I originally suggested Monal to my friend (who is quite into iOS and really appreciates a well designed application) and she found the same, but then she tried Siskin, and was happy enough to use it to this day.

Just for reference, here are my favourites on each platform.

Each support modern XMPP extensions, interoperate very nicely with each other, and (at least in my opinion) look good!

• Android: Conversations
• iOS: Siskin
• Windows & Linux: Dino
• Mac OS: Beagle IM
• Web: Converse JS

As a note of caution, I used Oracle's free tier to run a personal Matrix server, and it got deleted without any advance warning after a few months. I migrated to another provider and haven't had any issues for 2+ years now.

Along similar lines, I'd say Snikket. I feel XMPP often has quite a bad reputation based on the user experience from 10 years ago, but it's come such a long way and projects like Snikket make it very easy to get started.

I've had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.

People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.

In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we're all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.

There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.

Thank you! This is going to send me down a rabbit hole. I had no idea these phone cooling fans were a thing!

This looks awesome! How would one go about making one of these themselves? Asking for a friend of course :)

I am addicted to OpenTTD at the moment! One of those games where I mean to play for 30 minutes, and then look up 5 hours later and realise what I've just done. Thankfully, it's fun enough that I don't even feel guilty about it!

Has anyone here chosen to make a significant / sudden change to their savings rate at some point in their life? If so, what was the story behind it?

started with a program called Italy Made Easy

Thanks for the suggestion! That's another one for me to look into :)

What are your thoughts on the courses you mentioned?

I've found them both excellent for learning speaking, especially for sentence structure and constructing more elaborate sentences. Just from using these courses I was able to express myself and have basic conversations while I was in Italy.

They haven't really helped with listening comprehension though, so that's one thing I'll want to focus on when I finish these. When trying to have conversations, even if we were on a topic I could talk about, by the time I'd understood the previous sentence the moment to speak would've passed. I think this is normal, but definitely something I want to practice.

Open-source doesn’t necessarily mean private or secure.

Agreed, especially if you get your software directly from the developer. But if you get your software from a distribution that you trust, with dedicated maintainers, then the chances of such backdoors are greatly reduced.

They are the basics of modern secure OS’s

Also agreed that this is the way things are going in linux desktops as well as commercial platforms, thanks to the increasing complexity of software. These approaches are very useful if I want to run curl | bash from some random git repository, run nonfree software, or have something very important to hide on my computer.

But these approaches also come at the cost of simplicity, ease of configuration and "tinkerability". So I think it can be valid for some people to choose not to use the approaches you mentioned, given their individual priorities.

Just because the value you provide to society isn’t captured by capitalism in the form of renumeration doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable

I couldn't agree more. I think equating the value you provide to society entirely to remuneration is sure to backfire.

So much of our salaries are purely dependent on the industry we're in. My job doesn't demand anything particularly special from me - the field as a whole just has a lot of money sloshing around and can afford to let more of it trickle down to me. I could do the same job in another industry, or another location, and get paid 1/3 of my salary.

You could argue that my field has this money because they are providing so much value to society, but I don't think that always holds, at least in the short term. We live in a world of corruption, regulatory capture, investor bubbles etc. - while a market should find an optimal balance in the long run, in the short term I think there's a lot of room to make an outsized salary considering the contribution you actually make, just by being in the right place at the right time.

Is this fair? I don't really think so. But it's all too easy to overthink things and tie yourself up in knots. I just try and live life, have fun and do what I think is right at the time.

Gotcha. Now I understand a bit more about the way input is locked down, it looks like I would need OpenSD to allow for more sophisticated controller input without using Steam.

Thanks for the reply, this is really helpful!

If you don’t, the Steam Deck will essentially behave as a Xbox 360 controller.

I see, this makes sense and I guess the "Xbox 360" experience will depend on whether the games themselves have native support for controllers or a very flexible input scheme.

the touchpads will not behave correctly

This is interesting, do you know what would be the difference between using the touchpads on other distros vs through SteamOS? Are they not just seen as a regular mouse input device by both OSs?

Thank you for writing up such a detailed response!

I run Debian on my laptop and tend to install FOSS games through the regular package manager. However, I don't spend as much time playing these games as I would like, so when I was looking into the Steam Deck I was hoping that it would let me have a very similar setup, but as a portable device.

I see through your reply that, if I want automagic compatibility out of the box, this is crowdsourced and implemented through some intermediate Steam layer. I was hoping there might be some way to bypass Steam and treat the trackpads as regular mouse input, and map the other buttons as if they are keyboard buttons or generic controller inputs, without having to go through Steam.

I guess this would mean the FOSS games I'm interested in playing would need controller support natively implemented, which I'm not too sure on for the games I'm interested in. Probably time to dust off an Xbox 360 controller and see how they perform!

I am neither FI nor RE - with about 3 years of expenses saved up at the moment.

Despite not having enough to be FI, I really like having such a decent chunk of savings available in case things go wrong, and it's nice to fantasise about quitting my job and having a few years off when things get tough at work!

My calculations currently say retirement is 17 years away, however, my lifestyle is inflating in front of my eyes, so it could well be much longer :)

Going a little off-topic here, but do you mind if I ask which resources you're using to learn? I'm in a very similar boat, so far I've been using the Language Transfer and Michel Thomas courses, but I'm always on the lookout for more.

For any fans of open-source software out there, I use beancount which I've found to be perfect for my needs. I didn't know much about double-entry bookkeeping when I started using it, but the documentation was very extensive and I learned a lot in the process of picking it up.

There are a whole collection of plugins and other resources which fit into the tool which help too, like fava which can generate webpages like this based off your data. Beancount is not the only plain text accounting tool, you can find lots of examples here.