I suppose I worded that poorly. I meant that the firmware and protocol are open while the Android/iOS apps are not. My intent was to clarify what was open/closed, not obfuscate.

Directly from MeshCore’s docs:

5.7. Q: Is MeshCore open source?

A: Most of the firmware is freely available. Everything is open source except the T-Deck firmware and Liam’s native mobile apps.

Like I said, I’d prefer to see those closed bits also being developed openly and as a community, and there’s nothing to stop anyone from that endeavor. I also get that the mobile app dev has put in a lot of work on both the closed and open source pieces of the project, and he’s gotta eat.

I could be off the mark here, but I think it’s a little more complicated than that. I believe Meshtastic has trademarks on the name and logo, and they went so far as to shut down a project that was attempting to allow a device to switch between Meshtastic and Meshcore firmwares.

On the other hand, Meshcore is all open, however the client apps are closed source and on a sort of fremium model aimed at supporting the developer. Mobile apps have a 10 second wait to admin router nodes, which can be removed by a one time fee ($9, I think?). And then there’s a more feature rich firmware for the LilyGo T-Deck (cool standalone Blackberry-like device) which has a paid option.

I’d like to see open source community developed apps, and I don’t think there’s anything to stop anyone from writing new ones, other than the fact that the existing ones work well and the paid features make for a cheap an easy way to support the project.

If I’m wrong about any of that, I hope someone else with a better understanding can chime in.

Helium just used the same radio technology as Meshtastic (LoRa) and that’s about it. Helium was some lame attempt to develop a mesh network tied to a cryptocurrency as incentive for users to deploy nodes. AFAIK Helium is basically over.

Meshtastic is free and open. The hardware and tiny amount of electricity are your only costs to get involved. A lot of devices are efficient enough to run on a 1 watt solar cell and single 18650 battery.

The reliability will depend on where you’re located and how many nodes are running in your area. If you happen to be in a particularly dense area, you might also look into MeshCore, which is essentially the same idea but designed to scale a lot better.

The Litter Robot 3 is a well built and well designed workhorse. I think they cost a little more new than your budget, but they may have a model right around 500.

Depending on your comfort level with the idea and where you live, you can sometimes find them on the used market for a couple hundred dollars, or even occasionally a free non-working unit. Replacement parts are easy to get and install.

They have a WiFi model that can use an app to alert you when the tray is full or something unexpected happens, but it works just fine without the app or internet.

This article reads like AI slop.

Tuxedo is continuing work on a Snapdragon X-Elite laptop but haven’t released it yet because Linux support is lacking around the SoC. They’ve made some device tree commits around it to the kernel. That’s it. Saved you a click.

Can’t speak to all of your points, but the main thing I’d recommend is to try distro hopping with some of the common recommendations. If you have a spare drive that would be the easiest. Mint and PopOS are probably the first two worth trying to see how things go.

In terms of games, you should really be checking protondb for compatibility. It shows the C&C series generally looking pretty good. If you’re out of the loop, Proton is essentially an improved version of Wine that Valve maintains that’s focused on games, but it’s free for anyone to use.

For text editors, there are an insane number of options. I’ve been pretty impressed with Kate from the KDE folks. Ties in best with a KDE-based flavor of Linux, but works great everywhere. Codium is a fork of VSCode that strips out all of Microsoft’s telemetry. Also great to use and very powerful with insane flexibility through plugins.

Regarding fragmentation across distros, you’re mainly looking at RPM-based (Fedora, Suse), deb-based (Debian, Ubuntu, and a whole slew of others based on those). Most programs will be bundled up as a deb or rpm. Efforts have been made to make more platform-neutral packages for distribution like Flatpaks, Snaps, and AppImages. Those have their quirks, and people have strong opinions about their merits and weaknesses, but generally you’ll be able to get those to work on any distro without much fuss. There are some cool utilities like Distrobox which do a pretty good job of setting up containers for different distros so you can install and run their native packages.

I’m not much of a programmer and I don’t host any public sites, but how feasible would it be to build an equivalent of Night Shade but for LLMs that site operators could run?

I’m thinking strategies akin to embedding loads of unrendered links to pages full of junk text. Possibly have the junk text generated by LLMs and worsened via creative scripting.

It would certainly cost more bandwidth but might also reveal more bad actors. Are modern scrapers sophisticated enough to not be fooled into pulling in that sort of junk data? Are there any existing projects doing this sort of thing?

If I understand it correctly, Bluefin was just the first downstream uBlue variant like Aurora that had the various goodies built into the images. Bluefin effectively being the Gnome version of Aurora. I think it was simpler to tie the Aurora builds into the existing Bluefin pipeline for generating images and packages.

I highly recommend Aurora (dx) if it sounds like it fits the bill for what you’re looking for. After starting out with Kinoite and rebasing on Aurora-dx, the latter just feels like Kinoite with all of the desired additional packages already baked in, and some great additional shell scripts for convenience.

Rebasing sounded intimidating but it was literally just a simple shell command and a reboot. One additional command if you want to hang onto the previous image the way you had it. Rpm-ostree is pretty magical.

Three and a half years ago