Buy European

Also, don’t leave your account unused, delete it. User and follower numbers count.

And least as important, reply (if necessary to another corporate mail address) every email with Twitter/X in the footer, with a kind request to stop promoting and facilitating X.

https://bio.link/everyonehateselon

Looking for a European smartwatch for health monitoring - what are your thoughts?

Hi everyone! I’m on the hunt for a smartwatch that’s great for monitoring health - things like blood pressure, stress levels, sleep quality, and physical activity. However, I’d prefer to avoid products from overseas and focus on something available in the European market. There are plenty of smartwatches, rings, and fitness bands out there, but I’m not sure which ones are actually worth considering.

There. That's out of the way. I recently installed Linux on my main desktop computer and work laptop, overwriting the Windows partition completely. Essentially, I deleted the primary operating system from the two computers I use the most, day in and day out, instead trusting all of my personal and work computing needs to the Open Source community. This has been a growing trend, and I hopped on the bandwagon, but for good reasons. Some of those reasons might pertain to you and convince you to finally make the jump as well. Here's my experience.

[...]

It's no secret that Windows 11 harvests data like a pumpkin farmer in October, and there is no easy way (and sometimes no way at all) to stop it. The operating system itself acts exactly like what was called "spyware" a decade or so ago, pulling every piece of data it can about its current user. This data includes (but is far from limited to) hardware information, specific apps and software used, usage trends, and more. With the advent of AI, Microsoft made headlines with Copilot, an artificial assistant designed to help users by capturing their data with tools like Recall.

[...]

After dealing with these issues and trying to solve them with workarounds, I dual-booted a Linux partition for a few weeks. After a Windows update (that I didn't choose to do) wiped that partition and, consequently, the Linux installation, I decided to go whole-hog: I deleted Windows 11 and used the entire drive for Linux.

The Asterès report quantifies the staggering cost of Europe's digital dependency on US software and cloud services, amounting to €264 billion annually. This economic drain highlights the urgent need for a sovereign, open, and resilient digital future in Europe, as advocated by the EuroStack Project. The report underscores the potential for job creation and economic growth if Europe chooses to invest in its own digital solutions.

My company is slowly but surely getting hooked on AI coding. Our management is resisting it, because we know it's self-destruction for us for a variety of reasons, but it's like a drug: lazy engineers insist on using it and they'll win out eventually because laziness is relentless.

So I've decided to preempt the inevitable and dive into this stuff, because one thing is concerning me: the lazy engineers ask Copilot to write their code for them, because it's right there, already integrated in VSCode, and it's bundled with other Microsoft services my company has unfortunately fallen pray to a few years ago when our last aging Unix engineer retired and was replaced by a MCSE monkey.

Of course, the tightly integrated ecosystem is very deliberate from Microsoft: they're creating a powerful path of least resistance for the laziness and it works.

There are two problems with Copilot:

• It's Microsoft (no need to rehash why it's generally best to stay away from Microsoft I guess)
• Microsoft is headquartered in a country that has gone rogue, adversarial, unpredictable and is getting very, VERY Nazi.

All my career, since the 90s, I've argued against using Microsoft products with all my employers, and I've always been treated as an amusing paranoid lunatic. But this time, the Nazi argument is landing: my management is genuinely concerned that the company's balls are in Microsoft's hand, and that they can be instructed by the orange madman to wreck our business - along with all the other businesses in Europe - at a moment's notice.

So I'm evaluation Claude Code an a step to at least divest away from Microsoft - still American, but fewer eggs in the same nasty basket. But ideally I'd like to evaluate a European AI company's coding assistant, so I can be in an informed and authoritative position to make a recommendation that isn't neither Microsoft nor American when the company finally decides to include AI use officially in the rule book.

Does anybody know a good AI coding assistant out of Europe I could look into? I don't mind spending money on evaluation, but if there's money to spend, I'd rather it'd be expensed on the right tool from the get-go if possible.

Hi!

We just booked our vacation and felt the need to share our experience as a reminder that if you start to book your summer vacation within the next few weeks, try to choose a European toolset!

So, what did we use, and how was the experience?

First, we searched for flights.
We used skyscanner.at and kiwi.com to search for flights from Austria to our chosen destination.

We did not book our flight via those, however, but directly with a European airline we found through them.

Ok, the flight looks good. Now, accommodation. Typically we are hotel vacation people, but this time we decided to go for an apartment + rental car. We hope it's a bit more adventurous, and we get to see more beautiful places and meet nice people.

So we searched for apartments via hometogo.at and holidu.at.
We found quite a lot of super nice apartments on both and ultimately decided on one on HomeToGo and booked it directly with them. The process was super smooth, just as one would expect.

So the flight is done, and we also have somewhere to sleep. Now, how to get there?

