Every day I feel more justified in keeping my 1990s car running.

(I’d also like to walk or take public transit, but the infrastructure here is car dependent)

I can attest that having full control over a mini PC feels great compared to Android TV, if you have rather niche media consumption habits. Someone in my family had below their TV a laptop hooked up to an external drive full of local media, a DVD drive, and a crappy Android TV box only ever used to play YouTube videos. Replaced it all with an old SFF PC, put GNOME with 175% scaling on it, with a mini wireless keyboard to control it.

But as others have commented, a Linux setup falls apart as soon as you want to watch the mainstream streaming services.

Honestly no idea. I could perchance team up with trustworthy people to form some self-sufficient community, otherwise it’s just a matter of time before succumbing to the elements or other people. Would work on my fitness a bit more if I knew ahead of time the world would become like that.

No idea about Honeyhell stuff, but last time I was stuck with something that needed wifi to work, I bought a cheap used router, made an access point just for that device, and never connected the router to the internet.

I’d say go for it. I can attest that it’s a very polished experience and the GrapheneOS devs go at length to ensure that their work is both secure and reliable. Just make sure it’s the factory unlocked variant so you can unlock the bootloader. Any apps that require regular Android can be put on a separate phone.

I will admit, I miss the smooth graphics of Virtualbox. It’s quite evident with dragging windows around or playing a video inside a VM. Don’t want to touch Oracle stuff anymore though. Anyone here manage to get that working on virt-manager?

The way I’ve seen people around me use the dryer, for sure. High heat will ruin clothes more than anything else, especially if it continues to run after everything had dried out.

Back in university, we had timed dryers that could only do either high heat or tumble dry low for an hour. Rooms were too humid and cramped to air dry. Of course, I wasn’t going to spend more money waiting for low heat to do its work. Clothes came out bone dry and metal zippers scalding hot. Only the large towels held up, everything else noticeably faded and thinned over a couple years.

Night and day difference once I got my own place with a condenser dryer. It takes longer, but everything is just dry enough at the end of each cycle. It’s also a bit smaller so I have to air dry parts of larger loads, but either way, my clothes have held up much better ever since.

Functionally, not really. I can get my work done on anything from FVWM to GNOME without a hitch.

Aesthetically, very much. The Chicago95 theme sparks joy and makes work just a bit more enjoyable. KDE and GNOME might have more creature comforts, but I will happily tolerate XFCE because it works well with Chicago95. I don’t even do fresh installs anymore because of the time it takes for me to configure the visual style just right. I’ll instead image from an install I’ve prepared on a VM.

In matters where the judgement of the courts cannot be trusted and I would be jailed either way, I’d rather have the option to wipe my phone.

Counting all injuries to date, I think I would. Probably with a concussion and blood all over me though. My face would be in very rough shape from how much I’ve picked at it in the past.

Between 2 and 3. I’ll show off my Linux setup to friends and preach to the choir, but I won’t rub my choices in the faces of people who use other distros or operating systems.

Because once you fall behind on anything, especially larger expenses, it’s pretty much over. You can’t recover from that unless you submit yourself to loan-hell.

Luigi time

Certainly. I’ve had setups with FVWM as a pure window manager while using XFCE’s xfce4-terminal, MATE’s Caja file browser, and GNOME’s Evolution mail client. Some utilities will pull a few extra dependencies from their native DE, but they won’t get in the way either.

Display manager won’t matter too much, most should be configurable to point at your WM of choice. LightDM integrates nicely with GTK themes, SDDM for Qt, and GDM for GNOME.

The biggest pain point from my experience was configuring power management and lid close actions manually, if using a laptop, since those often are only done for you if you install an entire DE at once.

Also grab a copy of qt5ct if you’re interested in making your Qt packages look more integrated next to GTK packages.

Sorry if this analogy has already been thrown at you dozens of times, I like to think of DNS like an address book for the internet. On a traditional phone, I can’t just type in someone’s name, I have to type in a number. Without DNS, the internet would be like that, accessing any website would require recalling and typing in the IP address. But DNS translates domain names (hence Domain Name System), the part of the URL leading up to .com, .ml, etc, into the proper IP addresses for you.

Unless you self-host, the DNS service is hosted on someone else’s server, and many devices default to communicating with the DNS server in plain text. Which is why you want to trust your DNS provider since they can keep a list of which sites you visit. And DNS over HTTPS mitigates the possibility of interception by encrypting your DNS requests.

Worth it, especially if you are stuck with the phone. Find FOSS equivalents of the built-in utilities (gallery, files, etc.), disable what you can (judiciously) with uad-ng, block the apps that can’t be disabled from network access using Rethink DNS, and use the websites of services on a computer browser instead of apps whenever possible.

It’s still far from what privacy ROMs can do for you, but until you can get a GrapheneOS, etc. friendly phone, taking some action is much better than just letting the spyware run wild.

If OP indeed has the 6th gen iPod Touch, not the classic, it won’t be as rosy as most of the comment here suggest. From my experience replacing the battery on one, you need a hair dryer to loosen the glue and pry off the screen, then a soldering iron to replace the battery since its ribbon cable is directly soldered to the logic board. No storage expansion or custom firmware is available for such iOS devices, as far as I am aware.

Also watch out for low-quality replacement batteries, the first replacement I tried only lasted around an hour on a full charge.

Does that happen to be a variant? I replaced the battery in my aunt’s iPod Touch 6 a few years ago and did have to desolder the battery ribbon cable as it was directly soldered to the logic board. Took a lot of patience just getting to the battery too (screen is held on by glue unlike the clips/tabs in an iPhone).

Also interested to hear other people’s thoughts on reusing these old iOS devices, got one sitting around just collecting dust.

No idea about macOS, but this is something the typical Windows user should notice when switching over to Linux. That is, Windows OOBE gives you a user with administrative privileges by default and therefore won’t prompt you for the password again after logging in, just yes/no dialogs when exercising those admin privileges.

Typing in the password whenever you need root privileges is just part of the security model of Linux and unless for some reason you’re using sudo for everything, people get used to it. Your default user account doesn’t automatically have root privileges, sudo or su mediates that for you. Back when I used Windows, I even had my accounts set up that way, separate admin, daily user account without admin privileges, and prompt for the admin password every time I installed stuff, etc.

Granted, it does leave me with a couple compromises like a login password that is shorter than my disk encryption password so I’m not asked for the full thing every time I sudo and sometimes leaving a terminal with sudo -i hanging around.

Are you keen on using wireless headphones or speakers? If not, I’d go all the way for one without Bluetooth so the thought of present or future vulnerabilities won’t have to cross my mind whenever I use it.

In addition to the Bluetooth vulnerabilities other commenters have mentioned, a recent one affects headsets with Google’s Fast Pair feature. Once forcibly paired, an adversary can register the headset with their Google account. The headset thereafter pings nearby Android devices as part of the find lost devices network and can be used to track the victim.

Not sure if they are in production any more, but I can recommend the old iPod-looking Walkman and Sansa MP3 players. Currently also using a no-name iPod nano clone for the fact that it has a microSD slot, even upgraded the internal battery a few months ago.

Any hidden screws or seams to pry? Is there alternative firmware for it?

If not, I’d imagine your only options would be physically crippling the bluetooth module, porting something like OpenWrt to it, or getting a router that doesn’t force Bluetooth on you.