thirtyfold8625

My opinions are likely to be in accord with information found at https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/ and https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/distributions/

As an alternative to making decisions without direct assistance, you might benefit from contracting with another person to make decisions based on requirements you describe (essentially getting a chief information officer (CIO) for yourself). The main reason I’m suggesting this is that having more people involved will make it more likely that someone will know about established best practices relevant to your situation or that someone will have experience with a problem that is similar to the one you’re dealing with. Additional reasons I could provide for this would be similar to the reasons people give to discourage someone from handling court appearances without a lawyer or doing surgery on themselves. You might be able to use https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/laptops to find information about how to contact people about your computing needs. Alternatively, you could visit a store (for example, one operated by Walmart).

Ah, I didn’t realize that “Con” meant “conservative”! I thought “Con” meant “scam”.

How do you know this is a con?

I suspect that, when certain election methods are used, it’s possible to make your preferred candidate lose if you express support for them:

instant-runoff voting is also sometimes vulnerable to a paradoxical strategy of ranking a candidate higher to make them lose, due to instant-runoff voting failing the monotonicity criterion.

I can imagine that someone’s best choice can be to entirely abstain from voting in some situations. I don’t think it’s ethical to force people to vote if doing so would harm them.

Making a law about an obligation to vote will probably make future electoral reform harder (since people will have to figure out / get confused about whether a change will make it more likely for them to land in court), and making it hard to change bad systems is surely a bad thing.

Incentivizing someone to show up and just cast a blank ballot could make it harder to detect fraud. For example, it might be convenient to dispose of ballots that someone intended to misuse by mixing them in with the legitimate ballots, and having more blank ballots that are actually legitimate would make it less clear whether something illegal has happened.

“Voting in all federal elections in Australia is a legal obligation for citizens aged 18 and over”, but there isn’t a very steep penalty for not doing so (and you might even get your name published in a newspaper, which some people might value for its own sake):

Failure to vote in the federal election initially results in a $20 fine as per section 245 of the Act, which can grow if left unpaid to a $220 fine and court fees.

Having early voting and making the “main” voting day be a holiday for a large number of people seems like a good idea, since that makes voting easier for people who want to vote. Hounding people who don’t want to vote (regardless of their reasoning) seems like a worse idea.

I use openSUSE because I want to see the license used with a package before installing it, and I can do that by using YaST. Also, it seems that version numbers are used consistently which enables elegant downgrading (I found that the pacman system is probably capable of supporting this too, but the operating system(s) that use it don’t seem to use version numbers consistently and I’ve had a bad experience with downgrading in the past). I reviewed packaging systems other than rpm but it seemed that rpm while used with openSUSE was the most robust.

I also like having a bootable image with a streamlined installation process that is clearly supported by the operating system maintainers: I was tired of worrying about whether I set up LUKS correctly while setting up Arch Linux, and just having a checkbox for “encrypt the disk” makes me a lot calmer. Knowing that I can use a guided process if I want to reinstall the operating system also gives me some peace of mind.

It’s also nice to get practice with an operating system that is more similar to “enterprise” Linux distributions: it’s probably useful to get practice managing my personal computer(s) and at the same time get knowledge that is probably re-usable while interacting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise itself. However, this was not a primary consideration for choosing an operating system for myself.

Luckily, my choice can currently also get some support from https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/

I also like NixOS, but it doesn’t seem to use secure boot by default, and I’d prefer to have that handled without needing input from me, so I only use it when that feature isn’t available at all.

Under the amended 1976 Electoral Act, European elections must be based on proportional representation and use either the list system or the single transferable vote system. Member States may also authorise voting based on a preferential list system.