In the context of communication networks, WiFi is a high speed netowrk. It was designed to be basically a “normal” (ethernet-like) network, but wireless. It acts for all intents and purposes like an ethernet network. There are significant requirements that devices need to follow, many include frequently saying “hello” (simplified). The complexity of the protocol to be able to send at gigabit and faster speeds over dozens of meters is significant. Having relatively low latency adds to this as well. If all you need is a few bytes every now and then, that isn’t ideal. Having devices in your network that follow older/slower standards is essentially like pulling the handbrake for your network (again, very simplified). But explaining this in detail is also very much beyond the scope of a comment here.

If I’m gonna install a device by some random manufacturer that acts as a wifi access point inside my network, I also give them full access to my network. That access point can do all sorts of things, and I would describe this as a security nightmare. It also doesn’t even have to be malicious: the manufacturer could get hacked, and now the hacker has access to all these wifi access points all over the world, and all their home networks. Fun.

Zigbee or Thread doesn’t actually stop them from adding cloud connectivity, they all still do. But you yourself can stop it. Similar to the “gateway” you suggested with dedicated WiFi, they sell you a gateway for Zigbee or Thread, which then connects to the cloud/internet to allow you to control your stuff. As they would with a WiFi gateway. The protocol isn’t “less capable”, it’s intended use is around (home-)automation. It is low power, low bandwidth and most importantly both are a mesh network. That means that while you have a central point to access them (at least Zigbee has exactly 1), they all talk to each other and for a fully connected mesh. A device doesn’t need to be able to see/hear that central point. It can send it through a multi-hop route, and that route is dynamic so when a device leaves (out of power, turned off, …) the packets basically just find their way. Generally anything that has a stable power sounce will act as a router and forward packets. The low power part means that if you have a battery powered thing (remote switch, thermometer, …) it can run off a single button cell for like a year or so. With wifi it would last a week, maybe two. The bandwidth thing is related to that as well, as a thermoeter needs to send the temperature and/or humidity maybe every few minutes, or even just when it changes and there is no need for that. That comes with power usage, complexity and many other downsides, but of course a zigbee device can’t stream video or something (like a security camera would need to).

When using wifi, any device needs to be in range of the access point. You can have multiple access point but those aren’t that cheap, and should be wired in. Devices only ever talk to the access point. When multiple devices talk to each other, it goes to the access point who then sends it out again to the other device.

There are great writeups on the internet, just google “zigbee vs wifi” or something. I’m not gonna repeat what

Side note: you can reply to more than 1 paragraph in a reply. No need to reply three times, but I guess I’ll stick with it now.

But that is not a fault of WiFi as a medium, …

but it is a fault of WiFi as a choice for that application. Just because it does wireless communication doesn’t mean it’s suited for any application that needs a wireless protocol. Using it for very-low traffic applications is simply not what it was designed to do, and it has significant negative effects if you do. Any device you add basically slows down any other device by a bit. And wifi network you add in a physical area decreases the effectiveness of all other wifi networks in it’s vicinity. In even medium densly populated areas, wifi is already borderline unusable due to congestion. Your proposed (dedicated) hub is a good idea for network isolation, assuming it’s designed and configured correctly, but that also comes with more and frankly just as bad security implications, just different ones. To be clear, having like a light bulb or two wifi is a fine choice. For 50 or a whole smart home network, it no longer is.

Both Zigbee and Matter do not rely on cloud connectivity as a protocol, though many of the manufacturers implementations do effectly add that on top: you get the exact solution you propose here as well. At least with these standards you can control everyhing locally, if you want to, and you don’t congest the spectrum nearly as much as wifi does.

Good luck explaining how to do any of this to my parents, for example. For someone with a technical background that’s feasible, for someone with an it background it’s even easy. For the other 90 or 95% of people who are actually supposed to buy and use these things, it isn’t. They don’t even know something like this can be done, let alone that it should be done.

I’ve had nothing but issues with NC instant upload, and stopped using it. It’s error prone and needs constant hand holding for no good reason. It didn’t handle taking a picture and then deleting it instantly very well (and will throw your notifications at you for this, often more than 1). When you have limited connectivity it will utterly confuse itself and ask you to resolve conflicts for 100 files for no reason, when it could just checksum server and client files and notice they are all the exact same. Also when set to only upload on WiFi, and not being connected to WiFi it often still spams notifications that the “upload failed”, despite not being supposed to upload anything. And btw. it could upload files just fine, they failed only because upload on mobile is disabled!

It’s a nightmare. Commonly also referred to as a cluster fuck.

