Alt Forums

This seems to be a professional chat client, so think Microsoft Teams and not Discord. Though they do have a blog post about why people prefer to use Pumble over Discord which is interesting. I don't think Discord when I think of teams so it's kind of odd they compared their platform to Discord lol. Anyways, I don't think most people here will use this one unless you manage a group of people and you need something more professional and don't use Teams. They do allow importing from Slack so if you're using Slack and want to try an alternative Pumble might be a good replacement.

https://pumble.com/pricing

I've been wanting to get a NAS server since I want to setup a webhost to save some money on hosting costs. Does anyone here have any experience with a NAS server? Which one do you have and what do you primarily use it for?

This Reddit alternative really reminds me of the old Reddit from the early 10's, which is the time I joined Reddit. There's also no ads on the site which is great to see. I also prefer the threaded style Tildes has compared to nested over on Reddit. I'm going to sign up and try this platform out! Have you tried Tildes yet?

https://tildes.net/

I figured now would be the best time to make a thread for this version of Linux since over 400 Arch Linux packages were compromised. I wonder how Someordinarygamers is doing since he uses Arch Linux... Sucks this is happening since Linux is typically more secure and harder to compromise.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-400-arch-linux-packages-compromised-to-push-rootkit-infostealer/

This is a thread I've been meaning to create since I get curious to see how everyone found the forum. So how did you find Alt Forums?

This is another Linux distro I've used a little bit in the past. It's based on Ubuntu so most packages for programs will work in Mint as well. I feel like Mint is more beginner friendly than Ubuntu is, and I do recommend giving it a go if you're having issues with Windows or Mac. I have it installed on a mechanical hard drive, and because of that it's pretty slow. But SSDs are super cheap these days so it'll definitely work much faster on a SSD.

Not sure where to put this but anyone like made-for-Linux PCs? I know of a few brands and personally have one.

https://system76.com/

is a popular one.

https://starlabs.systems/

is really good, I have the StarBook.

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/

Another option

What teams do you like? How do they perform? How was your experience playing yourself?

If it's too personal, feel free not to answer. If you do answer, then tell us some non-threatening details.

There's a guy over on Forum Promotion who created a retro like website complete with it's own social media network and forum. He's also working on implementing a monster collecting feature too which is pretty cool! I figured I would share this platform with everyone here in case you haven't checked it out yet. (Generally speaking I think sharing any cool forums you find here is fine btw. They are alternative platforms after all right?)

https://loneportal.com/

I was going to title this something boring, like "what's your favorite genre?", but then, I'm like, I'm feeling spicy. And since we're living in the modern age, my next subject point was just going to be "Books", but that might be a little too broad-- I mean, I know I got a lot of junk in the trunk, but let's be serious for a moment....

Anyway, we are entertained from many angles today. We have television, the big screen, the Internet, social media, even those small rectangle things known as books...with funny thin slivers inside of them. Some are even smelly because... that's what happens when paper apparently decomposes after a few decades. You remember paper, right? Awesome. Anyway, what category of entertainment excites you the most?

I happen to really enjoy Science Fiction. I love that I can travel through time, explore the galaxy, fight inter-dimensional zombies and rescue the space-princess, then to come back home for a glorified meal of protien slop. To me, the imagination has the ultimate latitude of control to create in a futurisitic environment. And because I create it, I need more data. Just like Johnny Number Five. Oh, definitely don't forget your towel if you ever decide to go on one of my adventures. You'll need it.

I was just browsing the subreddit "Reddit Alternatives" and came across another platform called Plato. Gotta say it seems a bit too barebones at the moment, the only two subs that are currently on Pluto are titled "agora" and "product release". I'm not sure if users have the ability to create their own sub or if the main admin is the only one that can now. It reminds me of Havn.to which was a platform that allowed you to post without having to sign up for an account but that platform shut down unfortunately.

https://ownsub.com/

This is a Discord like chat client that's currently being worked on by Prata over on Forum Promotion. Looks like they're basically focusing on trying to get features added before making a support server. You can create an account and make your own server but I haven't made my own server just yet. I did sign up but there's not much you can do at the moment it seems. There's no app to install either at the moment, you can only access it in a browser. Below is a link to their Forum Promotion directory listing.

https://forumpromotion.net/directory/prata.1321/

I thought that I'd take a moment to write about my experience with Obsidian.

