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?

Mine is simple (inspired by Kali Linux, if that’s even correct)
PS1='\[\033[0;32m\]┌──[\t] (\u@\h)-[\w]\n└─$ \[\033[0m\]'

Mastodon or Pixelfed come to mind.

You mean a “contact form?” They’re everywhere.

Yes, I tried to “wget -S” some of that stuff in the Linux console. Yikes!

Yes, personally I use DDG more than Google, but we are in our 70ies, so it would be hard to convince the wife (who has been a dev 40 years ago) to change her habits. I am already looking into SearXNG, though.

I changed the user-agent of my browser to “Error: No browser installed”. Can’t be more unique than that, I guess. That was 30 years ago, though, I don’t think it will hurt me today 😆

Very helpful command it was for those, whose modem had to be rebooted daily back in the day: Have a cron-job open the tray, which in turn was placed strategically so that it would hit the reset button of the modem, then close the tray. And voilà; automatic reboot of the modem. Robotics at its finest!

Apart from fzf that helps me find recently used commands and also files and directories easily, I also use tldr that gives you a simple cheat sheet for every command and very often saves you trawling through endless man pages.

That was my first thought as well.

I use external hard drives. Two of them, and they get rsynced every time something changes, so there’s a copy if one drive should fail. Once a month, I encrypt the whole shebang with gpg and send it off into an AWS bucket.

Terminator for me. It has tiles and tabs and does everything I need.

Not sure, whether it is relevant for this thread, but my phone (POCO F3) does not get any notifications if Google Play Services has no access to the internet. I scratched my head for a while to find out, why I never got them on mobile data. Not sure, what it does, if you disable the store.

Nope, Desktop computer with Linux, Firefox with uBlock, noScript etc.

I’ll look into it, thank you!