Surveillance over (not from) the governments would be fine. I am all for it, if the politicians had to wear body cams 24/7, and the people could watch over them and make an informed decision on who to vote for.

If that’s not optional, I’d have to leave Firefox for something else.

You could try Geany for small projects like that.

If you’re on mobile, are you using Gboard or the like?

I am pretty sure that every data they ever gathered about you is still there, just marked as hidden. Data is their currency; you don’t throw that away.

Microsoft could pull this off nicely. One nice foggy morning in the UK, and all Windows boxes go BSOD … Hmm, I think, they do that anyway, most of the time, don’t they.

I set it like this in .vimrc

set clipboard=unnamedplus

But when I yank anything, I cannot insert it somewhere else with ctrl-c.

Of all of these things, i only miss a shared clipboard between Vim and the rest of the system (or vice versa). That would be rad!

Not sure, but maybe a Casio G-Shock? You’ll likely still be spied on, but maybe not by the US? Personally, i wear a Huawei, oh well.

My graphical goto tool is double commander, so lists. In the terminal, it’s either ls -hal, fzf or mc, depending on use case.

Sounds illegal, though…

‘whoami’ and ‘who am i’ are two different things. Try it out.

Something like this?

alias ls=“who am i >> /var/log/intruder.log && logout”
alias l=“/usr/bin/ls”

How about starting your own sub - here or on Reddit? Then you are the mod.

I think, on a personal Linux desktop, more damage is done by malicious browser extensions than by actual viruses or root kits. So you could classify it as social engineering, maybe.

Once, someone sent me an Amazon link for baby nappies, and fool me clicked on it. Now Amazon showed boomer me baby nappies suggestions for the next six months. AI at its best… These things annoy me, so I try to avoid being tracked whenever reasonably possible.

OTOH, I am old and hope to not live long enough to experience any rogue government or whatever else persecuting me for having clicked on a baby nappies link years ago; so my threat model is short term only. I keep my privacy to a level, where it hopefully prevents as many annoyances as possible, but does not hamper what I am doing online too much. If I was younger, I’d likely do more.

I think, the “threadiverse” is more akin to the old (also federated, just in a different way) Usenet / Newsgroups than web-forums. So “ScoopGroups”, maybe?

SUSE Linux, back in the 1990s. Because you could buy it for cheap, and you got not only the huge stack of floppy disks to install it from, but also a set of thick fat detailed handbooks (these things made from paper full of pictures and letters and glued together, like your grandparents may have had). I spent many nights with them books instead of my wife…

It was a bear to install and terribly complicated to configure back then; at least for me. But in the end, I had a nice server running well for a while.

Back in the mid 2000s, we (my company) were on Windows, including three Windows 2000 Server licences. And we needed to upgrade. But it wasn’t sustainable for the small company to pay for all these licences, when a free option was available.

So we slowly moved all applications over to cross-platform alternatives, Outlook to Thunderbird (called Firebird in those days), office to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice), Internet Explorer to Firefox, Corel Draw to Gimp, Company software like accounting to a XAMPP stack etc.

Once this was established and running well, we just changed the underlying platform from Windows to Ubuntu/Gnome, cursed for a few days and went on with our lives. And it worked for the past 20 years and counting. Now I am cursing, when I am forced to use Windows and can’t find my butt using it.

So the mindset, if you want, was that of methodical planning and going slow, step by step. This is likely different if you’re a gamer, or you need some very specialised apps, but for me, this was not the case. The games that I play, like Sudoku and Solitaire, work on any platform.

I wonder whether Linux Mint will follow suit?