First, what is Obsidian? It's simple text editor, but on steroids! It uses simple Markdown formatting, which makes it really handy to write in. Need to italicize something, just surround it by single asterisks. Bold, double them. Bold and italicize? Triple them! IT supports more advanced formatting output as well, like tables, bullets, and you use hyperlinks too.

You can keep all your notes in separate documents, and all organized in a Treeview. You can also interlink the documents, creating a personal Wiki. You can include entire PDFs, and make a database, including images and all that extra stuff. But probably one of the best features is the PDF export function. You can customize the look of an exported PDF by using CSS coding, just like you would for webpages using HTML. And the CSS applies to ALL the files within your Vault. You can have multiple vaults too.

I don't use the majority of the functions that Obsidian supports. There's so much that it can do, and it's extendable with plug-ins! It also supports spellcheck, which is necessary for anybody who writes anything. But just the fact that I'm only scratching the surface of everything that Obsidian can do, allows me to grow with the software. Best of all, it works on all platforms, including Linux. It's totally free, although you can donate to the developers and get built in synchronization support. But you don't have to go that route, if you're poor like I am, you can always use something like Folder Sync, which is a free app that you can run on demand on your phone.

There's probably a ton more that could be written about Obsidian, but I simply don't know about all of it! Needless to say, it's one of my favorite applications for both my desktop and my mobile. Oh, one more thing-- it auto saves, like after every keystroke, so you never have to worry about lost input. There's just a ton of awesomeness to this App.

I forgot about this Reddit alternative, I have an account over there too. I should log back into my account and see what's going on over there. Have you used Discuit before? A few years ago I feel like a lot of Reddit Alternatives were popping up, sort of like what we're seeing with chat clients currently. I think this was mainly when Reddit decided to change theri API policy.

https://discuit.org/

I hope that this is acceptable. But for the longest time, whenever I would write my fiction, I'd use Microsoft Word. It does a pretty decent job, and has a lot of advanced features that authors need for formatting blocks of text. However, since Office 365 came out, there's a monthly subscription fee attached. When you're poor like me, that's unacceptable. Just the fact that Microsoft can turn off your advanced features, or the fact that you need the Internet to write is ... bogus. The Internet is full of distractions. When I'm writing, I want to unplug and just write!

So, when I discovered Scrivener at $59 for a single-time purchase, I was overjoyed. What's really cool is that this is a software specifically designed for authors. You basically write your book on what I call Note cards, each one being a separate Scene. You can rearrange these note cards in any order. It creates an Outline for you, keeps track of words, you can keep track of all your research too, all organized within a TreeView.

There's a Windows and a Mac version. I don't remember if there's a Linux version or not.

There's also a companion app, Scrapple, which is a Mind Map application, for like $20.

As the title says.

Does anyone here also uses SeaMonkey?

It's in a few words the modern-day Netscape. And aside from being a web browser, it also includes an email and an IRC client (ChatZilla).

I personally use it sometimes when I want to visit old and "small" websites and also for RSS and email because I no longer like using Thunderbird (and even more when they introduced the new UI redesign) and because it's too lightweight and clean. But yeah, don't expect to use it for modern sites like YouTube (watching from embeds works fine tho).

https://seamonkey-project.org/

And BTW if you're trying to find an adblocker extension/addon for this browser, check this fork of uBlock Origin for legacy Firefox browsers like this one and others like Pale Moon (I highly recommend installing this to avoid the browser to hang up while processing all that crap):

https://github.com/UCyborg/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy

Nothing is hack proof but this is a very secure OS. Every program runs in its own virtual machine so if you get an infection, you just close down the virtual machine and it's gone! I tried it and it works well but I have a shared computer and for the computer illiterate it's not user friendly so I switched back to Mint. It's very demanding as well so you need a good PC and it's not for gaming.

https://www.qubes-os.org/

Looks like the guy behind Prata Chat is also working on their own video hosting platform too! I've signed up and uploaded one video so far, there's only a handful of videos on the platform at the moment. It does seem a bit promising, the UI is very minimal but that's okay in my opinion. My channel is Sonikku 1011, so you'll see the video I uploaded on the front page.

