Focus follows mouse and unchecking the option to auto raise the active window. Couldn’t live without it and being used to it has made me extremely clumsy when I do pick up my Windows work laptop.

I change the taskbar clock to be a one-line MM/DD HH:MM:SS format, drop in my customized locale (based on en-US for maximum compatibility, but without having to deal with US formats and units that I’m not fond of), and point the taskbar shortcut for my text editor to a script that creates a pre-named file and launches the editor with autosave enabled. Because having to manually save and come up with a name for your spur-of-the-moment notes sucks, automatically generating 20260831_text_1 is so much better than a, b, a2, etc.

XFCE specific, I get rid of the second panel full of launchers. Acquired taste, but also Chicago95 theme and icon pack.

As others say, where the use cases are so specific to each machine, it’ll be a headache juggling all of those images if your needs and workflow change down the road.

But I’d be remiss to say I don’t practice a form of what you mention, I would go insane if I actually had to reinstall from distro defaults. I have a single perfected VM image with customizations and software common to all of my machines. And yes, if you were to go this route, there are little quirks to iron out manually each time I image to a new machine, even old and well-supported ones. Some just cosmetic, some preventing graphical output. Although still much less time than setting up from scratch.

It works well enough for me, but it also frankly leads to a poorly-documented system that will accumulate cruft with updates, and can’t propagate changes in the VM to my existing systems easily, so I’m interested too to see what other people here suggest. Particularly for those niche customizations that land outside of /home and /etc (e.g. /usr/fonts, packages not provided by the distro).

Look into threat modelling, we’re all striving for more privacy-friendly ways to keep in touch with people, and if you seal yourself off too early, you’ll suffocate.

I know my friends and colleagues well in person, they know that I’m a privacy nut, and we agree to not report me missing just because I’m unreachable on a particular day. But knowing that they SMS each other their plans and that I’m probably not a target of the state, I’m cool texting them things like when we’re eating out together.

Also don’t be disheartened, I keep at it even though my methods are nowhere near airtight. Even if every move of mine is known, the surveillance capitalists will at least know that I am flipping them off and trying my best to make their jobs hard.

First thing I always do is set icon scheme to have colors. I don’t know who thought monochrome for the tools was a good idea, but it takes me twice as long to find anything.

If I just learned of GOS now and didn’t have a Pixel, I would buy an unlocked unit cheap and used now. Motorola have gone quiet about their GOS phone in the months since the announcement. If it ends up flagship-priced, I’d have to settle for a used Pixel anyway.

But since I have a Pixel with GOS that is perfectly usable already, I’m holding out to see what Motorola comes up with. Either way, not too worried about specs since I don’t use my phone that much. Would be nice to have SD card, headphone jack (bonus ease of security points over Bluetooth and dongles), and replaceable battery, but have also learned to (begrudgingly) tolerate phones without those.

Same thing you suggested, plus a btrfs scrub to check integrity when finished. I suspect btrfs provides a more elegant mechanism for this, which I have been too lazy to look up.

I could never reinstall … I end up customizing so extensively that a few years ago, I centralized all of my customizations in a VM image that I clone if I do need a fresh install.

If those are your only copies, do buy extra HDDs first thing so you have at least a backup. Preferably then a third copy since otherwise, for a moment, only one copy would exist as you copy encrypted data back to the original drives. Technically, there are ways to encrypt in-place, but don’t ever do that when it’s your only copy of the data.

Overall, it would look like creating an empty partition on the new drive, creating an encrypted container on said partition (this intervening level differentiates it from an unencrypted data partition), creating the filesystem (formatting as ext4, btrfs, etc) within said container, and copying data into the encrypted filesystem.

LUKS is the best-supported encryption system for Linux. As an avid user of LUKS on nearly all of my internal and external drives, I highly recommend reading the Arch wiki entry: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Device_encryption. Section 4 teaches setting up the encrypted partition. Once everything is in place, most graphical file managers can handle detecting and opening the encrypted drives as well.

For non-boot drives, I’ve always used rsync to copy data over. If you use btrfs, then a btrfs scrub afterwards to double-check the copied files. I’ve never tried to see if I could rsync a root partition and leave it in a bootable state. Though I do have a way to migrate a non-encrypted root partition to encrypted without reinstalling, that’s a whole rabbit hole you are welcome to ask me about.

