Snake case. I find it the easiest to read.

Well it’s now a reality: https://monogr.ph/66add1680f119badfa65686f/

I’ve been on Mullvad with lemmy.ml and never had problems.

Thunderbird shows it for a at every startup

Honestly didn’t realise till you pointed that out. I’m so used to seeing it that it doesn’t register to me what it’s saying anymore. Probably for the best that KDE only does it once a year; if it were daily I’m sure it wouldn’t even register to people that it’s asking for donations.

Do you just need to write markdown? Plenty of text editors have a vim mode. Not sure if there’s any lightweight ones that do the markdown preview alongside a vim mode; I know IntelliJ-based IDEs have a vim mode and can preview markdown, but that’s not exactly a lightweight solution, and only the community edition is open source.

But also what exactly is it you’re looking for that Vim can’t do? I use Vim for writing pretty much everything. I use Vim for markdown and it works fine. Markdown is already pretty readable as a text file so I don’t feel the need for a previewer or anything like a rich text editor (but also there are plenty of markdown editors out there if you just want to edit markdown in a RTE).

Youtube doesn’t seem to inhibit idle for me for some reason, so my screen would always turn off with swayidle while watching youtube videos. So I made my lockscreen script (which is called by swayidle)

if [ "$(playerctl status)" = "Playing" ]; then
    exit 0
else
    exec "/path/to/lockscreen/script"
fi

(lockscreen script was just swaylock called with a bunch of arguments)

Not super crazy compared to some of the things people are saying in the comments, but also definitely not how you’re meant to handle idle inhibition when media is playing lol

I think your question is answered by the thread you linked. Is there something in particular you don’t understand?

GNU/the FSF says that GrapheneOS does not qualify as free software (which is true, it’s not completely FLOSS as per the FSF’s definition—the linked GNU article classifies plenty of popular Linux distros we consider to be FOSS as non-free, btw, they’re not singling out Graphene), and GrapheneOS is saying they don’t want to fit the FSF’s definition of free software because it would mean a lack of security (which is also true; they need proprietary firmware updates from Google). The FSF has a strict definition of free software which a lot of software does not meet, and usually an entire operating system would only meet the FSF’s definition out of a deliberate, conscious, ideological decision to exclude all non-free software. In their article they even list Debian as a distro which no longer meets their standards, despite Debian being known for their strict policy around only including FOSS in their repos.

This is an instance of two different entities (GNU and GrapheneOS) having fundamentally different goals (one values a strict definition of free software at all costs, one values security at all costs). You are more than welcome to do things GNU’s way if you don’t like GrapheneOS’s way, or vice versa.

I think, when you explain things to people (i.e. in instances where it’s not an absence of knowledge that’s the problem), the vast majority of people know we’re correct, but are held back by convenience. They’re embedded into the Google ecosystem or whatever, and it is a pain in the ass to migrate. There are many popular services for which there isn’t a 1:1 private alternative. I can openly and confidently say that I sacrifice some convenience for privacy, and to me it is worth it. But other people, while they agree that they don’t like being spied on, are used to being spied on and therefore have a “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude. They’re already using spyware and it’s not had an immediately obvious acute consequence for them, so there’s not really any turning point at which they would go “this is enough” and change.

I think so long as they’re aware, if they do value privacy, over time they should slowly replace the things they use. Also, some of my friends get Signal just to speak to me since I’m not really on anything else (unless they want to email me lol), so that kind of effect may push them in the right direction.

If your brother doesn’t care though, he just doesn’t care. Privacy is actually very straightforward: it’s creepy for someone to be spying on me and watching my every move, therefore I take precautions to make that difficult for people wanting to spy on me. You don’t need to convince people that being spied on is creepy. They know that, and are stopped by inertia, which they can only overcome on their own. I don’t think it’s worth nagging them about it when they already know what is to be known.

If you mean what made me uninstall Windows, it was actually just not being able to do anything I wanted to do on Windows. I was already using WSL for most basic things and tried to set Windows up to be as similar to a Linux distro as possible eg only installing things with a command line package manager and looking into trying to get it to behave like a tiling window manager.

