In an academic setting, LibreOffice is a good substitute if:

• Documents will not be passed back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office for collaboration
• Teachers accept assignments in PDF format

I got away with using LibreOffice in university since:

• Opening and reading files prepared in MS Office almost always works
• Every formatting option I had used in MS Office was also present in LibreOffice
• Professors accepted work I prepared in LibreOffice and exported as PDF to guarantee that my formatting stays intact
• Students and professors almost always used Google Docs for collaborative work

From experience, a moderately-formatted document with images will survive about 3 round trips between MS Office and LibreOffice before something breaks (things on the page get completely rearranged or get stuck and can’t be moved or deleted).

And despite having used LibreOffice for several years now, I still feel like I’m having a stroke when I see the default interface. For sanity, either set the user interface (under View menu) to tabbed or sidebar, or customize the toolbar to match that of Google Docs.

I didn’t

It’s also likely that the mSATA slot is bottlenecked since it runs at SATA II speeds while the 2.5 bay runs at SATA III speeds. This becomes noticeable with heavy swapping or flatpak updates. I found this out the hard way because I want my boot drive on my 256 GB mSATA instead of the 2 TB SSD that I use for media and backups.

I’m also considering this when it comes time for me to update. I would:

• Throw a spare SSD or equal or greater size into a USB enclosure
• Clone my boot drive to it using Clonezilla
• Remove the original boot drive to avoid UUID collisions
• Boot off the spare SSD and perform the update

Limitations

• Debian with XFCE: I want all of my Linux machines, both older and newer, fast and slow, to be consistent, with the GUI customized to my taste. I accept that I will miss out on whatever security benefits Wayland or distros like secureblue may provide.

• Networking: In the grand scheme of things, I know jack shit about networking. OPNsense, Pi-Hole, VPN, etc. would probably help my cause but I have yet to implement many network-based measures.

• Corporate conveniences: There are colleagues I need to reach with Whatsapp or SMS and there is software for my job that requires Windows. I try to sequester all of this among my work devices.

All of my frequently-used computers on Linux have “hardened Debian”

• hardened to the best of my ability according to Madaidan, with compromises to avoid obstructing day-to-day work
• LUKS encryption
• MAC randomization
• Mullvad DNS
• Hyper-threading disabled
• Rootless Xorg
• Firewall defaulting to deny
• unattended-upgrades
• LibreWolf
• Passwords in KeePass

Personal devices

• Desktop: The usual software. Non-FOSS components are mostly gaming-related.

• Server: Jellyfin, NAS, Local LLM / Stable Diffusion, and secondary workstation, each hosted on LAN in their own VMs. SSH password authentication disabled. Would like to set up a VPN so I can access it away from home someday.

• Backups: weekly to server, which is pulled to an offline encrypted 8TB disk about monthly. Repeat for the off-site disk that I store in a drawer at work.

Phone:

• Pixel with GrapheneOS and FOSS apps only
• Messaging primarily using Molly (Signal client)
• Email from important work and family contacts forwarded to my inbox on PurelyMail
• Looking to get a non-KYC eSIM once I learn how to pay in Monero
• Mullvad DNS

The “DMZ”

• Tablet: Samsung Tab A7 Lite received as a gift. Installed an AOSP GSI ROM (no Google Play services or GApps), mostly used as a NewPipe and travel device.

• Laptop: ThinkPad X230 with Coreboot and soft-disabled Intel ME. Also hardened Debian with the usual software, nearly all FOSS components with the exception of intel-microcode and the VGA option BIOS. I say it’s the DMZ since personal stuff resides here, but most of my work also ends up here. Logged in to work-related websites and email in a separate user profile for LibreWolf.

“Work” devices (for context, work has BYOD policy and does not provide devices for us to bring home)

• Laptop: can’t be bothered anymore to fuss with Windows VMs or debloating that go stale twice a year, so I just bring a separate lightweight ThinkPad with full-fat Windows for everything that requires it. While some proprietary software packages support Linux, I’ll also just throw the Windows versions on this laptop.

• Backup Phone (unused for now): Samsung XCover Pro with removable battery, waiting for the day I encounter apps that demand a stock version of Android. When not in use, the battery is removed.

• Occasional check of social media also takes place on one of these devices, though through the browser rather than an app.

Phone:

• Old Pixel with GrapheneOS
• Nothing I use really needs Google Play services
• One user profile for work apps, including proprietary 2FA and Slack
• Another user profile for various proprietary apps that aren’t necessarily work-related, but that I’m not entirely comfortable having on my personal phone.

I would rather meet bona fide rightists than pot-stirrers like OP

Nothing yet. This came about before I learned to use email aliases, so I created a couple accounts in fear of being correlated across shopping sites and other services. Though at no point did I consume more than 500 MB across my accounts, the limit for one free account. Not that this exonerates me, but I’d imagine heavy use across free accounts would raise suspicions sooner.

If anyone at Proton is reading this, my apologies and many thanks for graciously providing these accounts for free the past several years. I’ll stop leeching resources once I finish migrating to my new email provider.