https://video.prata.serv00.net/index

Rumble is a free speech video sharing platform that's been around since 2013. Though it's not as popular as Youtube of course it's got a pretty large userbase. In 2020 it gained traction from Republicans because Devin Nunes' Youtube channel kept getting censored. Do you use this platform? I personally don't, but since it's a Youtube alternative I figured I would make a thread for it.

https://rumble.com/

You've probably noticed that I enabled one widget so far, the board stats. You can collapse the widgets if you find them distracting btw. Other options I can add are a Shoutbox, who's online, new topics, etc. Are there any specific stats you want to see in the widgets? I'm probably going to have most of them show up on one side of the index page rather than have them all over the place.

You might think that there's only two phone operating systems. Of course there's two major ones but another lesser known OS that people have been using recently is Graphene! Here's a write up from their website:

GrapheneOS is a private and secure mobile operating system with great functionality and usability. It starts from the strong baseline of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and takes great care to avoid increasing attack surface or hurting the strong security model. GrapheneOS makes substantial improvements to both privacy and security through many carefully designed features built to function against real adversaries. The project cares a lot about usability and app compatibility so those are taken into account for all of our features.

GrapheneOS is focused on substance rather than branding and marketing. It doesn't take the typical approach of piling on a bunch of insecure features depending on the adversaries not knowing about them and regressing actual privacy/security. It's a very technical project building privacy and security into the OS rather than including assorted unhelpful frills or bundling subjective third party apps choices.

GrapheneOS is also hard at work on filling in gaps from not bundling Google apps and services into the OS. We aren't against users using Google services but it doesn't belong integrated into the OS in an invasive way. GrapheneOS won't take the shortcut of simply bundling a very incomplete and poorly secured third party reimplementation of Google services into the OS. That wouldn't ever be something users could rely upon. It will also always be chasing a moving target while offering poorer security than the real thing if the focus is on simply getting things working without great care for doing it robustly and securely.

This page provides an overview of currently implemented features differentiating GrapheneOS from AOSP. It doesn't document our many historical features that are no longer included for one reason or another. Many of our features were implemented in AOSP, Linux, LLVM and other projects GrapheneOS is based on and those aren't listed here. In many cases, we've been involved in getting those features implemented in core infrastructure projects.

The only downside to this OS? It can only be installed on specific Google Pixel phones. Which makes it pretty limiting. Here are the list of Google Pixel phones that are supported, taken from their website:
[center]Pixel 10 Pro Fold (rango)
Pixel 10 Pro XL (mustang)
Pixel 10 Pro (blazer)
Pixel 10 (frankel)
Pixel 9a (tegu)
Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)
Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)
Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)
Pixel 9 (tokay)
Pixel 8a (akita)
Pixel 8 Pro (husky)
Pixel 8 (shiba)
Pixel Fold (felix)
Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)
Pixel 7a (lynx)
Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)
Pixel 7 (panther)
Pixel 6a (bluejay)
Pixel 6 Pro (raven)(Wut it's called Raven?!)
Pixel 6 (oriole)[/center]
So if you have one of these phones, have you given this operating system a go yet? I've been thinking about getting a Google Pixel as my next phone so I might give this OS a go. Here's a link to the official website for GrapheneOS. https://grapheneos.org/

Are you looking for a new video host that's decentralized? Odysee might be what you're looking for. You don't need to host anything yourself, and their moderation isn't as strict as YouTube's. Odysee believes in freedom of speech, and it's also part of the LBRY Blockchain so if you're wanting to earn some cryptocurrency while uploading videos Odysee is a good place to do so. I've used it a little bit, you used to be able to pull your YouTube videos over without having to reupload everything but unfortunately this feature has been removed. Odysee is also new, it's only 6 years old so it's definitely not as active as YouTube but still has a good audience. Have you checked this platform out yet?
https://odysee.com/

https://grayjay.app/

Pretty awesome app that allows you to watch different video platforms such as YouTube, Rumble, Odysee, PeerTube with no ads and sponsorblock all in one app. Lots of settings for customizations.