Copying my comment to OP below - it might be worth checking:

Check your inotify maximums - this is the system which monitors directory contents and notifies applications of changes. These maximums used to be pretty low, but should be high enough for most users these days. Do you tend to work with multiple directories containing lots of files?

See what you get when you run these two commands:

sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances

You can increase them temporarily like so and see if it helps:

sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024

If it does help, add to /etc/sysctl.conf (or a file in /etc/sysctl.d/).

Check your inotify maximums - this is the system which monitors directory contents and notifies applications of changes. These maximums used to be pretty low, but should be high enough for most users these days. Do you tend to work with multiple directories containing lots of files?

See what you get when you run these two commands:

sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches
sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_instances

You can increase them temporarily like so and see if it helps:

sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288
sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_instances=1024

If it does help, add to /etc/sysctl.conf (or a file in /etc/sysctl.d/).

turnstile

Haven’t heard of it before, looks to be made by Cloudflare. Cloudflare don’t seem to be a totally awful company, but that’s always just one CEO-change away.

Their web site sounds promising, saying “Turnstile can generate multiple types of non-intrusive challenges to verify users are human, all without showing visitors a puzzle.” and “Unlike CAPTCHA options, Turnstile never harvests data for ad retargeting.”

So how do they make money from this?

If you’re exerting yourself at all, you pretty much have to mouth breathe. The way I avoid gobbling up any flying insects is to keep my head down while breathing in. It’s surprisingly effective.

Slightly related, my son once had a bee go up his nose while we were out cycling. I say only slightly related because he wasn’t actually going that fast; he was only about 8. He stopped suddenly, complaining about something going up his nose. Neither of us realised what had actually happened until he coughed up a still-squirming bee in a pool of phlegm.

All power to you friend. Nevertheless it’s best to be informed, especially when attempting to make a better alternative.

Unfortunately there is a significant security advantage in using Google Pay or Apple Pay which no one has yet mentioned. When you make a payment with chip-and-PIN using your physical card, your real card number is exposed to the merchant. The proprietary wallet services on the other hand use a device-specific token in place of the card number.

In practice, this means that if a retailer is compromised, there’s no usable card data to steal or clone, which removes a large class of fraud that still exists with physical cards.

Maybe it would need to draw on experiences of moderating chat rooms and forums - these are very often done by volunteers who put a lot of time and energy into it because they believe in it.

There is also the “Web Of Trust” concept, where, given that everyone can prove their identity, people can then vouch for each other.

needs to quickly get past two network effects: the global network effect […] and the local network effect

Sounds like a job for Fedi-date! If you could somehow hook a dating app into the fediverse, then maybe it could survive long enough to get sufficient users. If it also offers more general IRL meet-ups (like meetup.com but without the corpo rent-seeking), then it could perhaps begin to get popular that way too.

traffic statistics (through creepy location tracking, even in the background unless opted out)

yes it’s definitely creepy when Google does it, but it provides invaluable data to other users - advance warnings of tailbacks whilst driving, and accurate ETA for public transport when using bus or train. Would be great if a privacy-respecting way to do this could be found for OSM & its ilk.

I’ve been using Zoho for about 6 months and have no complaints. I pay about $12 a year for a couple of gigs of storage - not a huge amount, but enough for personal email as long as you delete stuff fairly regularly.

You can create up to 30 email aliases, which I use a lot. For instance, I have an email address for newsletters, a couple for generic web logins, and then some specific ones for important accounts such as banking.

It’s easy to make filters to sort email as it arrives. This is how I handle the “priority inbox” situation. Any email from my family or other important senders is all put into a single folder, and I have an email app on my phone which checks this folder and notifies me of new mail. All other mail is either moved by other filters e.g. newsletters or just left in the inbox.

Once you’re used to it, you can use the two separate clipboards independently. Say you wrote a sentence like, “one two five four three”, you can correct it by selecting “three”, cutting with Ctrl-X, then selecting “five” (meaning it is now in the selection buffer), hitting Ctrl-V to paste “three” from the clipboard, and then finally middle-click where you need to paste the “five”.

I tracked down the MythBusters in question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXdaPJAcjC8

Needs a rubber skirt or something

well, they had some toothbrushes as a control which were not even in the bathroom, and they ended up with similar levels of fecal bacteria, meaning that these things are just everywhere. Only solution is to live in a sterile plastic bubble.

compatibility layer upon layer

I can understand the sentiment, but don’t ignore the real advantages to the proton/wine way of doing things.

For instance, some old games won’t run on modern Windows but will run on Linux under proton/wine.

It’s also just a lot easier for game companies to target a single platform i.e. Windows. When Valve first released their Steam machines, a few AA games were released natively. For several of those, the native builds no longer work and you now need to run the Windows version under proton/wine.

often social eng attacks rely on a vulnerability as well e.g. getting your mark to open an Excel file that exploits a vulnerability in MS Office.