For the love of god, listen to some Citations Needed and stop self-congratilating your media literacy because some fucking dork with a website tells you the New York Times and Washington Post aren’t biased.

Old shitty laptops make good servers. They have a built-in UPS.

let them fight

At work we use Creo Parametric. I have a cracked copy of it at home, but I still prefer modeling in FreeCAD.

The former. The MiaB install is basically running a script on a fresh Ubuntu system, and the instructions stress that it should be a single-purpose machine. Mailcow uses docker though, and might be able to cohabitate in parallel with other docker containers on the same machine. I haven’t tried Mailcow as anything other than an end user though.

I’ve never tried Lavabit but I run Mail-in-a-Box. It works alright, and is pretty low-maintainence. I tried setting up Postfix and all the related programs on a couple distros and it was a nightmare (and I like to consider myself fairly competent at this sort of thing). Highly recommend just using something like Mail-in-a-Box or Mailcow instead of winging it.

You can set up a mail server. You can set up something like Nextcloud. You can set up a personal website, or just run a webserver and turn it into a place to dump files. You can set up something like Syncthing to facilitate sharing files between your devices. You can set up some types of Federated services, but in my experience Mastodon is too heavy for a baseline VPS. I needed to augment my instance with additional memory, CPUs, and an S3-compatible object storage provider for about 600GB of user media. Lemmy might work, but I haven’t tried running it on a VPS on the open Internet yet.

I think you might have better luck uploading them in webp format.

The politics of folks like RMS (personal issues aside) were far above average, but the Free Software Movement was very steeped in liberalism from its onset, and that explains many of of its present shortcomings. Its biggest failing was to believe that Free Software would ultimately win on its merits. In the early days this was understandable, when free software was often playing catch-up to replicate the functionality of established commercial offerings. When the GNU project was just a C compiler you could install on proprietary UNIX systems to dick around with.

Today though, Free Software is more often than not superior to commercially available offerings, with the exception of some niche industrial segments. But still, Free Software adoption by end users remains incredibly marginal. No matter how many merits Free Software stacks in its favor, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” never comes. We are still drowning in proprietary iOS and Android phones. The overwhelming majority of PCs still ship with Windows. All of it deliberately engineered to become E-waste in a couple of years.

Folks, this won’t change unless we take over the factories where these PCs and phones are manufactured.