Syncthing is my answer though I appreciate it doesn't get to the root of your question.

There are local backups that include your system settings, text messages, contacts, call history and (optionally) apps. The one thing I want is the ability to pick a directory for the local backup so I can make it work with syncthing without jumping through hoops.

It's also compatible with Nextcloud and WebDAV if those are options for you.

I miss my pixel 5 :(

Chiming in to note that GNSS communications are actually receive only. A typical phone can't physically broadcast a strong enough signal into mid-earth orbit (where most of those satellites typically are) to achieve the "pinging GPS satellites" issue.

Note this only refers to how that signal physically hits your phone. Once your position is deduced and digitized there's an entirely different attack surface.

The other concerns (especially cell tower data tracking) are valid though.

What would you tout?

Echoing this but change if to since :/

Ma-trix! Ma-trix!

Wild how you happened to have this totally original idea days after this exact diagram structure was in a video posted by a channel with 3M subscribers :) crazy coincidence

My favorite line in the fireship video this is from goes something like "FreeBSD is the real answer but I like being able to Google things"

I was going to say Guix but I've always been a little Gentoo curious

There's something to practicing with the operating system family that most big commercial outfits use. Plus SELinux is neat, and there's no Canonical ads.

I use Fedora with home-manager, btw. After using Arch and Debian for years I really think Fedora (or adjacent like Nobara) is on its way to being the de facto starter distro.

Wrong™ in 100 seconds

A rich person runs NixOS (for the military contracts apparently)

Avoid AMD? Why do you say that?

I use my Framework 13 (Intel 12th gen) for some heavy CPU workloads and it's been a champ! For the balance of quality, performance, cost, and repairability I really don't think it can be beat.

You beat me to it! I have the same setup. Did you have any issues with the 39->40 update? It broke my icons in plasma

My solution is to use Rathole. I rent a wildly cheap (2 core, 4GB memory) VPS and basically just run Traefik there. Then I use Rathole to make some services hosted on my desktop available to Traefik.

I like this solution better than Wireguard for my application. It reduces attack surface to services you've explicitly set up, rather than a full data layer trunk between your machine and a potential malicious actor.

Ooh, I'll definitely check out Voice!

I'm more of a desktop Jellyfin container person myself, but all roads lead to Rome in this case :) thanks for the input!

Does anyone know of a good alternative for Android?

Right now I just use Antennapod, but it would be nice to get chapters and whatnot built in.

To add on to this already good description, wanted to give my $0.02 on the notion of apps.

The only way it might seem like you lose app(lication shortcut)s might be if a tool other than GNOME's built in search is looking in a different directory, likely based off of an environment variable.

By default, hyprland doesn't come with an equivalent to GNOME search. I use wofi to get similar functionality, but there are many tools that can do the job. Just make sure they're looking in the right place or launch things manually from a terminal and you'll be all set!

Agreed. That said, with a few remotes and a cron job git could facilitate "duct tape and zip ties" federation.