I've put 15 minutes of my work into configuring the app. Even on that surface level I can conclude that the application is full of bugs that impact accounts and savings. It looks good, but it's unusable for any serius purpose. Have a nice day.
I've only used Fedora for the last 3 years as my main OS but some things you've mentioned (which I consider important examples) are far better than you might think. What I know of that has been solved well:
- "Multi-monitor usage sucked" - GNOME with Tactile extension gives you basically what PowerToys doeas for managing windows in Windows which is the top productivity experience of what you can gat on the desktop in general. Better than anything on MacOS for instance. And zero issues with multi-monitor.
- NVIDIA drivers failing on updates - I dind't have a chance to experience that during the last 3 years and I use one of the worst GPU setups that are known to have stabilibty issues on Linux - a gaming laptop with 2 GPUs, Intel + Nvidia.
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Moreover, the overall OS stability is top notch. If it's not a clever GNOME extension called Another Window Session Manager saves my work and all opened windows every couple minutes or so (a GNOME session can be revoked after restart).
- "Music (half backed)" - a free Strawberry music suite is one of the best you can get and if that is not enough you can buy Jriver which is one of the top 3 best music platforms in the world. Or host a Logitech Media Server in a docker container locally. Plenty of very good options.
(I'm a hardcore audiphile myself).
> "full of bugs and incompatibilities" - I wouldn't say that at all. I consider myself a kind of person that doesn't like even minor unnecessary issues in my life and if Linux wasn't good enough for me I would not use it.
(With a disclaimer that the fact that there's nothing like Linux from the privacy and freedom standpoint I'm willing rarely to swallow an issue with it here and there to remain free person in the lengterm).
> Linux might not be OK for content creators, though. Or people depending on a lot of niche software, etc. In that case do what I did and find alternatives. Before you start thinking about switching an OS! Apps are more important than the OS.
To be honest I'm pretty sure that with what the future might bring regarding how major operating systems work (as hostile entities) one might want to consider alternatives now regardless of how inconvenient it might feel... Linux is fine. You'll make it work if you want to.
A hint that might help at least partially: novadays for managing digital and handwritten notes I juse Joplin, but before that I was an avid Evernote user. Having a paid plan active gives you access to Evernote's OCR function on their backend. I had a lot of handwritten notes uploaded as attachments to Evernote, and I remember that despite my handwritnig being awful their softwre was able to parse it and allow me to, among others, perform quite advanced searches on my handwritten notes. I'm not sure if there's a way to make Evernote's OCR backend work for you in scenarios more elastic that what it's been built for, but I wanted to menion that there's this unique OCR tech that I think does far better job that any standalone OCR software I tried (for my handwriting style which I consider awful). It might be worth researching further for you.
Be careful about Evernote, they got bought out by a somewhat questionable company that has a history of buying up companies and basically not improving them like the old owners.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang - "The Distraction Addiction"
I found it to be immensely helpful at a certain point in my life when I had to deal with huge workloads, and I was not ready for that (too young, lack of character back then, etc.).
Regarding the part about how to organize oneself: I found the GTD model of managing projects and tasks, and practicig it over the years to be the solution I could recommend to anyone.
Remember, those things take time. Invoking changes in oneself is a matter of years, not days. But it's certainly worth it! I can't imagine leading my life the way I was doing it 15 years ago. That would not work well... Today is a different story. Let's just say it's much, much better.
Good luck!
I just wanted to say that you made my day, @retSava, with that /r/linkedinlunatics community :D
I haven't been reading my LI feed for at least 6 years now. I had no idea how quirky things were there. Wow. Just wow.
I'm not in your target group, since in a case of being threatened I’d rather write a quick and dirty dead man’s switch myself, nevertheless people less technical than me could benefit from the service.
An idea for you to consider: at least in Europe, in the last couple of years on the enterprise software market Emergency Notification Systems (mass notification, incident management, etc.) are a big thing. A lot of governments in the EU either already deployed an ENS system, or consider doing so (it might be the case that they are obliged to do so, IDK).
I can see how a service like yours could complete an ENS for a gov org for instance by supplying an emergency passwords / sensitive data sharing in the time of crisis. Usually ENS systems don’t offer that capability – they’re only about re-setting an org structure after a disaster, etc. IMO sensitive data redistribution could be an important factor in a crisis situation, and from what I’ve seen almost no one on the client’s side think about it beforehand… They solely rely on software vendors to deliver everything.
