Cheap MVNO with enough data and good coverage/no outages. The low price comes from somewhere, I guess…

Same here. My mobile provider blocks the standard VPN ports, and also access to other DNS servers, so I am pretty sure, their low price means they are selling my data. Going through a VPN on a non-standard port to my home network, from where I can go out through DNS over https and also a pi-hole, and being protected by my own firewall, gives me the (false?) feeling of an additional layer of security.

I run ClamAV regularly, and it has not found anything on my several systems in the last 20 years. Good to know we’re safe, or are we?

I’m more concerned about rogue browser extensions that may be innocent when you install them, but then change owners, and after an update that you don’t even notice are going to do bad things.

I mainly protect my company secrets by encrypting it and hope for the best. Else, it’s just the normal stuff, that is nobody else’s business. But then, i am glad that i am old and likely won’t have to live in a dystopian place like this world seems to be going towards.

[ condition1 ] && [ condition2 ] && echo "Good" || echo "Bad"

If you’re on mobile, are you using Gboard or the like?

I am pretty sure that every data they ever gathered about you is still there, just marked as hidden. Data is their currency; you don’t throw that away.

Microsoft could pull this off nicely. One nice foggy morning in the UK, and all Windows boxes go BSOD … Hmm, I think, they do that anyway, most of the time, don’t they.

I set it like this in .vimrc

set clipboard=unnamedplus

But when I yank anything, I cannot insert it somewhere else with ctrl-c.

Of all of these things, i only miss a shared clipboard between Vim and the rest of the system (or vice versa). That would be rad!

Not sure, but maybe a Casio G-Shock? You’ll likely still be spied on, but maybe not by the US? Personally, i wear a Huawei, oh well.

My graphical goto tool is double commander, so lists. In the terminal, it’s either ls -hal, fzf or mc, depending on use case.

Sounds illegal, though…

‘whoami’ and ‘who am i’ are two different things. Try it out.

Something like this?

alias ls=“who am i >> /var/log/intruder.log && logout”
alias l=“/usr/bin/ls”

I think, on a personal Linux desktop, more damage is done by malicious browser extensions than by actual viruses or root kits. So you could classify it as social engineering, maybe.

Once, someone sent me an Amazon link for baby nappies, and fool me clicked on it. Now Amazon showed boomer me baby nappies suggestions for the next six months. AI at its best… These things annoy me, so I try to avoid being tracked whenever reasonably possible.

OTOH, I am old and hope to not live long enough to experience any rogue government or whatever else persecuting me for having clicked on a baby nappies link years ago; so my threat model is short term only. I keep my privacy to a level, where it hopefully prevents as many annoyances as possible, but does not hamper what I am doing online too much. If I was younger, I’d likely do more.

SUSE Linux, back in the 1990s. Because you could buy it for cheap, and you got not only the huge stack of floppy disks to install it from, but also a set of thick fat detailed handbooks (these things made from paper full of pictures and letters and glued together, like your grandparents may have had). I spent many nights with them books instead of my wife…

It was a bear to install and terribly complicated to configure back then; at least for me. But in the end, I had a nice server running well for a while.

Back in the mid 2000s, we (my company) were on Windows, including three Windows 2000 Server licences. And we needed to upgrade. But it wasn’t sustainable for the small company to pay for all these licences, when a free option was available.

So we slowly moved all applications over to cross-platform alternatives, Outlook to Thunderbird (called Firebird in those days), office to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice), Internet Explorer to Firefox, Corel Draw to Gimp, Company software like accounting to a XAMPP stack etc.

Once this was established and running well, we just changed the underlying platform from Windows to Ubuntu/Gnome, cursed for a few days and went on with our lives. And it worked for the past 20 years and counting. Now I am cursing, when I am forced to use Windows and can’t find my butt using it.

So the mindset, if you want, was that of methodical planning and going slow, step by step. This is likely different if you’re a gamer, or you need some very specialised apps, but for me, this was not the case. The games that I play, like Sudoku and Solitaire, work on any platform.

I wonder whether Linux Mint will follow suit?