I use debian btw

Dual-booting, modding, or debloating Windows. And anything but the LTSC edition. It’ll all fall apart within a year given the nature of Windows 10 updates. Projects like Ameliorated, while well-intentioned, are a security mess waiting to happen since you have to disable any and all updates.

So I bit the bullet on an extra laptop, exiled any Windows-specific projects, files, etc. to it and slapped on a copy of LTSC. I consider the machine compromised and only use it for what absolutely depends on Windows.

A few years ago, when I cared little about my privacy, I would fancy buying a new car. Thanks to privacy concerns, I became proud to have my old car, which also happens to be highly repairable.

Ideally:

• Well-organized set of frequently-used and recent files on my laptop
• Media and old documents on my NAS, synced to an external hard drive I can remove for travel
• Each device/non-backup drive/USB drive/SD card backed up to its own folder on a large external drive
• A duplicate of said drive from another manufacturer
• An archival copy of my documents and photos (encrypted on microSD ofc) that I carry with me
• Additional copy of the most important stuff on M-Discs

Reality:

• Controlled mess on my laptop
• Dumping ground of random YT videos and CD rips on my NAS
• A well-curated external drive prepared in my pandemic free time
• An external drive with somewhat periodic backups of my devices alongside every unsorted file. I worry that some file paths have grown too long
• Duplicate of the two above on one large external drive
• Another external drive with files and backups of dubious usefulness that I refuse to delete
• An outdated copy of my documents and photos on an everyday carry microSD
• A stack of unused M-Discs

“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.

Graphing and familiar commands and syntax for those who grew up using TI calculators

yt-dlp. Too many options to remember and look up every time, but all useful and missing from GUIs when you just want to dowload audio or ‘good enough’ quality video in batches without re-encoding.

While nmtui is perfectly fine for the CLI-uninitiated, I sometimes wonder why the nm-connection-editor window doesn’t provide the same level of functionality.

A metal 128 GB USB on my keychain next to the U2F key

16 GB Ventoy partition with:

• Clonezilla (‘deploying’ my system image and backups)
• Mint Debian Edition (everything needed to test and recover my Debian systems)
• Debian netinstall
• Various manuals and reference documents
• Portable CrystalDiskInfo and VeraCrypt for Windows
• Dumping grounds for files that I intended to transfer between machines, particularly the XP retro gaming rig
• An optimistic IF-FOUND.TXT
• KeePass
• Previously Windows, until once upon a time, I booted into WinRE via Ventoy, got confused between X:, C:, and whatever else, and proceeded to nuke my USB instead of another disk. The Windows installer lived on its own USB happily ever after.

And a LUKS encrypted partition in the remaining space with more documents and a backup of almost all of my photos.

To make it clear, I would still use Linux with GNOME/libadwaita over Windows any day. Yes, some themes are ridiculous and will be a nightmare for any developer to work around. That said, I can’t help but be concerned about the coming demise of theming with the way GTK is going.

What first pushed me to start exploring Linux was when Windows 8 forced the Metro theme down our throats. My time with Linux would have started three years later if M$ had kept Windows 7 theming options - that’s how important a customizable, sensible theme is to me.

I’m glad that I don’t have to do that again since there are DE options that do insist on keeping theming alive.

Is DivestOS any better in this respect?

On a file share, a notes directory with each category as a subdirectory, and plain text files for each note. Accessible from my computers and phone.

On my laptop, the launcher for my text editor (Pluma) points to a bash script that creates a blank text file YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts and opens that file with Pluma. If it already exists, YYYYMMDD_text_1, or whatever increment is created. That’s mostly to take advantage of Pluma’s autosave feature, which only works with already saved documents. Then I save the document to the file share if it’s worth keeping.

ThinkPad X230 with 9 cell, 16 GB RAM, total 1TB storage, and an Atheros NIC. A bit limiting at times, but I ‘outsource’ heavier tasks to my much more powerful desktop. I’m quite uncompromising with laptop design and ‘ergonomics’, so I’m trying to piece together a custom laptop based around the Framework mainboard before the X230 no longer meets my demands.

For testing stuff on Windows and work stuff that requires it, an X1 Carbon Gen 7 with 16GB RAM and 256 GB storage.

First experimented when Windows 8 took away Aero Glass and other customizations. Committed when I had to fight with Windows 10’s twice-yearly feature updates that messed with my settings and wasted space with new programs I didn’t ask for. I now keep a separate laptop just to run Windows when I have to.

Distrohopping was mostly confined to my first year using Linux. Deepin (kept crashing) -> UbuntuDDE (went unmaintained) -> Arch Linux -> Debian. Settled on Debian Stable since it just works, I haven’t been using bleeding-edge hardware, and I don’t like things changing around too often (see my Chicago95 rice).

• Room phone: A clear 90’s phone

• Cell Phone: Some sort of non-folding T9 phone, it wasn’t a Nokia though

• Smartphone: Knockoff iPhone 6

• Computer: Pentium III desktop with 256 MB RAM, 30 GB HDD, Windows Me. It was also the family computer. Later upgraded to 1GB RAM and Windows 2000

• Computer (my own): 10.6" notebook with a 1 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB HDD, and Windows XP (later upgraded to 2GB RAM)

I also had a netbook with an Atom Z3735F and 2GB RAM, albeit an Ideapad 100s. The 32 bit versions of Debian Stable 11 and 12 worked out of the box for me.

If you are at the terminal, try running apt install grub-efi-ia32-bin before installing grub.

No shame in that. My phone’s at 305 tabs. I’ll look random things up throughout the day and sometimes I’ll find a longer article that I’d like to read later. But I hate reading on my phone. So it just hangs out until my next tab purge, which is perhaps a yearly event.

More or less replicated the desktop layout I had used throughout childhood, sans desktop icons

• Debian 12 stable
• XFCE + Chicago95
• Chicago95 black cursors
• Helvetica bitmap font
• Not shown: wdm login and slock screen locker
• Running on an X230T with classic keyboard mod to complete the look