Another plus in favor of posteo is they will never delete or block access to your account even if you stop paying (you just won’t be able yo send emails).

That’s a very unique trait amongst the privacy focused providers. In comparison, mailbox.org will recycle email addresses after a certain amount of time of not paying, potentially allowing someone to impersonate you by claiming your old address.

Hm, death could be interpreted in a number of ways.

Does Almalinux’s 10 year support represent death by being unchanging, stagnation?

Or should it mean a distro that is on death’s door, with less and less developers working on it each year? Solus, Mageia and OpenMandriva might qualify there.

Void Linux seems fitting from the name alone, though otherwise doesn’t really go with the theme.

Just want to mention DavinciBox, which makes installing Davinci on any distro a pretty seamless and hands-off affair.

Personally I’d recommend Linux Mint, as you’re likely to have a very positive experience with it.

Fedora hasn’t been all roses for my particular setup either, since they fully dropped X11 in the latest version, but my hardware combo isn’t viable yet with Wayland, ultimately making me land on Linux Mint (which has been pretty dang nice).

I also tried OpenSUSE slowroll before trying Fedora, which I love the concept of, but an update on that seemed to bork my system (second monitor would remain blank upon booting), which made me a bit skeptical of its claims of extra stability over normal Tumbleweed.

I haven’t experienced any friction from DNF, so personally I don’t see it as a con. I just think Fedora has a useful middle ground between new packages and stability.

Fedora is a solid middle ground between Arch and Debian.

Even with the automated testing, Tumbleweed will still sometimes introduce problems with updates. They mitigate the risk of that with Snapper, so you can rollback to a previous state if things get borked.

Personally, though I’ve tried it a few times, I just can’t get on with openSuse distros.

1. Updating is really slow since Zypper does one task at a time, compared to DNF or Apt which can download and install multiple packages at once
2. Updating is particularly slow in the US, since most opensuse servers are in the EU
3. Yast is powerful for enterprise/sysadmins, but is damn clunky to use for everyday normal stuff (IMHO).

I’d honestly just go for Fedora if you want up-to-date packages, perhaps Nobara if you want it more pre-setup for gaming and codecs. It’s much more slick overall.

Hm, isn’t Airvpn based in Italy?

For those needs, an old used thinkpad off ebay would be pretty ideal. Affordable, well built and reliable. Only downside is I think the smallest model is a 12"

Perhaps a Chromebook known for being compatible with being flashed with Linux?

I’m still rocking a 2011 38" vizio from Costco. Does everything I need, nice and dumb, as a TV should be. A bigger and higher def TV won’t bring me more happiness, so I’ll be sticking with it until it quits and I can’t fix it.

Depends on your needs. Matrix can mostly replace the functionality of Discord, which makes it stand out despite its flaws.

If you just need group chat, encryption, and 1 on 1 calls, XMPP is easily self hosted and highly scalable.

SimpleX seems to be another decent option that’s decentralized.

This post on the subject of privacy may be relevant.

Email and calendar: Tuta, Posteo, Mailbox.org, Disroot

Passwords: Bitwarden, KeepassXC

Drive: Filen.io

AFAIK, GrapheneOS supports the Pixel Tablet, which is probably the only truly secure android tablet on the market.

If you’re willing to sacrifice some UX, there are some Linux tablets. A cheaper option could be a 2-in-1 chromebook that allows installing Linux.

Otherwise, you could try to degoogle your Samsung tablet by installing LineageOS on it, if it’s supported.

I consider odysee to be a longer term pump’n’dump scam for the reasons outlined here:

https://slrpnk.net/post/11302039/9749921

Personally I wouldn’t place much trust in them.

I’m actually going to suggest; Yes, possibly. But for a very specific reason.

While much of social media isn’t ultra necessary, federated social media could be quite essential to collectivising and resisting state and corporate manipulation and propaganda. All other forms of media and news are corporate or state controlled, and thus can construct and project false narritives that are beneficial to their aims, much to our collective detriment.

Social media has become the dominant way that many, possibly most people, see the news, discuss such news with eachother from people around the globe, and build a picture of what’s going on outside of their isolated part of the world. I think Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent gives a pretty fantastic argument on the importance of citizen controlled media, and federated social media is about as citizen controlled as it can possibly get. It’s non-corporate self-hosted open source software as far as the eye can see! It’s not perfect, but holy shit this is as powerful as a tool to diseminate ideas and information on a grassroots level that we’ve ever had, and we should not underestimate its usefulness in the coming decade.

An excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45”, an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn’t rise up:

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Dude.

This is the same guy who, just a couple weeks ago, publically endorsed the AfD (the far right nazi party in germany), saying “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

For context, this AfD (That is a real ad by them). Look familar?

Surely you must see these aren’t just a series of unfortunate coincedences?

I agree entirely, especially as modern systems massively ballooning the required knowledge and skill.

However, I do think there could’ve perhaps been a happy medium, where OS’s retained and continued to develop a simple, built in way to program easily and without setup to retain the spirit of what BASIC provided.

I guess I’m imagining a sort’ve evolved version of Hypercard, which seemed to be on the path of providing something like that.

The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call “programming for the rest of us”. HyperCard has made it possible for people to do things they wouldn’t have ever thought of doing in the past without a lot of heavy-duty programming. It’s let a lot of non-programmers, like me, into that loop.

David Lingwood, APDA

There seems to be Decker as a spiritual successor, which is pretty neat.