The closest small one is about 1 km, a reasonably sized one for stocking up is 5 km or so. I have never walked to either in 5+ years of living here. Even the closer one is like a 10 minute walk (ish), and then I would have to carry back what I bought, which also means I can barely buy anything. 5 km is more like an hour by foot one way, so that’s just not happening, ever.

I usually take my bike to the closer one, or the cargo bike to the bigger one. I also pass by the smaller one on the way home from work (I commute by bike). The fact that I own bikes is why there’s never any rain to walk anywhere, basically. Additionally, there is very little sense in taking a (relatively small capacity) bike to a big store when a cargo bike is available. I also don’t own a car. I don’t know a single person who would regularly walk 1 km+ for shopping, but I also don’t know anyone who doesn’t own any form of personal transport. Most would usually take a bike, and take a car for bigger or heavier trips.

Taking a bus or tram/train for grocery shopping does happen for some, but highly depends on the local situation and town or city layout if that can bring useful time savings. Unless you live is the middle of nowhere, bus and train schedules are anywhere from every 10 to 30 minutes or so, more frequent in dense areas where there’s multiple lines.

Edit: for context, I live on the outskirts of a medium sized city (250k inhabitants), but my town only has 3500 or so. The small supermarket is on the literal other side of that town, the bigger one is one town over (opposite direction of city). Distance to the city is also only only 10 km or so (to the center), but there happen to be no “attractive” supermarkets in that direction for me.

Thanks for the update!

I don’t understand the change in regards to how ‘mention’ suggestions are handled. When viewing this changelog post in summit, they show identical text. When I started writing this comment I noticed that they are in fact different in the markup/source code, as seen above the input box.

So what effect does that change have in practice, or does it functionally do the same just less verbose?

I’m not seeing it either (yet), and I’m on Haas-os.

Edit: nevermind, manually checking for the update in settings/system/updates made it show up

So you’re basically saying “I don’t have any proof of any of this, but I’m scared so I’m scaring others as well”.

Your first point makes zero sense: it can’t be both “for profit” and have “no means of generating income”.

Their way of generating income is the reason they created the distro/OS in the first place: selling hardware. To my knowledge, they wanted to ship their mini servers (ZimaBoard) and later NAS-like devices (ZimaCube I think?) with an easy to use OS that can do all basic home server tasks. That didn’t exist, so they made one. They didn’t need to make money from the OS, it’s a catalyst to bring able to sell (more) hardware. I personally think that is a great way to use Linux as a company and contribute to the wider ecosystem, why does it scare you so much? They could’ve closed this of much more, but made it for available to everyone, on any hardware.

From what I heard, they did achieve their design goals. It’s a bit simplistic for me personally, but probably great for a beginner.

I get that enshittyfication is everywhere these days, but maybe don’t try to stop people from using things that haven’t actually seen ANY yet, just because they might? With no indication that they will, either.

4&5 might be fair points though, I for know enough about the details.

Yes, it’s the first of the month, which is the most heavy of all days for the the giveaways. They sometimes come out on other days, but only a few.

They recently announced that this would be necessary. They also said that this would mostly be during peak times, so the moment the Amazon prime codes are released for example. Assuming this is correct, the workaround would be to just wait a day, or 2, or 5.

As far as analogies go, is pretty far off. It doesn’t hold even for basic behaviors of the two cases, let alone complex ones. A better analogy would be that you buy a (small) car that always happens to come with an included, free trailer for more cargo capacity. You can of course take it off and have a small car. And it’s also as magic trailer that doesn’t take up any space at all when not in use, but can also not be sold.

I’m actually not a fan, an am also using it somewhat reluctantly personally, though self hosted. I’ve had my issues with it, but an still using it because it solves some issues that are much harder to solve without it. I’m not using the contacts/calendar functionality.

But your original statement was that you couldn’t understand who would need calendar and contacts (in their file sharing app). There’s enough I object to in this statement that I wrote my comment. First of, in this context, specifically in their article/blog/whatever, it’s about nextcloud as a whole, not the fact that it can do file sharing. That’s what it evolved from, but not all it is any more, more better or worse. Secondly, it’s about an advertised alternative to O365, which includes the very common and almost universal requirement for teams (be it a company, family, …) to have events (=calendar) like schedule meetings with people (=contacts). Even if you work with just like 5 people you are probably gonna need that. There you probably want to share files, but probably more so it’s about the office functionality and collaborative, simultaneous editing of files. Obviously replacing Word, PowerPoint, Excel. And yes, Outlook (calendar,& contacts, also email).

This isn’t meant for individuals who need a few GB to store some files. It’s for teams of some description that need office like, cloud based tools.

