makes a big difference too. When an OS is dominant for so long, the ecosystem around it morphs to fit.

People are raised using Windows, go through school and college using Windows, get a job where their apps are all on Windows. Companies write software for their largest install base…which is Windows. And because the vast majority of companies and orgs use Windows, the IT ecosystem is based around managing Windows systems.

I worked at an MSP a few years back where almost every sysadmin there was far more experienced than me, I was the greenhorn. But when one of the sysadmins had their client’s Xen hypervisor go down, they called me because, “We heard you’re a Linux guy.” At that point, I had less than 3 years of Linux experience at all, and had almost zero actual Linux admin experience, I only used it personally and as a hobby. But I fixed their issue in less than an hour, got their client’s Xen hypervisor running which their entire ERP system ran on, all because I knew enough Linux basics to figure out what was going on.

Point is, people tend to become experts in what they use all the time. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Microsoft experts and admins are a dime-a-dozen where I live, but Linux/Unix admins, I rarely see a job posting that isn’t offering 20-40k more for people with those skills.

At my current company, roughly 50% of folks could be switched over to Linux without any issue. Their jobs all require basic document editing, email, Teams, and web browsing. All tasks that desktop Linux can handle now with zero issues.

As an IT guy who has worked at a bunch of companies with exclusively Windows environments, Windows absolutely doesn’t “just work.”

I can’t begin to list all the random problems I have with Windows in my day-to-day job.

Driver problems, hardware compatibility problems, software crashes, OS freezes, random configuration resets, networking issues, performance issues, boot issues, etc etc etc…

New hardware causes problems, old hardware causes problems.

Almost everything is harder to troubleshoot on Windows than Linux.

I have several test servers set up at my current workplace, they are old decommissioned desktops that are 10+ years old. I use them for messing around with Docker, Ansible, Tailscale, and random internal company resources like Bookstack and OpenProject.

All run Linux, all are a head and shoulders more stable and functional than the majority of much newer and more powerful Windows machines at our company.

Debian, Mint, CatchyOS, they all are far more dependable than most of the Windows machines. They install fast, on any hardware I use, decade+ old Quadro cards and Intel CPUs, doesn’t matter, they all run nearly perfect. And the rare times I have an issue, it’s so much faster to figure out and fix in Linux.

I switched over one of the computers in our department to Linux Mint. Threw it on a random laptop I had laying around. I did it just as an experiment, told the guy who was working on it to let me know if he had any issues using it. I planned on only having it out there for a week or two… It’s been 4 months and he loves it.

He says it’s super fast and easy to use, he doesn’t have any problems with it. Uses Libre office for documents, Firefox for our cloud-based ERP system, Teams and Outlook as PWAs installed on Mint.

I use Ansible to push updates to it once a week, Timeshift in case something ever breaks. It’s great. About a month ago I told him I would probably need to take it back because technically, it wasn’t an official deployment and the experiment I was doing had long since passed. He put up such a fuss that I decided to just let it stay. I’ll probably clone the drive, put it on his old tower, and take the laptop back, and let him keep using it indefinitely.

Linux absolutely isn’t perfect, no technology is. But in my years of experience with both, Linux on the whole is far less finicky, and far easier to fix when it breaks.

Decomodify software. Refuse to respect copyright laws for software, or mandate that all software must be GPL or an equivalent restrictive license.

Make it so that all government software must be GPL, that would remove an enormous install base from corporate entities. Certain EU countries are already doing this.

If you are a public institution of any kind, you should not be using corporate, proprietary software, no exceptions.

Closed source software and hardware is largely what allowed massive corpos to take over the software and hardware scene, and it’s what creates the incentive for silicon valley tech bros to create new technology solely in the hopes of being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars by some massive megacorp.

Corpos and private equity scumbags wouldn’t be interested in acquiring these companies if they knew all the code and technology was under a GPL-like license, and anybody could take that tech, modify it, redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, etc.

In Minecraft of course…

I try to make everything Pascal case. It’s easy to read in a terminal and pretty easy to type.

Oh man…I want labor to have a massive comeback so soon, absolutely put the screws to the corpo scum.

Yeah, they want to be able to get people totally off Linux as a root OS.

By creating WSL, they now can say, "Oh, you like to develop for/on Linux? Well good news, Windows has Linux built in! Just come on over to Windows and you can use WSL and Linux on Azure for all your Linux needs!

You got me!

No, they’re hardcore because tiling WMs are hardcore. Most users don’t want to use them, they don’t care. And they wouldn’t be significantly more likely to use them if more distros had them as a default.

Y’all complain that users still occasionally need to use the terminal for certain tasks on Linux, but you think those same users will be totally interested in spending hours writing Perl or JSON configs and memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts for every function they used to use the mouse for??

Hot take alert:

This is a stupid opinion.

First, the article reads like an AI wrote it, but assuming that’s not true, the Linux space absolutely does NOT need more tiling window managers.

Quite frankly, I’m amazed there are still as many actively developed ones as there are.

The VAST majority of Linux users have little to no interest in a tiling WMs, and the basic tiling features of Plasma, Gnome, and soon Cosmic are fine for most of the users that want to try it out. The few that really want hardcore full tiling are almost always already very experienced power users who know what they want and how to get it. They aren’t going to be put off by their favorite distro not having built in support for tiling WMs.

In fact, most of them are already using distros that are able to be heavily customized to their liking, like Arch, NixOS, and Gentoo.

How many users do you think want to run Linux Mint or PopOS but with some hardcore tiling WM?

Linux has a massive amount of variety in all areas, it’s already hellish for new users to pick a distro from the forest of suggestions, do we really need even more tiling WMs on tip of the dozen+ ones that already exist and serve a tiny percentage of Linux users?

Truly humble beginnings.

Lol sure, and AI made human staff at grocery stores a thing of the…oops, oh yeah…y’all tried that for a while and it failed horribly…

So tired of the bullshit “AI” hype train. I can’t wait for the market to crash hard once everybody realizes it’s a bubble and AI won’t magically make programmers obsolete.

Remember when everything was using machine learning and blockchain technology? Pepperidge Farm remembers…

Been 100% Linux on all my personal devices for about 4 years.

I just got tired of being treated like I was either an idiot or a criminal by Microsoft. Plus the way they kept forcing their bloatware and trash ads on the OS that I already paid for!

I decided I didn’t care what I had to give up, it was worth it to be rid of Microsoft’s clutches forever. Switched to Linux and I’ve never looked back.

Turns out, I actually didn’t have to sacrifice much at all, and the few things I don’t have anymore are nothing compared to the benefits of using Linux and FOSS software.

Everything works better for me too, more stable, updates are rarer and wayyyyy faster when I push them. No more fighting with AMD driver hell in Windows, no more weird lockups or crashes, a million times more customization options, and zero bloat or spyware installed by default on my system.

Thank you!