We used check24.at (mietwagen.check24.at) and europcar.at to search for rental cars. Europcar is only one provider, while Check24 is a comparison portal that searches for the best offers.

We ended up booking a car from a Spanish car rental company through Check24. Again, so far, the process was flawless, and I felt very well informed about insurance and everything else I needed to pay attention to.

And that's it; the only thing left is how to get to the departure airport. We haven't decided yet on that, however.

One major drawback: almost all of them allow payment via PayPal, credit card, or SEPA Direct Transfer (which is just not comparable to the payment protection the others give).

That's really a bummer, as still, through the use of credit cards/PayPal, the money does not solely stay in Europe. That's such a pity.

I do hope the payment problem is solved soon via the digital euro or possibly WERO or other alternatives.

Other than that, we are super happy with how the process went and are looking forward to our vacation this year :)

If you have any tips for former hotel vacation people who just switched to trying out apartment + rental car, let me know. I'm grateful for advice from experienced people on this matter. :)

One more thing: While checking out the area, we used mapy.com, and for navigation during our vacation, I already downloaded www.comaps.app for offline navigation. :)
And for correcting this post, I used languagetool.org (but I stop now to not go off-topic 😇).

It's also made to be decentralized. Seems voice chat works already. Screenshare and video chat don't seem to be released yet, but I was told that if you host your own instance, you can turn them on (vidchat and screenshare are probably still in beta/are experimental features I assume). UI layout is comparable to Discord.

Me and a friend are considering installing an instance on the server our peertube instance is installed on.

Source in Italian.

The Italian engine manufacturing company, CMD, has completed a reverse buyout operation which has brought it back under 100% Italian control. The cousins Giorgio and Mariano Negri, who founded the company back in 1989, have bought back the 67% of shares that they themselves had sold to the Chinese multinational Loncin Motor Co. Ltd, which had bought CMD’s shares in 2017 to sustain its global expansion. The recent buyout operation costed the Negri cousins 17,4 million euros.

“Bringing back to Italy the decision and industrial centre of the company means reclaiming an identity built in over thirty years of history and it also means creating better conditions with which to face the technological and industrial challenges of the incoming years”, says Mariano Negri, president and CEO, who leads the new board of administrators. “In a complex transitional phase for the automotive industry – continues Mariano Negri – we continue to invest because we believe in the growth possibilities of the company”. We are talking about a technological champion of southern Italy, where the company has always been located: in Atella, province of Potenza, with four manufacturing plants, and in Campania, with its R&D centre and its administrative offices in the town of San Nicola La Strada.

“We chose to stay anchored to southern Italy, to our roots – continues the president - and in particular to the Basilicata region, which in a complex historical moment it’s proving itself to be a land capable of industrial rebirth”. The industrial pan is focused on three lines of action, cultivating the relationships with large clients (spanning from Lamborghini to Ferrari), continuing to invest on research and development focusing on hybrid engines, and continuing to diversify by investing in the aeronautical sector. CMD, with a 2025 yearly revenue of over 38 million euros and 200 employees, of which 60 temporaries, begins 2026 with a portfolio of orders worth 40 million euros per year for the next 10 years, thanks mostly to three big contracts with Lamborghini (worth 20 million euros per year) and with Asian and Austrian clients. The reverse buyout operation has also meant a significant increase of the share capital, which increased from 16,8 to 25,9 million. Founded in 1989 by the Negri family, for over 30 years the company has developed, prototyped and built engine and propulsion systems. In 2012 it entered the elite programme of the Italian stock market.

Written by Vera Viola, published by Il Sole 24 Ore 8/1/2026, manually translated by u/minos83 (reddit).

Also which alternative I should use? Is Codeberg good enough?

I am looking for my next smart phone.

It seems like I will choose between a Fairphone 6 or Nothing 3 (or any other phone) How do these phones compare?

Europe is experiencing a crisis of digital autonomy. Our dependence on US big tech has been growing for decades and is now nearly total, at a time when worries about our former ally are no longer theoretical. Might we, like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, find ourselves locked out of our own mailboxes if we say something that is upsetting to the US government?
This post was written in response to an article in the Financial Times.

Thank you all for suggestions.

A lot of the European brands produce in China. So, wondering if anybody produces in Europe/EU.

Usually when alternatives for messaging apps are recommended it's Signal, Threema or Element but all of them still seem to have small inconveniences (Signal is American, Threema isn't free and Element just seems too complicated).

Today I stumbled upon Delta Chat for the first time and it seems to be the ideal solution. It's european, free, open-source, decentralised, usable on almost any device and privacy focused. But the fact that I've never heard about it before makes me hesitant.

Has anyone of you used it and can share their experience?

Edit: Here's a link to their official website: https://delta.chat/en/