I thought it was not recommended to run on bare metal? There are some other obscure OSes that can run fine on bare metal (although Serenity is not really obscure in the foss space, only in the mainstream)

We’re not talking about the OP. We’re talking about someone suggesting smart glasses as an accessibility tool for facial recognition.

You don’t just wear glasses in public. You wear them in private settings too.

Unfortunately it’s unlikely for this to be implemented in a privacy-respecting way. Arguably, even if it never “phones home”, it’s always going to be a more risky option—e.g. police can seize the glasses and see who you’ve seen, whereas they can’t seize your brain and see what faces you’ve seen. You might be fine with that risk, but will everyone you ever meet be fine with it?

I switched from Proton to Mullvad and I would highly recommend switching in that direction, not vice versa. Proton was unreliable for me for starters. And Mullvad requires no personal info—not even an email address—and you can pay in cash. Mullvad “just works” for me, whereas I had connectivity issues with Proton semi-regularly. You may also have more privacy/political concerns with Proton e.g. them handing over a French climate activist to the police, or some people take issue with the CEO’s comments on Trump. Mullvad has no such incidents like the former, and I’m not aware of Mullvad involving itself in politics beyond privacy politics.

But for piracy specifically, you may want port forwarding. I’ve heard AirVPN recommended for that reason, so if you’re looking to switch, you might want to look into that instead of Mullvad.

I do not know what an init system is. I don’t know what systemd is. I do not know what Devuan is. I do not know what SysV init is. I do not know what OpenRC is. I do not know what runit is.

If you are a “noob” as per this community suggests, you don’t need to know any of these things. You don’t ever need to know what these are in order to use a computer. You only need to know about these things if you want to be a poweruser/nerd.

I vaguely understand what debian is. Although I would be the wrong person it explain it. I know it’s the type of linux that ubuntu is. And I know it seems like every disto I look at says it’s based on ubuntu, and therefore is debian since ubuntu is based on debian.

What I don’t understand is if everyone hates ubuntu, but ubuntu is based on debian, but nobody hates debian, why is everything based on ubuntu and not debian?

Debian and Ubuntu are “distributions” of Linux. Linux is just a kernel, not a full operating system—that means it’s a low-level piece of software that allows the OS to communicate with your hardware. So there are Linux “distributions” which are full operating systems that contain the Linux kernel but will also contain an entire operating system, so everything else your computer needs to run.

People dislike Ubuntu for the decisions it’s made that make it different from Debian, e.g. its promotion of Snap. Debian is a pretty good choice for first Linux distro. I’d probably recommend either Linux Mint or maybe Fedora KDE—both widely used and supported, with communities where you can seek support, and they come with desktop environments pre-installed that should be familiar and easy to use for users coming from Windows.

You might want to look up in a search engine “how to install linux” for articles covering a lot of this stuff, including advice on starter distros. And the distro you choose will have their own installation guide—follow that in the last instance.

From the sounds of it, it’s just a hobby project for fun for OP. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing something just for the sake of it.

I didn’t mean it as nitpicking. I was just responding to you?

I think FDE is different to full partition. If your home partition is encrypted but not your root partition, that’s not FDE. I would say FDE is when the partition that you mount to / is encrypted.

I don’t like JS either but it’s not a big deal. You can whitelist sites with noscript.

For Q2: I would recommend your native layout. I’ve not tried US QWERTY but I tried DVORAK many moons ago because it’s “better”, but I found it’s better to be good at one layout than to try split your efforts. If you’re not doing something where speed is crucial, just use what you’re used to. If your keyboard layout is not good for your purposes (e.g. typing a character you need often for the programming language you’re using, is difficult on your layout), you could remap individual characters or maybe there’s a layout similar to your native one but better for programming. But no need to use US QWERTY specifically. Also as another commenter said, typing speed isn’t that crucial for programming. I find I’m always limited by thinking speed, not typing speed.

Yeah the intro read as weird to me. If you’re writing for a programming crowd there’s no need to explain all that, and anyway the rest of the article wasn’t about the stack/heap distinction.

I think once Forgejo gets ActivityPub integration working it will really help for migration. I know federated platforms like Mastodon struggled with adoption because I think a lot of folks struggled to wrap their heads around the fact that there’s no “default instance” and they have to choose their own instance, but hopefully for a programming crowd that won’t be an issue. It would massively help with the “well I could move to a different website but there’s no obvious second choice I can move to” issue; you can just head to any Forgejo instance and interact with any other federated instance.

Simply make everything an array of bytes

Do you live with other people? It sounds like someone who lives with you (or otherwise has physical access to the device) is playing a prank on you, given the fact that the issue returned a day after a reinstall. Maybe they are booting into a live USB and installing the prank software that way.

Try reinstalling with full disk encryption maybe, so that they can’t just modify your files like that.

I do this (self host mail, have a script to encrypt incoming unencrypted mail) and have not had problems. There are lots of guides online; here’s a good one: https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-mail-sever-ubuntu

It doesn’t replace E2EE. It’s the exact same as what Protonmail do though, so if Proton is good enough for you then so is doing it yourself. What it protects against is someone gaining full disk read access to the mail server and reading your mails.

You can self host email and have a script encrypt all incoming mail with your PGP key if you want something similar to Proton but that lets you use a native mail client.

Similar experience. Non rolling release are always so volatile with version upgrades. Never had a major regression from rolling release if I update regularly.

Not to victim blame but if you are entering sensitive info into chatgpt, I think that’s on you…