As a perfectionist myself, perfect is the enemy of the good. It’s good that you’re still learning and finding possible improvements. If you haven’t already, may I suggest organizing a copy of your customizations and dotfiles in one neat location? Saves a lot of mental anguish when you need to track down that edit to a config file you made some months ago.

What privacy though? The situation with LinkedIn just like Instagram. Even though they aren’t open for scraping, there’s still no expectation of privacy among the users who post anything.

I daily drive Debian now, but several years ago when a couple of my computers were still very new, I used Arch since it has bleeding-edge support for new hardware while being still thoroughly documented in the Arch Wiki.

The sheer volume of packages on the official repo and the AUR made it great for discovering which desktop environment I wanted to use and for software-hopping in general too. You can have as much or as little on your system as you want and nothing is forced on you.

I think ROCm is fine with more recent cards, but getting it to work on my RX 480, for which ROCm dropped official support a while ago, was a real pain.

Everything in Owner and a secondary phone for all proprietary work and communication apps. The secondary phone is powered off or at least disconnected once I leave work. Google stuff and banking through a computer browser whenever possible.

If I were forced to use only one phone, the secondary phone’s contents would be on a secondary profile. This used to be my setup but switching between profiles throughout the day wasn’t my thing.

I like knowing what my computer is doing and that was noticeably less and less the case as I went from Windows 98 to 10 and all the major versions in between. Before learning about Linux, simply going through the options in debloat scripts made me realize how invasive Microsoft was behind the scenes.

I know that he’s not necessarily the best resource, but Rob Braxman’s videos were first to bring mobile privacy concerns to my attention. Also, while his promotion of his custom phone didn’t lead to me buying one of them, it did lead to me learning about custom Android ROMs and eventually buying a Pixel for GrapheneOS.

No, they respect my goals and seem to have accepted that I’m sometimes just unreachable. The only thing they might be annoyed about is my GrapheneOS and Signal proselytism. If anything, it’s more apathy than antagonism. They’ll agree with me on privacy issues but rarely ever give up the conveniences of Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. in practice.

As yet another modifier key. I use XFCE, so if I bind it to the applications menu, the applications menu will also pop up every time I use any other keybinding involving the Super key, which is less than ideal.

I don’t know how controversial this would be, I wouldn’t mind making it like the command key in MacOS either.

Enlighten me, I just want a bit of mindless entertainment while doing the dishes

If you can get your hands on the LTSC edition, that should have you covered until 2032

A noble goal in mind and I’m glad that the output of ChatGPT works for you. I’m not against LLMs in principle, but anything freshly spat out by an LLM is for you and you only. If AI was only used as an aid but you understand the codebase, document it and make it clear. Otherwise, you leave the assumption of vibe-coding open.

Mint is a very good option for this purpose. In my case, it’s Debian, but with a much more involved process.

The only ones who ask me to help with installing Linux are either very close friends or people in my family with whom I spend more time, and they tend to be curious about the exact setup that I’m using. I just so happen to have a fully-configured system image in a VM that I duplicate onto my machines, so I work with my friend or family to figure out what they need and how they want it to look, then I clone that VM, customize it to taste, and let them try it out. If they like it, I image it to their machine, make sure it’s bootable, work out any machine-specific issues, set a new password and encryption key, and make sure that unattended-upgrades is working.

Everyone else just asks me to help install Windows. I have a penchant for LTSC, with an obligatory trick up my sleeve.

HP also made laptops with a Blu-Ray drive built right into them. I got one for a few bucks at a flea market and ended up swapping the BD drive into my old ThinkPad.

I’d look for an alternative. Failing that, I would try every trick to fake that selfie.

The cheap secondary phone is the approach I have gone with for work apps. Powered up only when needed and doesn’t connect to my main home network.

Great for my tablet which is too weak to run IronFox smoothly. One annoyance is that it’ll insist on a refresh if your internet connection is interrupted or changes in any way. The reason for it is not immediately obvious and neither is the option to turn it off (Settings > Homepage > Ask to restart on connection change)

Glove Prints

Problem: Thin gloves like surgical gloves can still leave fingerprints on surfaces.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glove_prints

Mitigation: Wear thick, textured gloves

Finally found an explanation for why my phone’s fingerprint sensor works through thin gloves.

Have a NAS, Jellyfin server, and LLM on my LAN so far. Next step is to make them available outside my home, but I’ve been procrastinating.

I daily drive Debian and have a few loose .deb packages and tarballs installed. Also enabled the Librewolf repo. It mostly comes down to an issue of manageability and possible conflicting dependencies. The ones I have installed don’t introduce any dependencies, so they’ve been trouble-free and have survived the Bookworm to Trixie upgrade. They are installed as a last resort option in the absence of a satisfactory equivalent via the official repo, Flatpak, or AppImage.

Loose .deb packages can be installed and uninstalled like any other normal Debian package, but won’t be automatically updated and don’t have any compatibility guarantee. Tarballs are nothing more than a collection of files, which may need to be placed in system directories. You’re on your own for those since there’s no standard and automated way to manage them and it’s possible to overwrite important system files if unpacked and copied in blindly. It’s a good idea to keep a manual record of what was put where in case any issues with them pop up down the road.

My personal ranking:

Official Debian repo > Flatpak > AppImage > Docker/Podman > Snap >> Reputable and known compatible third-party repo > Loose Debian .deb > tarball > Loose Ubuntu .deb >> Unfamiliar third-party repos and PPAs

There are certain occasions where a loose .deb or tarball won’t hurt, but sticking to options further up the list closes off the biggest routes of breaking Debian.

The firmware isn’t open source and I only chose it for the employee discount, but the blue Yubico security key has held up well over hundreds of uses and several years jingling around in my keychain.