I have rescued several laptops that were struggling with Windows by installing Linux, and KDE Plasma is excellent these days. My 7 year old Dell XPS, which had become unusably slow and hot under Windows 11 despite repastes and cleaning, runs OpenSUSE Tumbleweed like it’s a new machine.
I feel the same about KDE and Windows. I only keep Windows for some music production stuff and legacy .NET application maintenance. The rest of the time I avoid it and use Linux and KDE, a far more pleasant experience.
I've been buying these little boxes from AliExpress for years to use as firewalls and routers. My oldest one is almost 9 years old now! OpenBSD installs just fine. Just a BIOS tweak to always boot up after power is restored.
I use one with 6 LAN ports and a fanless 10th gen i5 running OPNsense, and it has worked well for years. It runs many services including Unbound DNS and Suricata with capacity to spare. It’s much better than any consumer router, though I run WiFi separately with an Asus AI Mesh set to AP mode.
The only concerns are that you don’t get BIOS updates, and you don’t know for sure that there’s nothing nasty in the firmware. But then you don’t really know that on consumer routers either.
I just found the general combination of security - mindedness and cheap Chinese hardware curious / amusing.
I think it can make sense, since there are so often vulnerabilities in consumer router firmware, and because those devices are so common the vulnerabilities are profitable to exploit. Running a BSD-based router on a cheap Chinese PC is likely to be better security for the router’s OS and software itself, even if you don’t know for sure about the firmware on the board (which you don’t with consumer routers either, really). Overall you could still have reduced your attack surface compared to a popular consumer router.
Prominent "free-speech absolutist" threatens to sue Jewish anti-hate group because it engaged in free speech he didn't like.
"Elon Musk has threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League after accusing the civil rights group that campaigns against antisemitism and bigotry of trying to “kill” his X social media platform.
"The owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, said the ADL was trying to shut down his company by 'falsely accusing it and me of being antisemitic'."
If your list of enemies includes the ADL, then there's a more-than-reasonable chance that you're an anti-semite.
If there’s one characteristic I’ve found to be widespread among right wingers, it’s black-and-white thinking. They don’t do “sometimes” or “partially” or “60%”. They just do “is” and “is not”. Vaccines either work or they don’t. Immigration is either bad or it’s good. Climate change is either 100% there today or it’s not happening, and if not every climate phenomenon is humans’ doing then none of it is humanity’s fault. Either every government regulation and law is good or government is simply bad. Either everyone gets guns or no one does. They apply this same black-and-white thinking to free speech.
Best Linux Distro Privacy/Usability for a mid level user
What do you think is the best linux distro for a user who wants to migrate from windows in terms of privacy, usability and respect for the FOSS spirit?
Other governments will follow suit, in particular the governments of other Five Eyes countries. The USA has its own anti-encryption act threatening to pass:
Whether or not the corporations agree to this, we need an open-source campaign of disobedience. Keep offering the tools and make them easy to use. The challenge would be getting the software into mass use when most of the public will continue with their backdoored corporate software.
If the corporations would refuse to obey, that would be helpful, but I’m not confident they will, especially when the USA heads in the same direction.