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Comment by wazoox | Hacker News Reader

> My wife complains that none of the devices in our house work, and she’s right

My wife is quite happy with her LineageOS phone. Its battery lasts days and days, though it's from 2014. She has not much trouble with LibreOffice, either running on her Ubuntu laptop or our common Slackware desktop (multi-user computer, that's Unix for you baby!). She happily uses jit.si for her meetings. My nextcloud works just fine; I stream music in my car from it (thanks to Ultrasonic from F-Droid repo), and use it extensively to share documents and pictures with my friends (Netxcloud links work just as well as Dropbox links), and of course to centralize all pictures from my wife's phone and mine into our common computer, automatically.

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A Phone from 2014 is really really old... I feel for your wife.

I have no problems with IoT devices, and online services. As long as used in a smart way. Honestly for IoT Devices, use more advanced networking hardware. I'm all for home automation and smart devices, but they all are on private networks separated out with vlans and kept in line with firewall rules. They only do what is needed, and many private networks are key here. My Camera network doesn't even touch the outside world, but my DVR software allows me to remote view from anywhere.

I'm a heavy user of two factor auth, and really this is the biggest factor in keeping you safe. Not using Multifactor is the biggest flaw in peoples idea of being secure. I don't care if your password is complex.

While I do like Nextcloud, be careful with it. This is not something you should really trust you data with unless you have a pretty beefy setup under it. Like a Pretty well configured Freenas setup or something. Data rot is a real thing, and HDD failures are a real thing. Cloud backups are a thing for a reason, and Onedrive is a cheap way to make sure photos will live on. I can't stress this enough, as i've seen people loose everything from not knowing how to configure a proper data store.

As someone that isn't a fan on jank, used a computer on a TV is something I would have done years ago when I was in school and broke. But I paid for 4K and 7.2 surround and you are not going to get that via the web browser

Her phone is from 2014 and is perfectly satisfactory. Mine is from 2017 and will probably suffice for many years to come, too, at least as long as LineageOS supports it. My main PC is from 2008 or 2009 (it has been upgraded somewhat). I hate consumerism and waste. I change devices when they're dead and not salvageable. Ditto my car, my clothes and everything else.

My Nextcloud is running on a RAID6 server in a datacenter, with a backup on a secondary array. All data is at least replicated in 3 different places (my DC, my office, and my home). I think my data is pretty safe (and safe from prying eyes, too).

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