Public key cryptography and signatures are common technologies nowadays.

It is possible to build an age verification system, where you use your actual ID with a cryptographic process without any personal data. The technology has existed for decades now.

As a user the license doesn’t matter for you. Even if you contribute back to a project, you will be able to use your changes in the project.

The license only matters if you want to redistribute a changed version yourself or use parts of it in your own software.

sh.itjust.works

or go to piefed

All valid points. It is still popular.

toxic kingdoms

Exist here too.

Make real backups. Ideally make two or more

• a full disk backup with SuperSuper
• A Time Machine Backup on an external drive

The likelihood of making your machine unusable for a while is non negligible.

Mac

If you want to dual boot with macOS, do some research. Boot loaders and EFI can be tricky.

Holding alt after pressing the power button gives you the option to choose the drive to boot from. Holding cmd + R after pressing the power button allows booting into recovery mode. It allows you to partition and format your internal drive and reinstall macOS.

You can install a newer version of macOS than is officially supported using OpenCore Legacy Patcher.

FOSS principles

Intel Macs often have Broadcom WiFi chips, that need proprietary software to work. As a noob, you should got with a distro that makes it easy to install these or does it automatically for you.

You likely also want to play some video files, so you will need nonfree stuff.

Distro hopping

Install to an external drive or Virtual Machine. You can do that on your existing macOS with VirtualBox for example.

similar to Windows, macOS, customizable

Even the desktop environments, who claim to be macOS like (Endeavour, GNOME), have at best a superficial similarity. Don’t expect a macOS replacement. All desktop environments are different from macOS.

beginner distro

Fedora and SuSE are not beginner friendly. Lots of Linux distros use the same marketing terms of easy to use, powerful, efficient, etc.

Start with Ubuntu or something based on Ubuntu like Mint.

Cinnamon, KDE, and Gnome are all good desktop environments for beginners.

Zulip integrates with Jitsi, Zoom, and Bigbluebutton for voice and video chat. Looks like a sensible solution.

Not bad is a good description. It’s not fun to use compared to other chat software.

Call them cretins all you want, Discord in a great piece of software and very powerful. The usability is better than most others.

Yes, enshittification of Discord has started a while ago, and it’s becoming worse.

There are alternative App Stores in Europe for iOS. So far they haven’t been very successful, because of Apple‘s interference. They do exist and are growing.

Why do you like it? It wastes a lot of space and lacks features compared to voyager and Blorp.

Big fan of Blorp

That looks very intriguing and useful. Thank you.

Downvote should not be a disagreement button.

Churn is an issue you mentioned.

I was specifically thinking about men who have sex with men. Grindr and similar platforms are very successful. Most of it is about casual sex between promiscuous men. They are also a great target group otherwise. Travel between gay metropolises is common as. Pride tourism is big.

Local network effect is enough, even when it’s restricted to a specific demographic or subculture. Once a dating platform grabs a hold in a location and demographic, it can extend from there.

Of course to keep a project like this running, you need a way to pay for hosting and development.

Working in Remote Desktop for an extended amount of time is no fun. It’s possible, but you need the right version of windows and office to do that.

I wouldn’t want to rely on complex solutions like that for an essential for work. Now you have to administrate your local computer and the remote server. You also rely on a bunch of things going right to be able to use it from on the go: Internet connection on the go that doesn’t filter Remote Desktop, Home Internet connection, proxmox configuration and updates being okay. If you want to add a VPN on top, you get more possible failure points

So run a windows VM directly on your Linux machine. No need to make it more complicated. At least then you don’t depend on a working internet connection.

Alternatively try to run MS Word using WINE on Linux. This might work or break randomly.

If you don’t want to buy a license for office or windows use these scripts.

You really seem to need MS Office. It’s not necessary to make your life harder by building complex solutions. Run windows if it makes your life easier.

Other alternative: buy an Apple device and run MS Office for Mac. That’s the only reliable way to use it without windows.

Statcounter is running on more than a million websites. They track user metadata across these websites.

While this doesn’t give you absolute numbers for everything, it should be enough to notice trends.

Their methodology is on their website.

You’re better off with a seedbox or a service like put.io