AFAIK the “wear” does not mainly come from the spinning, but from temperature changes that make parts slightly expand and contract in size. An always on HDD has pretty constant temperature.

Be careful with powering HDDs on and off. That is actually the operation that puts the most strain on them AFAIK. Sadly there is no good rule of thumb when it does more harm than good, but I would guess if you turn it on more than once a week, you are probably doing more harm than good compared to just letting in run. Many people even intentionally turn off sleep-mode in “green” drives so that they don’t shut down automatically.

This isn’t about a laptop, but a full desktop case with 5.25" slots. 3.5" fit fine into these with a different kind of adapter.

Taler ensures asymmetric privacy. The buyer does not expose their identity to the seller (or the government), nor what they bought to their bank/payment-provider. But the seller needs to expose their income for tax purposes. This is a good compromise as it follows existing law and prevents tax-evasion and (to some extend) money laundering.

Yes, like cash.

An IRC server would work, but I think having to deal with 32bit ARM will be too annoying.

Except for some very niche crypto-currency users no one stores “money” like that. You have a bank account where you store money.

The same audience as Paypal, which seems to be reasonably popular. Except this is privacy preserving and an open standard that many providers can use.

It can be many different ones. Usually your home bank would allow you to exchange some Euro into Taler tokens and then use those to pay in compatible stores. But instead of a centralized system there can be many different exchanges that follow the same standard (protocol) and can be used with the same software and wallet apps.

Taler is not a store of value. Exchanging some Taler is like going to the ATM and withdrawing some cash to put in your wallet.

If there’s one thing that we learnt from the cryptocurrecy industry, it’s that users don’t care to understand how the technology works, and will do stupid things.

Yes, like turning a digital payment system into a speculative asset and making it basically impossible to actually buy anything with it.

But it seems you are totally missing the point of Taler, as it doesn’t even aim to be anything like so called crypto-“currencies”. It’s a digital payment system like Paypal, but decentralized.

Seems like an obvious suggestion, but Nextcloud can do that quite well.

Yes, you could continue using the old unmaintained app, but this is similar to using old proprietary app versions that lack security updates and are always at risk of stopping to work due to some changes in your OS. So that is far from ideal.

Non-commercial is really not well defined legally. For example in Germany, a public tax funded broadcaster was found in breach of a CC-BY-NC license for using an image on their website. And many similar legal examples exist. So basically anything that involves a service offered to more than one person, even if totally free and donation funded, is not safe from litigation.

And obviously, if upstream changes the license to something that triggers a hostile fork, it is unlikely that you will get a commercial license for that hostile fork. Furthermore, even if you somehow can make a deal, you will always remain hostage of that proprietary license.

FOSS licenses are explicitly designed to protect the users of the software from such potentially abusive licensing, so I really don’t think anyone will see this as an improvement.

You could probably approximate something similar with Odoo. It is a big ERP, but all modular, so you can just remove the parts that are too complex.

Well, if they want to try that they are of course free to try, but the argument has a big gaping hole:

They might not ever change the license terms afterwards for software already on your hard-drive, but they absolutely can do so for updates and likely will. Normally that would result in a fork if the new terms are bad, but who would be willing to fork software under a restrictive non-commercial license that doesn’t even allow you to collect donations for running the infrastructure?

So in the end you are basically back at square one with nothing but nice promises by them and still vendor locked.

Being worked on apparently.

https://bewcloud.com/

https://github.com/bewcloud/bewcloud

Is a new option I recently learned about.

Like a sister comment here already said, mini-ITX boards and cases often come with unexpected space contraints, and annoying things like the RAM not fitting under the CPU cooler etc.

You will probably save yourself some hassle if you go for one of these N100 NAS boards that come with a soldered on CPU and a built in cooler.

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ maybe?

You can open the browser extension menu and press the fill button. The autofill never seems to have worked here on my mobile Firefox 🤷

In theory you can also self-host Firefox sync, but well… there seem to be issues with that.