bear

I guarantee you the time spent swapping AAs every few days will far outweigh the time you spend using a screw driver to replace this battery at the frequency it requires.

Yeah, but the AAs will still be around in 10 years. Until we standardize internal power cells and legally mandate companies use them, I don't really care how user-serviceable it is, by the time it actually needs a swap most companies are done selling it anyways and just want you to buy the next thing instead. At best you can get a shady third-party knockoff. Valve is slightly better in this regard, but I don't expect them to still sell batteries 10-15 years from now.

I think most people just use "user-serviceable" as a cope and never actually intend to service it, it just makes them feel better to think they can. They just throw it away and get a shiny new thing when it becomes slightly inconvenient.

I’ve been able to order replacement parts directly from them in the past. Would they not sell you a replacement battery? Is the Pro 3 less repairable?

I can get rechargeable AAs in packs of 4 just around the corner from my house and therefore always have a few spares on hand instead of special ordering a unique battery that only works in a single device on the planet and only is available for purchase as long as they allow it. But I guess we can just throw it away in a few years instead and buy whatever new product they want to sell, as long as it comes with a charging cradle of course.

This is a strange argument to me. I just don’t get it.

We have a universal, standardized, cheap power cell. To this day you can use the same type of power cell in any low power device since it was standardized, going all the way back to things made in 1947. We then made it reusable for hundreds or even thousands of uses a piece, and they still only cost a few bucks.

We then replaced it with millions of different single-purpose batteries that are only compatible with one thing each.

People keep trying to gaslight me into thinking this is somehow better.

but there’s still going to be a percentage of people who just use disposables.

Make them illegal, and I'm not kidding.

It's definitely dried up a fair bit over the last couple of years. In January 2025 I got some recertified 12TB Ironwolfs for $140 each from GoHardDrive, and that was already a fair bit over what they historically had been. Same drives are now $200 on GoHardDrive, and $220 on Amazon. You can just get them new $250, so at that point I barely think it's worth it to get recertified unless you're really stretching a budget. I'm sure the businesses are very happy with the demand they got now, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that LTT and other Youtubers covering these sites really drove up demand and prices.

Also, the smaller drives are a lot harder to find recertified these days since enterprise users will usually go for much larger capacities, so yeah, for 4TB you'll probably have to go for new. You could also just get a larger drive and only use 4TB of it, assuming this is going into some kind of array. Upgrade the other one at a later date, then just expand your pool!

Authentik has done the opposite of enshittification. As they've gotten more successful, they've taken enterprise features and moved them into the community edition. I've been extremely happy with Authentik so far and the dev has been nothing short of fantastic every time I've seen them interacting with the community.

Your example of Ubuntu being a good desktop is a web service run by Canonical that is relevant to maybe 1% of users, if not less?

Look, I'm happy that it works great for your use case. But this doesn't matter to most users, and it's also not even intrinsic to Ubuntu itself. OpenSUSE also has fantastic build services. Basically all major git services do too.

Reddit is mildly left of center as a whole. It is not leftist. You do not find many people there who are genuinely anti-capitalist, which is a prerequisite for any flavor of leftism.

The counter to low-quality "Ubuntu sux" posts is not low quality "nuh uh it's actually super epic!!!" posts, but that's all we ever get. I've seen this pattern for probably fifteen years now, and it's exhausting. If you don't care about the criticisms and want to keep using it, then keep using it. More power to you. I probably use things you think are garbage. Hell, Windows users think we both use garbage. I'm just tired of people desperate to justify their choices like they need to "prove" something to everyone who disagrees.

There are plenty of high quality takedowns of Ubuntu, but so rarely are there high quality defenses of it, generally because the criticisms are correct. Nobody ever talks about what makes Ubuntu good, not even Ubuntu users. Arch users will yap your ear off about ArchWiki and AUR. I'll evangelize Nix to anybody who will listen as the future of advanced Linux management. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed fans will not shut up about rollbacks and bleeding edge software. Fedora users... well, Fedora users are usually busy out there actually doing productive things with their time instead of pointless internet squabbles.

But what is Ubuntu strong at? I genuinely have no idea. All I ever see Ubuntu users say is that it "sucks the least", in some vague indescribable way. That it's not as bad as everyone says, that Snaps are actually fine, etc. Always on the defensive. If Ubuntu is actually good, somebody needs to get out there and make a case for what it's good at, besides being featured as the default instructions for running proprietary third-party software.

I don't know why we're still doing snap discourse in 2025. I'm going to be harsh and direct.

It has a proprietary server backend. This is objectively true. Theoretically you can build an open source backend, but nobody has completed a full implementation of it.

If you don't care about that, you can use Ubuntu, nobody is stopping you. You don't need other people's approval. Which is good, because of the people who disapprove, you're never going to get their approval until it's actually open sourced. You're not going to convince anybody here to stop caring that it's proprietary. So just get over it and use your own operating system without airing your insecurities online about it.

Something you might want to look into is using mTLS, or client certificate authentication, on any external facing services that aren't intended for anybody but yourself or close friends/family. Basically, it means nobody can even connect to your server without having a certificate that was pre-generated by you. On the server end, you just create the certificate, and on the client end, you install it to the device and select it when asked.

The viability of this depends on what applications you use, as support for it must be implemented by its developers. For anything only accessed via web browser, it's perfect. All web browsers (except Firefox on mobile...) can handle mTLS certs. Lots of Android apps also support it. I use it for Nextcloud on Android (so Files, Tasks, Notes, Photos, RSS, and DAVx5 apps all work) and support works across the board there. It also works for Home Assistant and Gotify apps. It looks like Immich does indeed support it too. In my configuration, I only require it on external connections by having 443 on the router be forwarded to 444 on the server, so I can apply different settings easily without having to do any filtering.

As far as security and privacy goes, mTLS is virtually impenetrable so long as you protect the certificate and configure the proxy correctly, and similar in concept to using Wireguard. Nearly everything I publicly expose is protected via mTLS, with very rare exceptions like Navidrome due to lack of support in subsonic clients, and a couple other things that I actually want to be universally reachable.

I envy your life, as it feels like every year the browser assimilates and consumes more and more.

A direct case was not reported in the UK in recent years, but evidence of very likely polio transmission was found in sewage samples two years ago:

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/polio-virus-found-in-uk-sewage-samples-risk-to-public-low

A similar situation happened in New York where an actual case was found a month later:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/polio-found-new-york-wastewater-state-assesses-virus-spread-2022-08-01/

The short of it is, when vaccination rates fall, Polio can be reintroduced via transmission of the live virus found in the oral vaccine, usually taken in poorer countries. If someone were to take the oral vaccine and then immediately travel to a country with lessening vaccination rates, like is currently happening in the west due to the spread of right-wing conspiracy mongering, the live virus still in the vaccinated individual has a low but not zero chance of propagating to the unvaccinated or immune-compromised population there. Samples containing these vaccine-derived viruses are found a few times per year in most places, and it's a weaker virus so often it leads to no symptoms, but in very rare instances it does take hold with the expected effect:

https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2022-DON366

Despite individual cases of polio turning up, either via direct reporting or evidence found elsewhere, it would still be correct to describe polio as being "eradicated" in these countries, at least currently. Nobody is confused by this or demands reclassification of the status of polio.