I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/month, maybe even less, depending on how much heavy usage your Nextcloud instance requires. And you won‘t have to worry about keeping your hardware and network running, which pretty much always takes up more time than expected.

Some web hosters (I‘ve had very good experiences with Hetzner) charge an hourly rate and allow you to preconfigure VPSes with software like Nextcloud. So unless you have specific needs, you could just spin up an instance, check if it suits your needs and, if not, only pay a few cents.

I think Ghostfolio might be what you’re looking for.

I unfortunately can’t really see how a browser could still be nice to use and properly resist fingerprinting.

The site https://amiunique.org/fingerprint tries to fingerprint your browser and lists the used attributes along with their uniqueness within their dataset. And while a browser could pretty reliably lie about its User Agent or Platform, it’s often just necessary for a modern website to know, for example, what your view-port’s resolution is or what kind of audio/video codecs your device supports. Going through my own results, I’d say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me, even though I’m pretty privacy-conscious.

Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, but I think preventing fingerprinting would need a regulatory instead of a technical solution. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem very likely anytime soon.

That really depends on the service you’re looking at and what your needs are. Google probably offers the best all-round package, but depending on your needs, there are often times good or even better alternatives available.

As far as I know, address completion is supported by almost every alternative. At least I don’t know of one which doesn’t support that.

The quality of directions not only depends on the product, but also the method of transport you want directions for and the geographic region your targeting. For example, Google is, in my experience, very good for cars, but terrible for cycling. At least in Europe, OSM based maps generally include far more paths and details, which, combined with a good routing engine, results in better routes. I have made very good experiences with OpenRouteService.

For SteetView-like images you’re unfortunately pretty much limited to Google or Apple. Mapillary exists, but, as it’s crowdsourced, quality and coverage just aren’t all that great.

I think that there’s a good open alternative for most use cases of embedded maps available, as few of them really need StreetView or traffic-based routing. If that’s the case, though, you’re unfortunately stuck with Google or Apple.

Someone‘s probably just using those ports wirelessy!

I‘m personally very happy with kagi when it comes to features and, most importantly, the quality of search results. But, as they don‘t have ads, it’s pretty expensive to use.

There‘s a great video on that topic by Matt Parker (Standupmaths) which I‘d wholeheartedly recommend.

TLDW: No, terrain elevation isn‘t generally taken into account when calculating a country‘s surface area, though the actual method differs slightly from country to country. Switzerland would be around 7% bigger, if its mountains were to be taken into account.

Looks like someone needs to be introduced to the wonderful world of pre-commit hooks.

I think it’s important to remember that LiMux, the Linux project in Munich, didn’t really fail because the software didn’t work. The city had commissioned a study that blamed bad implementation, bad internal cooperation, and bad administration. It explicitly did not recommend that the project be shut down. Unfortunately, this recommendation was ignored by the mayor, who was previously responsible for convincing Microsoft to move its German headquarters to Munich and who calls himself a “Microsoft fan”.

So it’s probably worth noting that the success of such large projects doesn’t only depend on the viability of the software. It’s also very much dependent on the lobbyists the project is up against, especially in the public sector.

Great picture, but that‘s actually Tower Bridge, not London Bridge.