This stuff makes me grateful that my bank and your bank still maintain a fully-featured website. I would be quite upset if I were stuck with such an app and no website.

same here but with hentai on searx.be

XFCE4. It’s intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss

Enough features so that it “just works” (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.

Can’t wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don’t have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.

QR code reader and generator on both phone and laptop

• Phone: SecScanQR
• Laptop: ZBarCam and Zint

But I’m glad to have learned about LocalSend here so I’m no longer limited to short text snippets

I miss print coupons. Hearing “get the app” or “there’s an app for it” makes me flinch these days.

School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born

In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students’ passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one’s passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.

Makes me wonder how far the closest alternative, glim, could be upgraded to match Ventoy given the confines of GRUB.

Someone had mentioned that Fedora fails to verify when booting from Ventoy. Now I’m thinking if I could dd the media loaded via Ventoy and compare with an original copy to see what changed.

What did it in were the semi-annual mandatory feature updates, which restored the invasive settings and bloat I worked hard to remove. Already being acquainted with Linux at that point, I began dual-booting and later having Windows on an entirely separate machine for a few stubborn programs I needed for work.

What made me acquainted with Linux was looking for alternatives after the loss of theming options and the start menu in Windows 8. That eventually brought me to my present Debian setup with the Chicago 95 theme, which recreates (and even improved) the workflow and stability I had grown to love in Windows 2000.

The first time I ever booted into a Linux iso, however, was to migrate files off of my machine, which was excruciatingly slow to transfer files under XP.

IMF: Imperialist Monetary Fund

Storytime!

As a physics major, daily driving Linux worked out pretty smoothly. The thing that saved me from trouble the most was making a weekly full system backup (I used Clonezilla and my file server). If anything was truly incompatible, I took care of it on the school’s computers.

In my second semester, I began dual-booting on my X201 Tablet and desktop, eventually booting into Windows infrequently enough that I made my X201T Linux-only by the end of my second year.

Around that point, I began using LUKS full-disk encryption on my machines and USB drives. I highly recommend if you don’t already, even if just for peace of mind. I have strong ideas about the way things ought to look and work, so being able to customize Linux to my heart’s content (with Chicago95 ofc) made doing work on my computer a bit more enjoyable.

Documents

• MS Office: Libreoffice worked 95% of the time. For the other 5%, I used the school computers or my Windows VM.
• Google Docs and GMail: accessed through Chromium, which I only used to access Google and sites linked to my school’s SSO system.
• We did a lot of writing in Latex, though it might be a physics thing
• A lot of other small stuff I’m starting to forget, but if I don’t mention it, I probably did it through the browser.

Lab

• MATLAB: GNU Octave sufficed 75% of the time, often needing just slight changes to the code. Otherwise I used the lab computers or my desktop with actual MATLAB.
• Proprietary dana analysis software: One had a .deb package for oldoldoldstable so I set up a VM just for that. Otherwise, lab computers it was.
• Lab computers running old and new versions of Windows were available to us, so if there was anything computationally intensive or requiring proprietary software, I would just take care of it in the lab.

Social

• Slack, Discord, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp: browser client, which I would check on a schedule

Tools

• VPN: NetworkManager, though it was a bit janky. I think it’s a lot better nowadays.
• Printing: We had a web print portal to upload docs and pdfs to a printer of our choice.

Graphics

• Mostly prepared my posters, etc in a mix of Libreoffice Draw, GIMP, and Inkscape
• Adobe: Had to use it on one occasion. Used the library computers where it was installed for everyone to use.
• Digital notes: I would use Xournal on my X201 Tablet whenever I forgot to bring my notebook or refill my fountain pen. Managed to impress a few of my iPad-toting classmates when I whipped out the pen and the display around on what they believed to be an ancient clunker.

As for the desktop, I had purchased it with gaming in mind, but it eventually became my SMB file share, media server, and RDP session host so I could make any library desktop like my own. Each thing in its own VM, of course. By the end of it, I was one of about 3 students running a server over the campus LAN. Even in the comp sci department, surprisingly few students used Linux.

Linux also met all of my computing needs while studying abroad in Germany. For five whole months, I had not used Windows once. Though my SSD did give out on me once, a backup saved the day.

A friend once did need to use a rather invasive remote proctoring tool. Highly recommend a separate laptop or at least a fresh SSD for this case.

Mobile privacy, if it’s relevant

• I was in the fortunate position where none of my classes or jobs required proprietary mobile apps
• Friends used Venmo or whatever else, I paid back in cash
• SMS and emails sufficed for regular communication

Overall, it was smooth sailing using Linux throughout my college years and no incompatibilities that couldn’t be solved in the library or a computer lab.

edit: i used debian btw

Middle mouse click is indispensable but it seems to be first to fail on my mice

Wayland, but I’m patiently waiting for xfce to support it

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.

The only thing that had broken was one of the rear reflectors, and that’s only because my dad crushed it

After two years of near-daily use, the truck is holding up admirably. I know that fact is going to drive the haters up a wall

Bruh, of all possible criticisms?

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).