You misunderstood my point. LocalSend is great. It does exactly what it promises, and works well.

But you’re claiming “AirDrop = LocalSend” and that is not true and causes false expectations. People used to Apple think they can use it in all the same situations and for the same things, which they can’t. Just because you mostly used it in the same network doesn’t mean most people use AirDrop that way, and I know quite a few that mostly use it while out and about, meeting new people etc.

The “Good advice” version is too tell them there is LocalSend, which can do quite a few things like AirDrop, but not all. Basically make it clear they need to be on the same network.

This is such bad advice. If you tell people that, people expect it too work like AirDrop, which it doesn’t.

LocalSend is great, but it is much more limited than AirDrop. As the name suggest, it only works if people are in the same network. If you’re in your home network, and both devices are yours, that’s probably fair enough, but that isn’t the point or (only) use case of AirDrop.

Also if you’re installing it on a Linux machine which happens to have a firewall enabled by default, you will have to open the correct ports for it to to work out even just see the other devices.

Desec.io when they are open for taking in new members. Fantastic service. Run by a bin-profit-equivalent in Germany.

What does this mean? I use signal with the official client on like 5 devices just fine?

In Firefox on Linux it’s a definitive “maybe”. It works on my gaming machine, not not on my home theatre PC. Same Linux install. Same configuration: Firefox with the user agent extension for Netflix, which was needed or it was stuck at 720p. HTPC is still stuck at 720p.

It’s all a matter of what you consider reasonable risk. I also run some specific services exposed where it makes sense (they are designed to do this, think things like home assistant or next cloud or jellyfin), but would never put anything that is used to do server administration public facing (Webmin, Termix, proxmox, that sort of thing). If the purpose of the tool is to perform or allow elevated actions, I run it behind a VPN (yes for me that includes ssh).

There’s also a difference between being randomly port scanned and/or probed, or being actively and personally targeted for some reason. If the second is ever a reasonable threat, that changes what is acceptable dramatically as well.

Yes, it inherently is. Authentication/encryption happens as the very first thing at the network level, before anything resembling a service becomes accessible. This is fundamentally different than for example a web interface, which needs to present “the Web page” to allow the user to log in, which might involve multiple individual parts that can already have a 0-day.

As a more direct comparison: look into historic vulnerabilities between ipsec VPN and SSL VPN. The former is the older technology, the second is more “web like”. The number of serious CVEs for the latter over just some manufacturers (Cisco, fortinet, …) in one year probably beats the number for ipsec in is entire life time.

Going back to Tailscale (or netbird, …): it is one very secure layer which then secures everything. You can have 1 service or 20, same security. If you expose individual services, c you also expose every possible vulnerability of all of them, so all 20 services if that’s what you run.

This is backwards in more ways than one.

First of all, how do you know what it was intended for? It started with gaming, because slackware for gamers wasn’t something that existed, let alone for free. I’m sure they always planned to expand in any way and direction they could. Surely the plan was never “we will only ever serve gamers”!

Forums require a specific sign up for every forum to post, but can be read and indexed freely. They also aren’t a “live chat”, provide no way to hop in a call and just share the screen for support (as an example). Answers take time, even for trivially simple questions. Ironically discord now includes and hosts forums. But for all of it, you only ever need one account. To be clear I hate this, too. Walled garden kinda bullshit, which they fully control.

But again, why and how we got here doesn’t matter. Here we are. It just is. The “support history” and knowledge or whatever you want to call it, it’s in discord. It’s inaccessible unless you know it’s there and where to look (which “server”). Being searchable by Google is just better for the status quo. Which we can’t naturally change, no matter how much we want to or hate how it is. You can shake your first at clouds screaming “you’re all doing it wrong!” all you want, and be right while doing so. The recent data/history is still on discord, not in forums.

This has been asked for, a lot actually. One if the major downsides of using discord for supporting “your thing”, being a game or software, is that people can’t search for problems they encounter using search engines. Everything that happens on discord can only be searched for specifically there. People need a discord account and join a server (that they need to know about) to even start searching there. If you use a forum or similar, it gets indexed and searchable. Discord used to be a closed, proprietary black hole of information in this regard.

After switching to Linux (CachyOS) over a year ago now, I think I’ve booted my still existing windows installation twice. Both times was at the very start to get some settings from installed software to migrate and to sync some data or something, I barely even remember. That has also been over a year ago.

Ever since I’ve switched, I stopped noticing I even have an operating system. I just use my PC. Unbothered by popups, updates and bloat are (re)appearing pinned in my start menu (no I didn’t want to have candy crush installed). Literally everything just works, and I’m mostly using my PC for gaming.

I regret not switching much sooner.