fridsun

PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) on my laptop works surprisingly nicely. It's been more stable than Xubuntu for me, and because of ZFS, capable of rolling back any wrongful update without an external backup. The ports system is straightforward and close to hand that I already want to contribute. I didn't know such system can be done with just a git cloned hierarchy of dirs with makefiles doing search. While its GUI app manager AppCafe resembles Ubuntu's user-friendliness, if not better.

For server maybe you can give OpenBSD a spin for its fame of security.

You probably didn't realize that pain until systemd. Otherwise if you searched for alternatives, daemontools family is pretty easy to find. Or you would be using BSD instead, with better security.

But, well, since I saw a 5-year-ago Stackoverflow question recommending double fork to daemonize which goes against process management best practices dating back to 1990s IBM AIX, I realize the Internet is not smart enough to get such delicate things straight. Maybe djb stuff was not easy to find. Whatever.

*"Portable across systemd" is not portable at all.

Wow qmail! Instant confidence.

Even if you host your own email server, your emails are still handled by routers and the destination server unencrypted. You are not trusting others much less than not hosting your own email.

If you have your own domain and you don't trust others with your conversations with others, I think you are better off hosting a chat server over an encrypted protocol, such as XMPP or IRC or https://blog.okturtles.com/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-al... . Persuading your contacts to use it is a problem though.

Calendar is a different thing though. As long as you have a CalDAV server and a CalDAV client you should be good to go.

Also related to selfhosting stuff: https://sandstorm.io/ is a project I've discovered some time ago and haven't been paying attention to, but it seems to have thrived pretty well.

It's advertised and designed to "feel" like a public space, in an effort to disguise the truth of the ownership. Lack of a true public alternative is sad.

Security is not only dealing with aftermath, although that is an important part of it. A security-first distro such as http://www.alpinelinux.org/ or OpenBSD, although harder to setup, would serve better long term.

IM in a corporate setting has never really take off IMO. Email is usually the choice, which has a more mature in-house management model.

All ISPs in China are government-owned. It is believed that the government can locate any IP. Then it's only a problem of finding his IP by monitoring.

It depends. I am a bit surprised that reddit is not blocked. Neither is hackernews. Apart from classic Google, Facebook, Twitter, AWS is targeted intensely for its role in "affiliated freedom", to the point releases on github are blocked, others not as much.

You can get arrested for hosting illegal web content. All public facing servers in China must be registered at the government, or they can get raided.