It bugs me how, within a month after Apple releases a new iPhone, small-time manufacturers put together the hardware, custom ROMs, and tooling to pump out bespoke knock-offs of the latest model. Which sell for maybe $200. While we’re stuck worrying that the development of a new Linux phone, with completely ordinary hardware by today’s standards, might get mismanaged to hell or ends up costing a fortune.

In an academic setting, LibreOffice is a good substitute if:

• Documents will not be passed back and forth between LibreOffice and MS Office for collaboration
• Teachers accept assignments in PDF format

I got away with using LibreOffice in university since:

• Opening and reading files prepared in MS Office almost always works
• Every formatting option I had used in MS Office was also present in LibreOffice
• Professors accepted work I prepared in LibreOffice and exported as PDF to guarantee that my formatting stays intact
• Students and professors almost always used Google Docs for collaborative work

From experience, a moderately-formatted document with images will survive about 3 round trips between MS Office and LibreOffice before something breaks (things on the page get completely rearranged or get stuck and can’t be moved or deleted).

And despite having used LibreOffice for several years now, I still feel like I’m having a stroke when I see the default interface. For sanity, either set the user interface (under View menu) to tabbed or sidebar, or customize the toolbar to match that of Google Docs.

I didn’t

It’s also likely that the mSATA slot is bottlenecked since it runs at SATA II speeds while the 2.5 bay runs at SATA III speeds. This becomes noticeable with heavy swapping or flatpak updates. I found this out the hard way because I want my boot drive on my 256 GB mSATA instead of the 2 TB SSD that I use for media and backups.

I’m also considering this when it comes time for me to update. I would:

• Throw a spare SSD or equal or greater size into a USB enclosure
• Clone my boot drive to it using Clonezilla
• Remove the original boot drive to avoid UUID collisions
• Boot off the spare SSD and perform the update

When maximizing uptime, Debian is the no-fuss way to go.

Well said. LUKS implements AES-256, which is also entrusted by the U.S. government and various other governments to protect data from state and non-state adversaries.

Possibly overestimating the value of the data entrusted to me, but whenever I see that xkcd, I like to think that I at least have the option to remain silent and die with dignity if I really don’t want the contents of my disk out there.

I wish I found a guide like that back when I first made the move to FDE. Regardless, I was adamantly against reinstalling and painstakingly replicating my customizations, so I came up with a hacky way of tacking on FDE.

It went something along the lines of:

1. Shrinking the root partition as much as possible
2. From Live CD, dd root partition to external drive
3. Perform minimal encrypted install of Debian
4. From Live CD, open LUKS container of the newly-installed Debian and overwrite the root partition within with my old root partition.
5. Update fstab, crypttab, initramfs, and grub
6. Cross my fingers and reboot

The text editor shortcut on my taskbar runs a sort of autosave script in ~/.drafts. I wanted my text editor to function more like the one on my phone so I can just jot down random thoughts without going through the whole ritual of naming and saving. It creates YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts (or YYYYMMDD_text_1 etc. if it already exists) and launches Pluma, which I also have configured to autosave every 10 minutes.

The other thing extends beyond Linux itself a bit. I like to joke that I have the most secure NT 4 / Windows 95 lookalike ever put together. Aside from the encrypted and hardened Debian base (/boot is also encrypted), I was in part inspired by Apple’s parts pairing (yikes!). So my coreboot is configured to only accept my boot disk. If it’s swapped out or missing, or if I want to boot something else, it will ask for a password. In the unlikely event my machine gets stolen, the thief must at a minimum reflash the BIOS or replace the motherboard to make it useful again. Idk, it amuses me every time I think about it.

It’s nice getting a glimpse as to what fraction of Linux users are using disk encryption. Full disk encryption is becoming the default on mainstream OSes, but not in most of the Linux installers I’ve encountered. Always made me curious just how many people went out of their way to encrypt their Linux install.

I personally encrypt everything except for VMs already in an encrypted device or USB drives that need to work with non-Linux machines. It’d be interesting to hear what other people’s reasons to encrypt their disks or not are.

Biolinum O for desktop

Liberation Mono for terminal

I’ve used this Windows 10 live image to run the occasional windows-only diagnostic tools and firmware updates: https://github.com/VulpesSARL/MiniNT5-Tools

It doesn’t choke loading GUI programs like the install disc command prompt and doesn’t have any weird blobs except for windows itself.

The level of detail and control in the Properties dialog from the file explorer in Windows. Also its ability to easily search by metadata like the bitrate of media files.

Old hardware indeed, but 768 pixels ought to be enough for any window

“suicide linux”

Looked it up with quotes and the first update in the first search result:

Update 2011-12-26

Someone has turned Suicide Linux into a genuine Debian package. Good show!

:(

It’s nice and easy on the eyes. I conjecture that glossy and matte (as seen here) styles of skeuomorphism gave way to more abstract design since:

• Skeuomorphism is hard to get just right without being excessive and tacky
• Saturated, simple blocks of color pop out more, particularly on the increasingly prevalent mobile UI
• And thus also have better shelf appeal

If it were up to me, the red line would be when buttons and interactive elements are indistinguishable from text. The stock Android settings is probably among the worst offenders in this regard.

What I really miss is light mode that isn’t hated for blinding users and dark mode that doesn’t plunge the user into the void. Those “toolbars” look lovely, perfect for any lighting condition or time of day. I’ve yet to understand why, at present, designers insist on pure white everywhere when it comes to light mode. Maybe everyone is using the night light filter so it doesn’t matter? At least pure black dark mode makes sense for power efficiency on OLEDs.

• Debian stable (w/ XFCE). No-nonsense, excellent community support, well-documented, low-maintenance, and runs on anything so I can expect things to work the same way across all of my machines, old, new(ish), or virtual
• Just flexible enough that I can customize it to my taste but not so open-ended that I have to agonize over every last config
• It’s been around for many years and will be around for many more
• I often entertain the idea of moving to Alpine or even BSD, but I can’t resist the software selection available on Debian

Microsoft shouldn’t revoke license keys unless it’s a leaked VL key being spread around for piracy or the like. The semi-annual major updates seem to count as “versions” like Windows 11 22H2 (now end of service) vs Windows 11 24H2 (current). That said, it’s a poorly worded error message and it doesn’t help that Windows 11 will cry wolf at every opportunity.

Debian Stable. Predictable, low-maintenance, and well-supported. From time to time, I think about switching over to Alpine or even BSD, but the software selection and abundance of Q&A posts for Debian and its derivatives keeps me coming back. Having been a holdout on older Windows versions in the past, I’m quite used to waiting for new features and still amazed at how much easier life is with a proper package manager.