Get a feel for LUKS before you set up the root partition with encryption though, perhaps by setting up an encrypted install in a virtual machine. Recovering a non-booting encrypted install of Linux takes only a few extra commands compared to a non-encrypted one, but if you mess up encryption and lose the key, no amount of commands will save you. So before doing anything I mention here, always have backups.

Woah a huge flip phone!

Cool pairing of hardware in all seriousness. I too used to laugh at the inclusion of 3G/4G in select iPad models.

Would like it more than Signal ideally. But it’s hard enough already to get people over to Signal. Couldn’t justify how much battery its notification service drained for the few contacts (all nerdy close friends) I had there. That was over a year ago so I’m interested to hear if they fixed the power consumption issue.

For anonymity alone, no. You ought to at least aspire to live the nomad lifestyle first and put up with its challenges, then enjoy whatever anonymity comes from it as a bonus.

If you don’t mind apartment living, you could consider the arrangement I had at one point. Private landlord who didn’t run background checks, accepted payment in any reasonable form, many tenants, communal mailbox without apartment numbers or names required. Internet, utilities, etc. all rolled into rent and not individually metered. Might be harder to find but they exist.

As others have said, no because Google’s components have very good backward compatibility and will come for your device on its stock OS.

I had other vendors in mind when I first read your question. In a sense, older ones could spy less as a side effect of vendor telemetry servers going dark over the years. Samsung also wasn’t as rampant with their spying back then. But either way, such phones would have been long without any security updates.

Gross. Does it still track bluetooth if the phone is already paired with a headset and not actively searching for new connections? Guess I’ll be back to wired headphones if that’s the case.

As someone who has used X11 and Wayland, it doesn’t matter for the typical user. If you, like me, have a penchant for some smaller desktop environments like XFCE or window managers, you will be stuck with X11, but many are already working on porting to Wayland.

Couple edge cases for gaming, namely screen tearing on some X11 configurations and certain Nvidia hardware running into issues on Wayland. For multi-monitor or high DPI users, Wayland handles per-monitor DPI and fractional scaling far better than X11. Maybe a couple more edge use cases for remoting into the desktop, but Wayland support is also improving quickly on that end. In any case, Wayland is by design more secure than X11.

it should use the encryption passphrase to auto unlock the keyring after the autologin

It doesn’t, hence the need to remove the password. Password only comes back every once in a while, rather than every login. Maybe a bad combination of desktop environment/session manager? LightDM with XFCE in my case.

Meanwhile, I’m fighting to get rid of the password on the keyring each time it comes back by itself. For context, my root partition is encrypted, so it’s not a huge deal if the keyring stored on it doesn’t have its own password, I think. I set up autologin to avoid a duplicate password, but since the session manager no longer unlocks the keyring, the keyring must have no password else I get a password prompt all over again. There’s probably a more elegant way, but I’ve yet to find it.

Anything that requires PII in a separate browser that doesn’t clear on exit. General browsing on my main browser, which clears data on exit, except for a small list of exceptions. It doesn’t defeat non-cookie fingerprinting, but I at least get rid of all the cookies that I don’t want.

Nearly everything that both requires a phone and disrespects my privacy has been work-related, so using 2 phones has been a solid choice for me.

The work phone has a sim from a mainstream carrier and only gets powered on while at work during work hours. Maybe I’m spoiled that my workplace tolerates this arrangement. I couldn’t imagine having to be reachable any time of the day. I didn’t intentionally buy a separate phone, it’s just my old phone repurposed.

The personal phone has an “IoT” SIM which can be purchased non-KYC where I live. All FOSS apps and a personal number via VoIP.

I know it isn’t by any means airtight, but it gives infinitely more peace of mind than just trusting whatever sandboxing mechanism available on one device will be sufficient.

Whatever the choice, there will be trade-offs. From a technical standpoint, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with the upcoming Motorola phone with GrapheneOS as long as the bootloader is still unlockable and relockable so that the user can install a known good copy of GOS instead of trusting what Motorola put on it.

As much as I trust them with passwords. Which is not too much trust. Implementations of passkeys also tend to be frustratingly bad.

As long as you have a strong backup strategy, I would recommend full disk encryption during installation, especially if for a laptop. Peace of mind with negligible cost on modern hardware. Even accessing the encrypted disk from a live USB takes only two extra commands compared to an unencrypted disk. As long as the LUKS header doesn’t corrupt, hence the need for good backups.