Windows software is always the same (immutable distro or not), as it is run with “wine”. To run Windows programs they are installed in what’s called a prefix, which is basically just a folder containing stuff related to Windows. Things like “program files” and all the other folder structures a Windows program would expect, and will then appear as a drive letter. The prefix is generated inside your home folder (typically) anyway, which is always writable, and one can house multiple windows programs (or just the one if that needs special settings).

Immutability matters more for the actual Linux system and how you install Linux native software. Normally, you install software using a package manager (pacman on Arch, apt for Debian, …), and each package knows what else is needed to run it, and that gets installed as well. Many programs needing the same library means that library will be installed once. For an immutable distro this is basically fixed, and programs get run using “flatpacks” (there are similar solutions with other names, same idea). These are similar to packages from a package manager, but instead everything needed to run a program it’s always contained. That means they are bigger, but this will run on any distro, as it doesn’t have to tell the package manager what else to install. There are other technical details, like flatpacks are somewhat isolated, but nothing critical.

I would suggest finding a YouTube video or article to go into more detail if this matters to you, or if you just want to know more about the differences and reasons for using each of them.

Basic idea: immutable distro has stable base, updates are rarer, but system harder to modify. Regular distro is easier to tinker with, and a rolling release means frequent updates (doesn’t mean you need to install them frequently, btw), but occasionally things do break and might even require a manual fix.

Edit: somehow I forgot to answer your actual direct question. Generally anything from Adobe is a real pain to get to work. It can be done, but from what I heard it’s rather involved (I never have, don’t use Adobe). If you absolutely need that software and alternatives (paid it not) are just not an option, check first what is involved. There’s might even be a specific distro recommended to make it easier, or some distro might have better guides or more up to date ones.

Your analogy doesn’t make any sense, so I assume you really don’t know. So let me explain:

If you buy a 4wd, it’s always a 4wd, usually that means s relatively large vehicle. You might be able to turn it to 2wd, but it doesn’t make the car smaller. If you just needed a tiny car in all (or most cases), you can’t push a button to make it smaller. You always drive around the extra equipment to possibly make it 4wd.

Nextcloud is plugin based. Assuming this isn’t locked away on an instance like this, you can literally push a button and make that whole functionality go away everywhere. You can fully remove that ‘clutter’, if that’s of no use to you. They are offering it always, as it adds no additional effort on the hosters side: they don’t need to add gear boxes or whatever to make it have calendar & contacts. If you don’t want/need it, turn it off and it’s gone.

For some reason CachyOS hasn’t been mentioned. Like others said basically any distro can do what you’re describing, and this one is also one of those “with gaming in mind” distros. Didn’t mean you can’t do anything else on them, but anything making should “just work”. They also have a dedicated image/installer for “handheld” PCs like the steam deck that come preconfigured for that interface combination (but don’t use this special image on a normal PC/desktop).

Like SteamOS, it’s based on Arch, but unlike SteamOS or Bazzite it isn’t immutable. That’s a matter of preference. Being a rolling release means frequent and direct updates of new releases of any kind (kernel, software, everything, …). KDE is the default install option, like on the steam deck, but of course basically all other options are also available is you want (additionally or instead of kde).

Who ever wanted a file sync platform that also does calendaring and contacts?

Most O365 & exchange users? If you just want file sync, this isn’t for you. If you want a collaborative (online) office suite that can also sync files, it is. It’s meant to be able to replace the whole O365 stack, which includes Outlook.

You can also just not use that part, or any part you don’t need. This is basic NC functionality that has been there for a very long time, so why shouldn’t it be part of the package?

This is like the 3rd or 4th time this (mis)information is posted, and has to be corrected in comments. There’s a very large discrepancy between “all of Denmark” and “this one tiny ministry in Denmark”. Journalism really has just become “how to out-clickbait others, no matter if objectively false”.

Didn’t he disappear recently? I don’t mean as a person, but the user of steam in the stats.

I live in the EU. The violations of Google and Amazon I mentioned also happened in the EU. Feel free to look up the repercussions on those. Having rules is irrelevant if there is no way to actually enforce them, or at least verify them. It would be doable (maybe not quite “easy”) to have that verifiable, but there is no system or law in place for it as it stands right now.

You can trust them companies that would put surveillance equipment like that in their stuff to not abuse it, that’s your call. I just won’t use it. In quite a few EU countries this wouldn’t be allowed anyway, btw. At least not with current laws in regards to video recording in and around traffic. For example dash cams are still not fully legal in Germany, and only very limited recording (and storing) of footage is permitted.