JustARegularNerd

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is my pick.

I've got two study laptops and apart from Tailscale giving me some grief very recently with DNS resolution, I literally haven't had any problems with either machine. Both have been going for 1.5 years.

I like the LMDE route for the DE already having pretty decent defaults and not requiring much tweaking from the get-go. Xfce (as it ships by default in Debian) absolutely works, but I end up spending an hour theming it and adding panel applets and rearranging everything so that it... ends up looking similar to Cinnamon anyway, because default Xfce looks horrible in my opinion

...and this is how you keep people using mainstream services instead of FOSS / privacy respecting ones.

The actual answer is convenience and not wanting to make their life more difficult, which brings ignorance into it.

Not everyone is ready to flip their whole digital life upside down based on the privacy principles you and I care about - that's why I too use the approach the parent commenter mentioned, and I'm also okay with people who just won't make any switches, because while I don't support it, I understand it.

The long and short of it is don't think of this as "us vs them" - we're all people together and understanding and gently making people aware of these privacy principles and giving them realistic private solutions is, in my opinion, way more effective than saying "fuck 'em"

This isn't the first time they've had an ad supported Office for free. Anyone remember Office 2010 Starter, that shipped with only Word and Excel and also had a permanent ad banner.

I no longer have any complaints about Beszel. Thank you!

"The hackers gained initial access using a stolen account credential that lacked multi-factor authentication security, according to UnitedHealth."

Absolutely unacceptable. I might be easier to forgive them if some zero day was used, but that's so easily preventable.

That account presumably had some level of privileges, the policy should have been to enforce MFA, and if the account was inactive, disable it until the user needs it at which point set up MFA again.

Seconded. My only complaint (which this might already be a feature I haven't found yet) is it doesn't seem to support multiple drives. But yes, it is shit easy to set up and has a beautiful UI

Seems that everyone else has said the same as what I mostly already do, but I'll just make a couple comments on the student communication topic:

My university already created a Microsoft 365 account for my university user, which included Teams. For my threat profile, I don't consider Teams a terrible option if I'm only using it for study purposes, so I've communicated over that for assignments before (web UI only).

Otherwise like others have suggested, some students are open to something like Signal (a fellow student got me onto it years ago) if you kindly ask and mention upfront that it just requires a phone number. I did an assignment over Signal with two other students, so it's very doable.

Everything but the fingerprint readers just works.

Good to know the struggle for the fingerprint reader wasn't just me. I did "get it working" but it was extremely hacky and it wasn't what I was after; I only wanted fingerprint for login, not additionally for sudo, but that's not how it set up and I didn't want to spend even more countless hours trying to fix that

Hey guys, my Dad was always a neck bearded Unix admin so I’ve grown up my whole life on FreeBSD, then moving over to Gentoo during my teen years.

I’m starting to have thoughts about switching to Windows given that’s what my new job uses, but I couldn’t find any instructions on compiling Windows outside of very outdated releases like 2000. Also, does anyone know if emacs and htop are compatible, as those are my most used applications?

microsoft-edge-stable_131.0.2903.112-1_amd64.deb

On that ThinkPad, LMDE.

Genuine question because I've been out of the loop on this. I had a Galaxy S5 that only got one major upgrade from Samsung (4.4 to 5.x I believe) but CyanogenMod and later LineageOS took that thing right up to Android 11.

Why can't the same be done with modern phones today? What changed between that old S5 and the Pixel 4a I ultimately sold for going EOL on GrapheneOS?

Edit: apparently I shouldn't compare apples to oranges without so much as quickly checking support for the Pixel 4a..