S410

Android is sending a ton of data, though, even if you’re not doing anything internet related. It, also, kinda reacts to “okay, google”, which wouldn’t really be possible if it wasn’t listening.

Now, it obviously doesn’t keep a continuous, lossless audio stream from the phone to some google server. But, it could be sending text parsed from audio locally, or just snippets of audio when the thing detects speech. Relatively normal stuff to collect for analytics purposes, actually.

Now, data like that could “easily” get “misplaced”, of course, and end up in the ad-shoveling machine… Not necessary at Google’s hands: could be any app, really. Facebook, TickTok, random free to play Candy Crush clone, etc. But if that data gets into the interwoven clusterfuck of advertisement might, it will likely end up having an effect on the ads shown to the user.

I’ve noticed that too. Intentionally veered a conversation into a different topic and, lo and behold, I get “relevant recommendation” short time later. That was, not entirely coincidentally, the same day I unlocked the bootloader and flashed a de-googled ROM.

Dualbooting is possible and easy: just gotta shrink the Windows partition and install Linux next to it. Make sure to not format the whole thing by mistake, though. A lot of Linux installers want to format the disk by default, so you have to pick manual mode and make sure to shrink (not delete and re-create!) the windows partition.

As for its usefulness, however… Switching the OS is incredibly annoying. Every time you want to do that you have to shut down the system completely and boot it back up. That means you have to stop everything you’re doing, save all the progress, and then try to get back to speed 2 minutes later. After a while the constant rebooting gets really old.

Furthermore, Linux a completely different system that shares only some surface level things with Windows. Switching to it basically means re-learning how to use a computer almost from scratch, which is, also, incredibly frustrating.

The two things combined very quickly turn into a temptation to just keep using the more familiar system. (Been there, done that.)

I think I’ll have to agree with people who propose Virtual Machines as a solution.

Running Linux in a VM on Windows would let you play around with it, tinker a little and see what software is and isn’t available on it. From there you’ll be able to decide if you’re even willing to dedicate more time and effort to learning it.

If you decide to continue, you can dual boot Windows and Linux. But not to be able to switch between the two, but to be able to back out of the experiment.

Instead, the roles of the OSes could be reversed: a second copy of Windows could be install in a VM, which, in turn, would run on Linux.

That way, you’d still have a way to run some more picky Windows software (that is, software that refuses to work in Wine) without actually booting into Windows.

This approach would maximize exposure to Linux, while still allowing to back out of the experiment at any moment.

Wayland has it’s fair share of problems that haven’t been solved yet, but most of those points are nonsense.

If that person lived a little over a hundred years ago and wrote a rant about cars vs horses instead, it’d go something like this:

Think twice before abandoning Horses. Cars break everything!
Cars break if you stuff hay in the fuel tank!
Cars are incompatible with horse shoes!
You can’t shove your dick in a car’s mouth!

The rant you’re linking makes about as much sense.

Simply disabling registration of new accounts using Tor/VPN should be sufficient and won’t affect existing users.

Although, requiring verification of accounts made via those would be a better approach. Require captchas to prevent automated posting. Automatically mark posts made from new accounts and/or via Tor or a VPN for moderation review.

There are way to mitigate spam that aren’t as blunt and overreaching as blanket banning entire IP ranges. This approach is the dumbest, least competent way of ensuring any kind of security, and, honestly, awfully close to being needlessly discriminating. Fuck everyone from countries with draconian internet censorship, I guess?

In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn’t like Gnome 3 can use it instead.

To be honest, most things in Nobra can be installed/done to regular Fedora. And, unlike Nobra, Fedora has more than 1 maintainer: goof for the bus factor.

Focusing on the things I need to actually do.
I swear, if even if I was forced to do something at gunpoint, I’d manage to get distracted anyway.

Almost everything that’s not Gnome can be considered lightweight, to be honest.

1k USD. Should be enough to leave my shithole of a country, if I’m lucky.

OpenSUSE + KDE is a really solid choice, I’d say.

The most important Linux advice I have is this: Linux isn’t Windows. Don’t expect things to works the same.
Don’t try too hard to re-configure things that don’t match the way things are on Windows. If there isn’t an easy way to get a certain behavior, there’s probably a reason for it.

Orange cats

I have a 120 gig SSD. The system takes up around 60 gigs + BTRFS snapshots and its overhead. A have around 15 gigs of wiggle room, on average. Trying to squeeze some /home stuff in there doesn’t really seem that reasonable, to be honest.

As long as you don’t re-format the partition. Not all installers are created equal, so it might be more complicated to re-install the OS without wiping the partition entirely. Or it might be just fine. I don’t really install linux often enough to know that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You can put your /home on a different BTRFS subvolume and exclude it from being snapshotted.

Not OP, but I have the same setup.

I have BTRFS on /, which lives on an SSD and ext4 on an HDD, which is /home. BTRFS can do snapshots, which is very useful in case an update (or my own stupidity) bricks the systems. Meanwhile, /home is filled with junk like cache files, games, etc. which doesn’t really make sense to snapshot, but that’s, actually, secondary. Spinning rust is slow and BTRFS makes it even worse (at least on my hardware) which, in itself, is enough to avoid using it.

There are “Video Rooms”. They’re in beta too.
Also, screen sharing is done via the same platform agnostic web APIs every other Electron-based app uses, though.
I got rid of screen capture induced lag by switching to Wayland.

Element has been working for me and my friends. At the moment, it just embeds Jitsi within the client to do group calls (which works fine. Jisti isn’t bad by any means), but native group calls are being worked on and are currently in beta!

Most music I have is from “Pay what you want” albums from Ponies@Dawn, VibePoniez, A State Of Sugar, etc.
When I come across artists I like, I tend to check out their other tracks and grab the ones I like.

On my devices like PCs, laptops or phones, syncthing syncs all my .rc files, configs, keys, etc.

For things like servers, routers, etc. I rely on OpenSSH’s ability to send over environmental variables to send my aliases and functions.
On the remote I have
[ -n "$SSH_CONNECTION" ] && eval "$(echo "$LC_RC" | { { base64 -d || openssl base64 -d; } | gzip -d; } 2>/dev/null)"
in whatever is loaded when I connect (.bashrc, usually)
On the local machine
alias ssh="$([ -z "$SSH_CONNECTION" ] && echo 'LC_RC=$(gzip < ~/.rc | base64 -w 0)') ssh'

That’s not the best way to do that by any means (it doesn’t work with dropbear, for example), but for cases like that I have other non-generic, one-off solutions.