sending personal data to someone else’s computer.

I think this is spot on. I think it’s exciting with LLMs but I’m not gonna give the huge corporations my data, nor anyone else for that matter.

I’ll have a look! Cheers!

The simple solution is to use another cloud, such as proton drive mentioned below.

Another more technical solution is to setup a vpn at home and use vpn + smb to share files with your phones, this one fails if your computer isn’t always online at home or if your internet provider runs CGNAT.

Your computer could be replaced with a selfhosted solution as nextcloud running on separate hardware, but now we’re firmly in selfhosting land.

The VPN home could be replaced with a VPS that both your home network and mobile devices connect to as a CGNAT workaround.

The KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) principle says that getting another cloud storage is the way to go. If you truly wanna own your cloud then a trip to selfhost land it is.

Telemetry, licensing and proprietary extensions in VS Code is the whole reason for VScodium to exist.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

For details follow the link. This is nothing more than the headlines.

Finances
The GNOME Foundation reserves policy says that the buffer is too low to run at a deficit any longer, which it has done for three years. This years budget is a break-even budget.

Strategy & Fundraising
A five year strategic plan has been prepared and a draft approved by the board. A variety of fundraising activies will be launched over the coming months.

Board Development
More directors are being added to reduce workload on individual board members. Non-voting officer seats will be added for the same reason.

Elections
Annual board elections is coming up, 6 seats are being elected.

I consider client devices to be a big risk factor and if I can keep them from having direct access to the Backup NAS and the IoT I consider that a big win. A simple ransomware attack on a client device would find any NFS/SMB shares the client can access and start encrypting - having the Backup NAS on a separate VLAN that only the server can access stops most of those from affecting the backup and makes restoring a lot easier. I would definitely recommend having an offline backup of the NAS as well in case of the server being breached.

I agree with this, protecting everything behind a VPN is the way to go. I help friends setup their vpn client to my stuff if I want them to access an internal service.

That’s a lot of text to basically say “categorize your data and give the files descriptive names”.

It didn’t end
They actually flip flop a lot.
2006: Migration to LiMux begins
2008: 1200 out of 14,000 have migrated to the LiMux environment
2013: Over 15,000 LiMux PC-workstations (of about 18,000 workstations)
2016: Microsoft moves german HQ to Münich
2017: Dumping Linux https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/munich-city-government-to-dump-linux-desktop-84307.html
2020: Going back to Linux https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/
2023: Microsoft opens new Experience Center in Münich https://www.munich-business.eu/meldungen/neues-microsoft-experience-center-emea.html
2023: Analysing what needs to be done to switch to Win10 before new vote https://www.tweaksforgeeks.com/ditching-linux-for-windows-after-wannacry-is-too-risky-for-munich-green-party-warns/
https://lemmy.world/comment/7251741

If you go for SSD another thing to think about is the TBW on them. Buying a low endurance SSD might save some electricity but will cost more in SSDs over time. Example:
Crucial P3 Plus M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB (2.67W on your link) has 440TBW compared to Kingston Fury Renegade M.2 NVMe SSD Gen 4 2TB (4.92W on your link) with 2000TBW.
Those few watts you save on using the Crucial P3 Plus will be less than the extra cost in buying new SSDs earlier.
The site I checked TBW on has the Kingston Fury at $9.4 more than the Crucial P3 Plus.

I think proper datacenter 3.5’’ HDDs will give you the most efficient Wattage per TB disk space
Seagate Exos X20 Harddisk ST20000NM007D 20TB SATA-600 7200rpm is supposed to have
Power Consumption 5.4 Watt (idle) | 9.4 Watt (random read) | 6.4 Watt (random write)

While it’s assigned public address, it’s only used inside the private DoD military network. Try tracerouting to that address space, you’ll see that your packets go nowhere.
Using dod address space in your vpn service means you will never conflict with the RFC 1918 private IPv4 addresses people use at home.

https://blog.erratasec.com/2013/12/dod-address-space-its-not-conspiracy.html

Regarding management UIs I’m a fan of Cockpit (https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit https://cockpit-project.org/)

Regarding management UIs for docker I believe most use either portainer (https://github.com/portainer/portainer https://www.portainer.io/) or dockge (https://github.com/louislam/dockge https://dockge.kuma.pet/).

Regarding Samba most NAS devices simplify it a lot, but it isn’t that complicated to do on Fedora either and once you’ve got it setup it’s not gonna need a lot of tinkering. (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/samba/)

Whether you invest in a NAS or not I recommend you invest in a USB disk large enough to act as a backup for the storage disks. That’s not an investment for later but one you want right away. And do make certain it takes backups, not replicates data. A popular option is Borg Backup (https://github.com/borgbackup/borg https://www.borgbackup.org/)
If I went for a NAS I would Borg Backup the laptop to the NAS and then use the NAS own backup software to backup to the USB.

I would pair a Synology NAS with at least one, preferably two, usb disks to make local backups to with the built in Hyper Backup - losing the whole family picture archive hurts and usb disks are cheap. It doesn’t seem possible to make a read only QuickConnect connection so beware of that if there’s to be non techie users connecting.

Personally I use dyndns and openvpn (if I rebuilt today I would look at Wireguard instead of openvpn as a vpn solution) as I prefer not relaying my traffic through services outside my self hosting. That would require you to aid your non techie family members with the initial configuration on their end though.

Synology has QuickConnect which makes external access easy without dyndns/static ip. I haven’t used it myself.
https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/share_File_Station_files_without_DSM_account

Another option is to create a Microsoft 365 Business tenant, with a single Business Basic license you get 1TB OneDrive storage and 1TB Sharepoint storage - their ToS says not to use customer data in AI training.
Unless you already know how to manage it this is probably as cumbersome as selfhosting though.
I have no idea about their ToS against non business licenses, so this assumes spending for a business basic license.

If you aren’t behind CGNAT you can use dyndns to get around not having a static ip if you want to get into selfhosting with proper external access. I doubt you’ll have the time with a newborn though. :)

Elements first self hosted tier is Enterprise at a minimum of 100 users with a cost of $10/month per user.
I would rather look at selfhosting Synapse as it’s the only Stable Matrix Homeserver release at the moment.
https://github.com/element-hq/synapse
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/

There isn’t a 1:1 app for Discord imo.
Selfhosting a teamspeak3 (ts3) server solves the voicechat.
Signal works great for text chats especially now that you don’t need to give other end users your phone number.
Then I would probably look at hosting a web forum for adding calendars and other planning tools. There should still be possible to show current ts3 users on that site too.
For open source projects codeberg for code repository/issues/feedback.
I completely understand those who use Discord for ease of management, as time taken to host the above is time taken from the actual project.

It is used to replace empty spaces left by Google Ads, more info here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/14r3vde/does_duckduckgo_privacy_essentials_firefox_uses/

Mind you, I haven’t installed a Windows Home OS since ever, but Shift+F10 and then using OOBE\bypassnro works just fine for me.

If it works, it works and staying close to defaults means less worries about updates breaking stuff.
I use the workspaces a whole lot more now than when I first installed GNOME but I still want my taskbar with appindicators.

If you start missing the classic taskbar and startmenu it is easily available in GNOME too:
Startmenu: ArcMenu
Taskbar: Dash to Panel
App Indicator: AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support