ripe_banana
To give a different opinion than all the thin-clients, old laptops can be a good choice too. I am a bit preferrential to really nice old thinkpads.
If you buy them used you can get insane prices (~$40) and also you get all the laptop conveniences of a keyboard, screen, battery (for power failure). Also I think the power/performance ratio is pretty much the same to the thin clients.
First off, I think you’re completely right in that laptop batteries are definitely a non-ideal solution. And, I’m really not an expert in this, so take my words with a grain of salt.
You could mitigate a bit of the dangers by doing some of the following (I only did the first):
- Reducing the max charge level to 50% of the capacity.
- Monitor your batteries health to alert for any discrepancies.
- Switch out your batteries every couple of years (which is super easy without downtime on the aformentioned old thinkpads).
If you are an under $100 budget, there seems to be an argument that maybe you are willing to risk a little bit for that extra power reliability.
Signal: Because I want better messaging, and somehow they already achieved some adoption.
Firefox: If Firefox can somehow make their browser miles ahead of chrome, I think that’d be just plain good for the world.
Gitea/Forgejo: I think Github is another one of these centralized platforms that’s pretty ripe for disruption (and gitlab is just not gonna do it).
Lemmy: It’d be amazing to have all the kinks ironed out of lemmy.
Mastodon: Same thing as lemmy. Get social media out of the hands of big companies.
Mail-in-a-box: I want to be able to host my own email if I want to. Proton is great, but isn’t email supposed to be an open standard?
Framework: Not exactly a software project, but man I’d love to see them get the time to push out a ton of great different products and really spark the right to repair movement. It’s the first device I was actually excited to buy.
Linux Mint: I don’t use mint, but it seems like one of the most user friendly distros. I would love for them to make everything perfect and create a seamless experience (and really make a year of the linux desktop). I also think it would be great to just have one clear frontrunner for new users.
Coreboot: Make firmware open source? Yes please.
Truly Open Source LLM: I really don’t want this tech to be in just the hands of just a big company. I’d love for there to be an LLM that has not only it’s weights open, but the full dataset, training methods and everything open.
I think when you just get 10 years of dev time, you get an opportunity to push a project ahead of all it’s competitors. It is kind of interesting to get to pick and choose a project to be the frontrunner (even if they aren’t currently).
Why are tax dollar being spent making it a little faster for rich FiDi people to get to JFK. Take the A train like the rest of us.
There is so much infrastructure NYC could improve:
- Biking Infrastructure
- More subway routes in Brooklyn
- Better ties to PATH and LIRR
- Expanded and more reliable bus infrastructure
And that is just what I can think in the moment.
I feel like this is a case for framework support. They were better than your generic IT team when I interacted with them. Maybe they have a better idea of what is going wrong.