Gotta disagree, for home use at least. I have found it to be the opposite of a nightmare.

Moving my home routing and firewall to a VM saved me hours, and hours, and hours of time in the long run. I have a pretty complex home network and firewall setup with multiple public IPs, multiple outbound gateways, and multiple inbound and outbound VPN setups for various purposes. I’m also one of those loons that does outbound firewall with deny by default on my network, except the isolated guest VLAN. With a complex setup like that, being in a VM means it’s so easy to tweak stuff safely and roll back if you mess something up or it just doesn’t work the way you expected. Turns what would be a long outage rebuilding from scratch into a 30 second outage while you roll back the VM. And being able to snapshot your setup for backup is incredibly useful when your software doesn’t behave properly (looking at you, PFsense).

All that said, I run redundant, synced hypervisors which takes care of a lot of the risk. A person who is not well versed in hypervisor management might not be a good fit for this setup, but if you have any kind of experience with VM management (or want to), I think it’s the way to go.

I’ve been doing it for probably 8 years now without any major issues related to being a VM. In fact, that made recovery extremely easy the two times my PFsense VM shot itself in the head. Just load the backup of the VM taken the day before and off to the races. After switching to OPNsense a couple years ago I haven’t had a single issue.

These days I run two identically spec’d hypervisors that constantly sync all my VMs to each other over 10GB NICs, so even a hardware failure won’t take out my routing. That is something to consider if you don’t have redundant hypervisors. Not really any different than if your physical router died, just something to plan for.

My understanding is there’s a licensing fee for another company to say they have an ‘android’ phone.

That part doesn’t matter to me. I ran de-Googled custom ROMs on my phones for many years, including cyanogenmod and later Lineage, only to find out they were tracking all of us against our will (and device settings) all along. That was the last straw for me.

Glad I abandoned Google 7 years ago when they made it obvious what they were really all about. I do miss my customized Android phones but it’ll be a frozen day in hell before I give them another cent.

A lot of them probably remember what appeasing Nazis leads to and don’t want to fund their own antagonist.

In the last 25 years working with approximately 700 servers that used RAID 5 I saw two of them lose an entire volume. Once was due to a malfunctioning HP RAID controller, and the other was due to a second disk dying while the rebuild from the first failure was still ongoing. There turned out to be a systemic problem with that drive model’s firmware which almost certainly contributed.

So in my experience it’s rare but it definitely does happen.

It can get worse. About 20 years ago the company I was at had an EMC tech yank the wrong power supply from a Symmetrix rack, where the other supply had earlier in the day caught fire! We lost that entire rack’s data (customer’s personal email accounts) due to data corruption. It was probably around 300 10k SCSI disks in that rack, a multimillion dollar expense at the time, and we had to restore all of it from tape over many, many days. Really, really sucked.

You are correct. These people won’t be stopped with words or rational arguments. They are past the point of being able to cooperate. We will be killing each other before long. Sorry to say, but if you don’t have the tools and skills to do that, you might want to learn. Or be prepared to be owned or killed by those that do. Adolph Musk and crew want to OWN you or DESTROY you depending on how you look. Start preparing for what that means.

I fucking hate that it’s coming to this, but without a major change of direction (that I see no evidence of yet) that’s where this ends up. The red menace was in our own country the whole time.

I am an infantry veteran and I will be fighting on the correct side of history until I can’t anymore. I do wonder how many of my fellow comrades I might come into conflict with once this all kicks off.

Agreed. After 30 years working in IT for various companies from 40 employees to 300,000 employees, I believe about 70-80% of the corporate work force has an elementary school level of reading comprehension at best.

In the last 10 years of my career I stopped writing emails with more than 1 question, because otherwise most people would reply and only answer the first thing I asked (often poorly), ignoring the entire rest of the email.

Fair enough. That doesn’t excuse the hundreds of millions old enough to know better.

Reddit, Meta, Twitter, the list goes on… if you’re still using the services provided by the nazis in any capacity, you are perpetuating the continued relevance and power of a nazi machine. The end.

You need it to stay in touch with friends and family? Bullshit. These apps have been around for 10-20 years, friends and families have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. You just like the convenience.

You need it to stay informed? Bullshit. The info is out there and easy to find, don’t be so lazy that you need to be spoonfed information by the same 3 bookmarks in your browser. They’re deciding for you what you can and can’t read about, and spoon feeding you propaganda as well.

If you are a truly principled person that sees all this for what it is, you will disconnect yourself from these things and encourage everyone you care about to do the same any time it comes up.

Otherwise you’re just making excuses and assisting our decline.