Adding to what others here have already said, I’d definitely download Signal and see if you can get any people to move from WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever to Signal.

I don’t know much about iOS apps, but you could look into more privacy focused YouTube clients, and possibly 2FA clients too (although that’s a bit of a controversial topic on iOS AFAIK).

I saw you mention in another comment that you use Amazon Alexa for smart home appliances. Depending on interest in selfhosting / time / motivation to move away from Amazon, you could look into using Home Assistant instead. It even has a Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world.

Yep my mistake, I confused ShadowSocks with Cloak.

I’m afraid your best bet here will be using WhatsApp.

Edit:
FindMy (for Android) might also be usable for that, but honestly if you just want it to work I’d still vouch for WhatsApp.

Signal supports a single momentary position, but not live location.

i use miracast where I can (my TV and Samsung phone support it natively), as it pretty much just works and is a decent protocol. Sadly every phone manufacturer that isn’t Samsung seems to have abandoned it right now, but it is still widely supported in TVs. On Linux, there is the app gnome-network-displays (yes it also works on KDE) to cast your screen over miracast.

Miracast is an actual local streaming protocol (closely related to WiFi Direct). For content streaming the only FOSS standard I am aware of is FCast, but sofar it only is implemented in the GrayJay Android app.

Edit: There is also Deskreen for casting a PC screen.

For casting mobile to PC there is also scrcpy.

This isn’t really casting, but I often find that an HDMI cable (often paired with a USB-C to HDMI dongle) is the simplest and most reliable way to display a phone screen on another monitor (as long as the phone supports DP altmode).

What worked for me at my old school was using a ShadowSocks proxy. Basically what this does, is it takes all your traffic and just makes it look like random https traffic (AFAIK). ShadowSocks is just a proxy. The description fits the Cloak module, mentioned below.

I believe multiple VPNs support this, for me with PIA VPN it’s in the settings under the name “Multi-Hop” (PIA only supports this on the Desktop App, not on mobile).

This technique is pretty much impossible to block, unless you ban every single VPN ShadowSocks Proxy IP. If that is the case for you (chances are practically 0), you could also selfhost ShadowSocks in combination with the Cloak module, however this method is a lot more complicated.

If the main battery isn’t “meant to be replaced”, it will often act as the CMOS battery (e.g. MacBooks have been doing this since roughly 2008).

I find it even more puzzling as surely it has to be a decent increase in server demand to constantly be streaming video. How can that be worth it??

+1 on OnlyOffice, it has 1:1 formatting compatibility with Microsoft Office. Unlike LibreOffice, it doesn’t have to translate documents between odt and docx in the background.

In the same vein, OnlyOffice has poor compatibility with odt files etc.

Quite a few cars also still have a SIM card hidden somewhere, which can be removed. The location of it varies widely though and they’re usually pretty hard to find.

That’s incorrect, Graphene OS has Android Auto support.

I was very disappointed with the (default) Camera after switching to Graphene, luckily you can just download the Pixel Camera (including all the Pixel optimizations) from Play Store on Graphene OS or download it as an APK bundle from some other sites (downloading the normal APK won’t work, it has to be the bundle).

Yesss fcast looks incredibly promising. Sadly the only app implementing it seems to be GrayJay, I really hope it will catch on more.

Not OP, but this instantly made me think of the worst-case scenario PDFs I stumbled upon on Lemmy recently.

TVHeadend is the way, I’ve been running it with a USB satellite tuner for 5+ years. Setting it up can be a little confusing, but once it’s running you pretty much never have to touch it again.

As for clients, there’s a Jellyfin plugin, however it seems to not work for me right now.

My client of choice is Kodi with the TVHeadend plugin, and that works great. If you still want Jellyfin integration, you could just add your recordings folder as a library in Jellyfin.

Could I purchase two different brand drives and use them with btrfs?

I don’t quite remember the source for this, but I believe I read some time ago that it’s actually a good thing to have separate drives. The reasoning is, if you buy two identical drives (at the same time), the likelyhood of both drives failing around the same time is severely higher.

This is then amplified by the fact that rebuilding a RAID puts a lot of strain on the non-dead drive, so if ie. drive 1 dies and drive 2 is about to die, the strain you put on drive 2 in order to rebuild your RAID onto drive 3 might kill drive 2 before you even finish rebuilding your RAID.

Again, this is just from my memory, it might be worth doing some more research on.

The Pixel 8 and onwards technically support DP alt mode again. I’m not sure about stock, but I believe I read about some people having it just work in Graphene OS.

I’d assume it won’t, you can always just test it out though. There might be some setting for those timeouts in the Steam-steamdeck settings.

I haven’t done this myself, but I assume you can turn off the display in Desktop Mode. I assume somewhere in the “normal” Linux settings there will be the usual Turn Screen Off after … and Go To Sleep after … You could just set the screen to turn off after 5 mins, then set sleep to never and that should do it.

I assume the tablet gets its video through standard HDMI/DP over USB-C, hence a USB-A to C adapter wouldn’t work.

If you still want to use the tablet with the official dock, there may be HDMI+USB -> USB-C adapters capable of inserting the HDMI signal into the USB-C connection. I’m not too knowledgeable on this topic, so you may want to resort to some more research of your own.

Also keep in mind (as far as I’m aware) there’s a hard limit on 2 external monitors, unless you use some “trickery” like DisplayLink.

Edit: I’ve done a bit more research and I’m pretty sure that more than 2 monitors are supported. There are two limiting factors here:

1. The GPU in the Steamdeck (custom APU which I didn’t directly find a spec sheet for), will typically have a max of 2-4 displays
2. The physical connection, AFAIK as the Steamdeck only has one USB-C port, this means it has one DisplayPort 1.4 link available. This link can be divided into multiple video streams. I couldn’t find a table for DisplayPort 1.4, but this website has one for DisplayPort 1.2, suggesting you should be able to run four 1080p60 signals at the very minimum.

Now with all this information, as long as your Steamdeck can output to any three screens (ie. two external ones and the internal steamdeck screen), it should also be possible to output three 1080p60 signals to external monitors.