I think that i started to feel this in the years of Reagan’s presidency (I lived and worked in Europe in those days). Still a little hidden then, it seems to be blatantly obvious now, they no longer try to hide it.

For important data, I have around 100 GB in an AWS bucket, all encrypted backups (moved away from Dropbox a few years back). It costs me about €5 or 6 per month. Thinking about moving them to a European provider, though not sure where to as yet. Less important data stay local on external disks.

I use a SIP phone service now (zadarma.com). They have an app for Android, and it also works with the SIP clients on my Linux desktop. Can’t give a longtime review of them yet, as i am a Skype “victim” too, but so far so good.

I think there is another messenger called Viber that can call landlines, but it looked a little sketchy to me.

I think, the “threadiverse” is more akin to the old (also federated, just in a different way) Usenet / Newsgroups than web-forums. So “ScoopGroups”, maybe?

Practice, practice, practice.

SUSE Linux, back in the 1990s. Because you could buy it for cheap, and you got not only the huge stack of floppy disks to install it from, but also a set of thick fat detailed handbooks (these things made from paper full of pictures and letters and glued together, like your grandparents may have had). I spent many nights with them books instead of my wife…

It was a bear to install and terribly complicated to configure back then; at least for me. But in the end, I had a nice server running well for a while.

Back in the mid 2000s, we (my company) were on Windows, including three Windows 2000 Server licences. And we needed to upgrade. But it wasn’t sustainable for the small company to pay for all these licences, when a free option was available.

So we slowly moved all applications over to cross-platform alternatives, Outlook to Thunderbird (called Firebird in those days), office to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice), Internet Explorer to Firefox, Corel Draw to Gimp, Company software like accounting to a XAMPP stack etc.

Once this was established and running well, we just changed the underlying platform from Windows to Ubuntu/Gnome, cursed for a few days and went on with our lives. And it worked for the past 20 years and counting. Now I am cursing, when I am forced to use Windows and can’t find my butt using it.

So the mindset, if you want, was that of methodical planning and going slow, step by step. This is likely different if you’re a gamer, or you need some very specialised apps, but for me, this was not the case. The games that I play, like Sudoku and Solitaire, work on any platform.

Yes, for marketplace and some flea market groups. Most of my friends have moved on, some sadly to WhatsApp, which I refuse to install.

Bissäguet, Merci (Swiss German)
Bitte, Danke (German)
Please, thank you (English)
S’il vous plait, merci (French)
Par favore, grazie (Italian)
Bonvolu, dankon (Esperanto)
Onegaishimasu, Arigatougozaimasu (Japanese)

I understand your thinking. OTOH, if you don’t carry your own weight, you make someone else do it for you, and put them through the same hell you’ve been trying to escape. That’s not fair, either.

If I were you, I would try to take some time off, travel the world on the cheap, and find my feet, maybe even make peace with myself.

Good luck!

I wonder whether Linux Mint will follow suit?

Mine is simple (inspired by Kali Linux, if that’s even correct)
PS1='\[\033[0;32m\]┌──[\t] (\u@\h)-[\w]\n└─$ \[\033[0m\]'

Mastodon or Pixelfed come to mind.

I am European (but currently living in Asia). I don’t identify with my country of birth. However, I do feel connected to the Franco-Alemannic culture space that I grew up in. The languages, literature, arts and crafts, architecture, food, music etc. are way more important to me than the colour of my passport or the madhouse that is politics.

Amongst other things, I always carry some zip ties. They weigh nothing, yet come in handy in so many ways.

The shareholders of the pharma-industry will not be happy. You have to manage a disease, not heal it; that would be detrimental for the balance sheet.

And unhappy shareholders of big pharma is definitely not what we want; if they are happy, we will be happy.