The biggest things were not being able to use some of my preferred software, e.g. my preferred PDF reader Zathura, and just having no clue what any of the commands were whenever I had to use PowerShell or CMD. I only really knew how Unix-like systems worked and was frustrated with my lack of familiarity with Windows and how their OS works.

The only reason why I kept a Windows partition was for gaming, but at this point Proton is so good there’s really no need for a Windows partition. And I rarely play video games these days anyway.

If you mean why I started using Linux, no reason, I’ve just always used it from a young age.

oh noooooo not the copyright infringement!

I think you misunderstand what Arch is. You absolutely do not assemble the entirety of the OS from scratch. You don’t compile anything during an Arch install—you install pre-compiled binaries. And you don’t actually have an awful lot of OS freedom in terms of what gets installed. If you wanted to use, say, openrc+musl+busybox+dracut, Arch wouldn’t be for you, as Arch uses systemd+glibc+gnu+mkinitcpio (You can try to replace these but these are what Arch uses by default; if you’re wanting to change these things, maybe just use a different distro). Arch just doesn’t install a display manager (you don’t need one; I don’t use one), any kind of graphical session (you technically don’t need one either, but I assume the vast majority of desktop users want a graphical session), or a bootloader. You can install all of those things yourself. Assuming you want all three of those things, that’s probably just three packages you install, and the OS doesn’t install for you, so that you can pick them yourself.

Arch doesn’t have an installer insofar as you install it with shell commands, but also the actual install itself is just one pacstrap command which installs a full OS for you in one command.

If you’re wanting to build an OS entirely from scratch, you may want to look into Linux from Scratch [disclaimer: I have not done LFS]. I don’t know of anyone who actually daily drives LFS though, as you wouldn’t have a package manager which would put most users off.

In all my years of not using WhatsApp this has never happened to me lol. At best I’ve gotten some people to message me individually on Signal but not entire groups

Notesnook is working on making their sync server self-hostable so you might just want to self-host once that’s available. Otherwise if it’s just down short-term just a text editor and markdown? You can import markdown files to Notesnook once it’s back up for you.

Notesnook has been working fine for me, not sure why some users are having issues and some not.

For context, my threat model doesn’t need to account for real people breaking in and accessing my computer, the damage would be very contained.

I mean if you don’t have open ssh ports on your computer or whatever I don’t think you need a strong password, given that you’re not concerned about physical access. I would say that at the very least have a reasonably secure root password (/user password if you’re a sudoer/anyone else who can get root permissions with your user account) because if you end up with some malware on your computer that can, say, enter passwords, you don’t want it to be ridiculously easy to bruteforce.

Yeah I agree I don’t want bleeding edge hence why I won’t be using anything Arch-based (despite the fact that Arch-based systems are the ones I’m most familiar with, I’m typing this on an Artix system rn). But there is definitely a middle ground between bleeding edge and outdated, and I imagine a server should want to be somewhere between the middle and outdated, depending on how they balance stability and security.

I’m also not categorically opposed to using Debian. Ubuntu was my first Linux distro so I’m at least more familiar with Debian-based distros than most other popular server distros. I was just thinking probably not Debian because of how old its packages are and that I’m fairly concerned with security.

Like I said, LibreOffice Draw can edit PDFs. Try it out and see if it’s suitable for your needs

LibreOffice Draw can edit PDFs. For just a pdf reader, I use Zathura, though it may not be for you since it’s very keyboard-based so might be confusing to someone coming from Windows. I think Cinnamon must come with a default pdf reader right?

I just use Mullvad VPN’s default DNS servers (with ad blocking, tracker blocking, and malware blocking)

Ah yeah, I’ve heard that offices are rolling out a new role of office cumdump. Glad to hear from someone already in the role

Most of my files are different across machines because of different themes etc. The only dotfiles I have synced across machines are my .zshrc, .gitconfig, .ideavimrc (not my actual vimrc because it has some machine-specific theming), and .p10k.zsh. I have them all in a folder synced with syncthing and then I symlink ~/.zshrc to e.g. ~/dotfiles/.zshrc.