I’m afraid the PC ecosystem is one-of-a-kind, and perhaps once it’s gone, we’ll never have anything like it again. Companies are obsessed with vertical integration now, owning everything from software to peripherals and accessories. The closest thing we have to PC ecosystem where multiple independent companies works to support a single platform is perhaps the raspberry pi ecosystem, but even then it’s pale in comparison to the PC ecosystem in term of variety and number of manufacturers.

The end of an era. Companies also locked the bootloader back then and you’ll need to find a vulnerability to exploit in order to unlock it. When custom roms starting to become popular, companies relaxed their stance and allowing their customers to unlock the bootloader using an official channel instead of utilizing a security exploits, perhaps as a competitive advantage so power users would recommend them to their friends and family.

Now with declining popularity of rooting and custom roms, companies are starting to stop allowing their customers to unlock the bootloader again. From their perspective, allowing bootloader unlocking is nothing but trouble (support-wise) and might even cannibalize sales (why upgrade your phone every two years when you can install a custom ROM with the latest version of Android), so declining popularity of custom ROMs is a perfect excuse for them to stop allowing bootloader unlocking.

Facebook has phones too back then, though they’re just Android with Facebook button.

Strange, probably due to some installed apps/plugins. I don’t install too many apps/plugins on my instance and it’s still rock solid to this day. Just like wordpress, most of the security and performance complains are usually due to 3rd party plugins/apps.

What kind of stability issue? I’ve been running mine for 3 years and hasn’t seen any yet.

It might sound crazy, but nextcloud actually can do all of that. It’s pretty easy to activate if you already have a nextcloud instance. Just enable nextcloud talk app on your nextcloud instance, and maybe add a stun/turn server to make it works through double nat.

https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Pirates and hacking groups rebellious spirit seems to run counter with what North Korean government stood for, so I doubt their government would facilitating them except due to massive oversight or incompetence. Also, can you get fast internet on North Korea? According to some survey, the average internet speed there is 2 mbps.

I imagine the IT person at schools might not be thrilled at the prospect of updating all Chromebooks in the school manually. On some schools, the IT guy might be a teacher doing double duty and simply might not have enough time to do it manually. One of the main selling point of Chromebook is low maintenance, which is why it’s adopted by schools in the first place.

My only issue with Proton are crash and rendering issues related to ray tracing on certain games (probably Nvidia’s fault). Also, Halo master chief collection crash after a few minutes gameplay, but that’s might have something to do with the game being made by Microsoft. Other than that, it’s perfect. Even DLSS is working fine too.

Watching foreign movies is illegal north korea. They might not care about the right holders, but they certainly care about not letting their citizen watch foreign movies.

That’s depend on how deep you want to go with router customization. Most casual enthusiasts would do fine using an Asus router. Out of the box, the firmware is based on an opensource firmware (Tomato) and has a lot of features and options compared to their competitors. Feature-wise, it already blows other consumer-grade routers out of water. And because the firmware’s source is available, third-party firmware (asuswrt-merlin) is thriving and can be flashed with zero risk while adding a whole bunch of new features and customization options.

If you want something more, then your only options are using enterprise-grade routers (e.g. mikrotik, ubiquity, etc). Just note that these enterprise gears usually don’t have latest WiFi tech (or even WiFi at all!), so you’ll still need to buy another wifi access point and hook them downsteam of the router.

Most of the sea in those region is pretty barren with mud/sand sea floor. As long as they don’t put it above a coral reef I imagine the ecological impact would be small. Might even have a positive impact because it might provide shelter for young fish in an otherwise barren patch of sea.

They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.

I assume getting your mail caught in spam folder is not a problem for your use case, right? Then get the cheapest vps you can find on lowendtalk and run mailcow. Use SMTP relay option (with Mailgun, Amazon SES, etc) if the provider disallow outbound SMTP.

Since you’re already using cloudflare, you might want to consider using Cloudflare Zero Trust, which is free for the first 50 users.

Here is an example on how to gate a gitlab instance behind Cloudflare Zero Trust login wall. You should be able to substitute it with any web applications easily enough. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/tutorials/gitlab/

Personally I’m using Keycloak and OAuth2-Proxy though, but they can be quite an ordeal to setup.