of course it’s ‘elitism’ and not just a bunch of people volunteering to code shit that’s interesting/relevant for them.

To provide ‘non-elitist’ desktop experience people need to sit down and fix bug backlog for hardware that’s nowhere around them, prioritize features that are relevant to users (even if they are absolutely ass to work on) and etc, etc, etc. You know how it’s called? A job.

with mass services requiring mandatory phone number binding I think being in user mass is a viable option - you cannot get reliable “secondary” email anymore and people don’t look through data leak dumps by eyes anyway, script doesn’t care about email address string - it all becomes hash anyway. Whois protection is pretty reliable to divert snooping 3rd-parties.

As for expensive… yeah, sad state of affairs is that there’s nothing cheap about hosting your own infrastructure. Price of not really trusting anyone or having obscure technical requirements.

Encryption in transit is pretty much solved these days with TLS, what OP wants is E2E - encryption from sender to recipient with no intermediate parties having an idea about contents of the message. Problem with E2E is inconvenience: emails are inaccessible without private keys and key management is pain. Users don’t want additional headache of managing their keys between bajillion of devices where they might use emails

get a domain name, host stalwart somewhere and set up email with this new domain there, get receipt emails there and autoforward it to your main email with S/MIME, gpg or whatever enabled.

usual disclaimer ‘do not host your email blablabla’ (at least don’t get fucking digitalocean ‘droplet’ for it), but there’s no other way around that, ecommerce won’t enable shit.

That’s a thin ice you’re walking here… Some people appreciate the support, some people don’t like when work contacts get into their personal feelings territory.

It’s highly dependent on how close your interpersonal relationship is with co-worker, what I’d avoid for sure is suddenly closing the distance just because you know he is trans and you can tell recent events are affecting him.

why not? it’s not like there is any competition.
Microsoft is making more money off Linux with Azure than several red hats combined.

I’m clueless european now living in a country where guns are generally available to trained and vetted to some degree public and I was always puzzled by US self-defense culture, some parts of it simply do not compute to me.

Like how does it work? Are gun owners in America spending reasonable amount of time at the range? Any gun is as good as your training. Safe handling should be muscle memory at the very least to promote an individual from a danger to themselves and people around (not necessarily to an attacker) to someone who is able to hold a gun. Then comes actual shooting practice, which will improve chances of achieving intended things with this gun.

Also strange obsession with high-power calibers, even knowledgeable gun bloggers mentioning things like .357 magnum in self-defense context. Did people really try to shoot them indoors without hearing protection? Do they really mind what’s behind their target, i.e your kid sleeping in the room next door. High-powered round is a responsibility, however a lot of people talk about them like they are toys.

I really hope I’m missing something or maybe gun handling culture is really common knowledge over there not worth mentioning, because looking at the general public pretty much everywhere I’ve been - there’s no way I’d trust them with a gun. It takes some dedication to learn, even if it seems simple.

resold oem key is not legal as well.

only legal options are: get windows with your device or purchase retail for a hunnit $.

just accept it and pirate.

Turns out many middle eastern toilets can’t handle toilet paper.

It’s more about toilet paper than plumbing. Toilet paper has to easily dissolve in water, otherwise you can clog any toilet, be it western or eastern.

10% is too low. Usually they won’t be against paying you the same they are paying your current employer for your services, so you can safely do 20% raise ( your employer charges more, of course, but there are other costs involved to set up and run the operation).

with arch it’s relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that’s it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there’s nothing to break.

every time I’ve tried “out of the box” desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it’s been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.

good way to accidentally lose the data.

in case of any forensics your drive will be copied first and master will be not touched, any decryption attempts will be executed on copies - so kill switch is effectively useless.