There's an easy fix, say you moved to the eu and request that they delete all data about you (you could also try to do a data correction request to change your age).
I don't know why people keep saying this, but there's no way in hell the CDU is far left. The CDU is a historically conservative center to slightly right party, and if they didn't need the votes, the current politicians in charge would go further to the right. A couple of years ago, the CDU lost many voters to the AFD, which is a far right extremist party, and many CDU politicians still sympathize with them, while no other party in Germany collaborates with the AFD. Getting pro gay, trans, and abortion laws through was hell with the CDU in power.
This is looks super cool, however not something I'd be interested in using myself if I can't selfhost it (at least it looks like thats not possible from the website).
Self-hosting a zero knowledge service is probably unnecessary.
If you're hosting the service, there's no need for data to be encrypted client-side. Unless, of course, you were intending on running the service on a public cloud which you didn't control, but that's something I don't think many privacy conscious folk would do.
There's plenty of open source, self-hosted alternatives to Google Photos.
Yeah, having attempted to operate a service very similar to this (only more focused on general encrypted cloud storage) I will say there are no good economics in usage-based billing. You're much better off selling a license to use the software and give users the ability to use common cloud storage providers (minimally the s3-compatible ones but also things like Google Drive) as the backing for this. Even safer from a legal perspective would be not having accounts at all and allowing users to purchase a 1-year license based on license keys that are cryptographically validated but not stored anywhere. Then it's impossible to do anything user specific whether you are compelled to or not.
To me it is a canary signal that I have the option to self-host.
Most likely, QoS would be better from ente's hosting and I would be inclined to take advantage of that. An open source server can be audited and offer an off-ramp should their service no longer suit me.
Then again, the economics of enabling self-hosted infrastructure are probably less exciting compared to locking users in to marked-up, white-labeled infrastructure.
The source code of the client-side apps appears to be available on GitHub. So if they're bluffing, it won't be too long until someone calls them out on it.
Without a fully described mechanism to confirm that the client you download is not compiled with additional code (i.e. without specifying exactly how the client is compiled, using which version of which compiler, and which compile flags, dependency versions, etc) any kind of "the code seems to be on github" is kind of meaningless.
Ideally they should support reproducible builds so that anyone can confirm that the hash of the app corresponds to a specific tag on the source repository. Unfortunately app stores are making it harder to know what the hash of the app you are installing is, but for side-loading this should still be possible.
For web apps, the situation is even more difficult, but there is a technique called Secure Bookmarks which allows you to confirm that a specific bundle of JavaScript is running (at the expense of some usability):
One way to mitigate that is through Binary Transparency, which would allow people to detect if a release is made for which there is no source code available (assuming the project already has reproducible builds). There is already a project attempting this for Arch Linux packages[0].
Of course it's still possible that an update could be sent to everyone which contains some code that only runs when a certain username is entered, so users would need to avoid updating the app until an audit by a trusted third party had approved it.
On the business side, there's plenty of companies that have offered and succeeded with self-hosted software. On the client side, there's many individuals like myself willing to dedicate time, money, and effort to self-host services. I spent quite a bit of time setting up my NAS with self-hosted services, not only because the number of photos and media I store would be prohibitively expensive to host elsewhere (I do photography and videography as a hobby, 120 fps 10 bit footage adds up), but because I enjoy the hobby.
Animations, even 3d ones, drop-down, sliders, static scroll elements, are often implemented on horrible js with bad performance and accessibility, while trival with a small amount of css.
Sadly, the trivial CSS solutions are often not supported by some browsers that a lot of people use (apart from the obvious IE, Safari on both Mac and iOS is possibly the worst offender for this), making the godawful JavaScript solutions a tragic necessity.
Safari is the bain of my existence and owes me money for the sheer amount of time I’ve had to invest in working around their god awful css and svg engines. PWA my a*.
While it is definitely not streamlined and very expensive, I've had a wonderful experience running a Windows VM and passing one of my GPUs through to it.
Even VR works flawlessly, which is otherwise unusable on a linux desktop.
Proton definitely still has major issues. A lot of the well-rated games on protondb are barely playable. Still, I've played a lot of games using it I otherwise wouldn't be able to experience.
>running a Windows VM and passing one of my GPUs through to it
This is very inconvenient because you have to install a new a GPU and then plug in antother monitor into th at new GPU.
>which is otherwise unusable
VR works nearly perfect for me. The main drawbacks is a broken video player in VRChat, no voice recognition in games that use Window's speech API, some anticheats not working, and that NVIDIA still hasn't added driver support needed for async reprojection. One final thing is that audio devices sometimes needed to be configured to the right device the first time you run some games, but from what I've heard from Windows users they have their own share of wrong speaker or microphone problems.
Hearing that VR works well with passthrough makes me want to try it again. I remember when I last tried it, everything worked great except for sound, which was staticky and choppy unless I handed the whole soundcard over to the VM.
Some setup is required, but KVM passing the system audio to pipewire-pulse worked first try for me actually. I'm normally using a virtual desktop to stream everything to my Oculus Quest 2, including audio, and it works surprisingly well.
