I should note that my scenario was exactly the same. I wanted to share location with family. Additionally, Traccar supports temporary location share links for friends if you'd like. You'll need to self-host it- I personally set up the Traccar server inside kubernetes and used Traefik for reverse proxy and SSL, but this is not necessary.

I started out with Owntracks. I found it to be unreasonably complex. I swapped to Traccar. It was much easier to get functional.

I'll believe it when I see it- Spotify lossless was announced years ago. I don't believe them.

They no longer offer this, right?

NixOS docs themselves are a tad lax, but it will get better.

Learning nix itself is also important:

https://zero-to-nix.com/

Just this morning I was having issues with a wacky dual-boot install with NixOS and Windows sharing an EFI partition, and quite interestingly ChatGPT and I were able to troubleshoot the process and get it resolved in under half and hour. I was really impressed by the specific configurations it was giving me for my /etc/nixos/configuration.nix , so that is also another resource you may consider leaning on when you run into walls in other documentation sources.

I'm required to use CentOS for work and it would be an understatement to say how frustrating it is to use for me. So many packages are missing / old, and some packages just break. There have also been wild bugs which just kernel panic the whole OS. I'd steer clear.

If you're on Kinoite, can't you just enable Plasma 6 if you really need it?

https://tim.siosm.fr/blog/2023/11/22/kinoite-plasma-6/

Otherwise:

https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6#How_to_use/test_it

Is syncthing falling out of favor these days?

GPL is the only good license out there. MIT just leaves too many opportunities for abuse because corporations won't ever do what is in the best interest of humanity.

There are many other considerations besides startup speed, no? Filesystem reliability is a big one, and all the scrubbing and defragging features of btrfs are pretty neat

Signal is not designed for anonymous communication. This is fine. Some of us like having a messaging platform that is E2EE because we don't have to trust the midpoints. I get to chat with my family in a convenient manner while not worrying about the telecom company doing things like logging SMS contents. Different tools for different jobs.

Note: Flork acknowledged the typo already.

IMO Graphene is the only true option in this list, with Copperhead being aggressively sus given the history