Do your research. ENS are needed in many places: military, gov agencies, corporations, police, border services, fire deps.
(also take a dive into mobile devices management suites [MDM], since they’re often a part of ENS deployments)
Good luck!
Thank you!, I really appreciate your words. I know this service is not for the masses, I knew it from the beginning, but I wanted to bring it to reality because I am really convinced that it can be very useful to many people out there.
What you mention is part of the idea, not now it is only starting up, but ahead if I have any chance, I can think of Zoldy Clouds working independently, for those groups that you also mention. I already contacted two Certification companies here in Europe to have a Certificate from a 3rd party, this way fears about the service will still be there but not that much.
@pramodbiligiri, would you be willing to share a little bit more about how the thext-to-speech is utlized in your project?
What provider do you use, the costs related to it, is it a real-time text processing, or maybe you have a bulk processing routine, opinions on different TTS providers? You know, things like that for everyone who'd like to try TTS in their projects.
(We're talking about >3000 abstracts TTS-ed on the author's page, and that's not a trivial amount if one is for instance using external providers for the job).
Sure, it's not exactly rocket science. I'm using Google Cloud's Text-To-Speech - https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech. You should be able to find the pricing details there. I'm guessing other cloud providers' TTS would be comparable as well? I haven't checked.
This is where I’m getting suspicious. 30M isn’t a trivial amount of money…
@Andrew_nenakhov’s comment is on point. Normal initiatives of this kind are organized differently. This doesn’t look good regarding the future stability of the initiative.
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On top of that @sprash has mentioned some valid concerns about Matrix being a potential metadata sponge (below in the comments).
Let me add some food for thought for you. Maybe you’re going to get suspicious too.
a) On the Matrix website, the one with the news about getting the 30M, we’re being given only two kind of information: who’s behind the leading round regarding the investments made, and what features are going to be developed due to that donation. Now, we know nothing about who’s actually giving the money, because both Protocol Labs and Metaplanet serve as proxies here. On top of that pointing the reader to the new features part seems to me like a: „forget about the money part, take a look on what we’re going to do with that, take a look on all those shiny things!!!”.
b) Both Protocol Labs and Metaplanet are kind of famous companies (proxies). The second one invested in the Boring Company for instance. It just looks so good. It’s like a miracle. Matrix is getting attention it deserves… But why on earth that happened? (take a look on (c)).
c) Protocol Labs has strange ties to World Economic Forum [1][2]. They are interested in Protocol’s work in the internet space in general. I don’t like that at all. I fundamentally don’t trust WEF and I consider whatever they „touch” cancer.
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I’m on the market for something that’s going to help me and my friends replace Signal. Matrix looks very promising, but after a careful consideration it also looks like it really might be a metadata sponge. Yeah, it’s all rumors, and establishing real information about the parties involved and their motivations isn’t possible. But a suspicion is enough. It looks almost too good...
Metaplanet is the investment fund for Jaan Tallinn, one of the four founding engineers of Skype. He is definitely a very positive sign for this investment in my eyes. Having worked with him a long time ago and followed his doings and presentations [1] it gives me much hope for Matrix, especially as I run my own homeserver and really like the vision.
I run a small website with 5000 unique users per month (.net core, server side rendered). It's hosted on an old Banana Pi with 1GB RAM, no ups, via my home internet connection (but with Cloudflare as a proxy).
The site doesn't go down very often TBO.
- Power shortages: happens 3x per year for 20 minutes or so. The server boots up automatically after that.
- DDOS: I have cloudflare. I have the server under monitoring. I have Mikrotik router.
- Hijacking: I use a Mikrotik router on the edge which has a pretty solid firewall (+ Cloudflare). It's good to have something like that in your household regardless of your web hosting needs. It’s just a matter of paying some attention to your own internet security.
- Active maintenance: I don't do that, lol.
It's so simple to setup all of that (server, linux, docker, cloudflare, firewall), that I think everyone should at least try. And it's fun, not an obligation.
I plan to increase the amount of services I'm going to host myself in the future.
You can't go wrong choosing freedom.
Said that, I understant the hesitation someone might have when dealign with the problem for the first time. My point is that it’s worth to take that step.
PS: the overall availability of the service is good enough on my setup to not be penalized by Google's SEO platform (that's a thing if you have persistent hosting issues).
