Random Dent

You can also pay for Mullvad by generating a random token on their website and then just literally sending them cash in an envelope lol.

The usual tech support search:

• First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.

• Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say “Solved” with no record of what was done.

• Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.

• Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you’re trying to fix break in a different way, but it’s progress at least.

• Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.

So to answer the question, I can usually tell I’m getting close to the solution when I say “Oh for fuck’s sake” as I’m closing tabs lol.

Yeah I was gonna say, I dunno if my distro is the best (Arch BTW) but it’s the best for me. Doesn’t give me any nonsense and lets me tinker as much as I want. Other people just want their OS to get out of their way, which of course is equally valid. Whatever works for you!

Isn’t that just the way things work in general though? If you have a worse computer, everything is going to be slower, broadly speaking.

As a side note, a couple of things that might be handy for you:

Bottles is a GUI for running Wine things that might make it a bit easier to navigate. It’s helped me out a few times.

Also there’s an AppDB on the Wine site where you can search for specific software to find out how well it runs/tweaks that people have used etc.

ALSO yeah games are in a pretty good place on Linux nowadays. I have a Steam Deck and it runs a surprising amount of stuff, even things that aren’t listed as being compatible. I think the main source of trouble is the online AntiCheat stuff, that’s not always compatible with Linux (although sometimes those work too, I think it just depends on the game.) There’s also protondb for checking which games work in Linux.

Hopefully some of that is helpful!

Yeah I have the Kobo eBook reader that’s also an e-ink tablet and that’s the same, good as a little sketchbook but it only has like 4 colours on it.

For me, I find it handy because it catches a bunch of stuff I always forget, like updating Docker containers. Also if you have Am installed it’ll even update your Appimages.

I use Topgrade, but I use the alias update to run it lol

Since OP mentioned that they used Plasma in the past and don’t like GNOME, it might be worth mentioning that KDE is developing their own OS which should be immutable.

Might have to wait for a little bit though.

I have a few personal rules about it, eg. I’ll try not to pirate smaller, independent things where it might conceivably screw over the creator, but other than that it’s all fair game IMO.

As a side note, it’s been interesting to grow up hearing non-stop from the corporate world that piracy is evil and is killing art or whatever, only to watch them do a full 180 in the last couple of years now that they need to pirate the entire internet to train AI.

I have a disaster recovery plan, but part of my disaster recovery plan involves not posting the details of my disaster recovery plan on the internet.

I have some mapped to super simple aliases too like e1 to reboot, e2 to shutdown etc. I don’t remember why I started doing that, but that way I only have to remember which number does what lol.

Yeah that was it for me. Just keep regular backups and bear in mind that you’ll probably break stuff at first. But once you get the hang of it, it’s like a whole other level of control over your system.

Also I’m not dyslexic but would things like tab completion and aliases help maybe? I sometimes shorten often-used commands with aliases just for convenience (as an example, I use rsync a lot, particularly the command rsync --ignore-existing -ravwhich I just shorten to rs to save time) so maybe that could also be used to avoid mis-spelling?

Not the above poster, but for me: it’s a slight concern but AFAIK the profiles are interchangeable so it’s pretty trivial to just switch back to Thunderbird if anything does happen.

For me it’s handy because I have multiple email accounts so I can just open Betterbird and check them all at once without having to log into several different pages.

I wonder if some sort of “Dead Man’s Switch” might be an appropriate solution for something like this? IIRC there are services that will send out messages to certain people if you don’t log in for a set amount of time, so maybe something like that could be set up to email friends/family/a lawyer/the consulate of your home country or whoever in case you get snatched?

It probably won’t be able to tell them where you are or what exactly happened obviously, but it could at least let people know something’s up.

I feel like the “getting into privacy” journey for a lot of people tends to look like a bell curve - you start off with a few apps and minor tweaks to protect you from the worst online privacy invasions, and then it gradually builds and builds until you become the sort of person that has all their cat pictures on an air-gapped encrypted server hidden in a cupboard somewhere while you use SearX to find the best mask that will confuse facial recognition cameras, and then after a while you break through and just go back to using a few apps and tweaks to protect from the worst of it again.

I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn’t look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there’s like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn’t do it as far as I can see.

openSUSE is right there lol

As a KDE person, the random potshot at KDE for absolutely no reason is what got me lol.