I’ve used Little Snitch on macOS, but I agree that a closed-source blob won’t fly on Linux. OpenSnitch exists, though I haven’t tried that one.

Can I just do an apt remove —purge systemd-ageverificationd and call it a day, or do I need to edit /etc/systemd/ageverificationd/birthday.conf and call it a day?

I don’t agree with this law, but having an age verification API as an open-source modular component is the best way to do it. Build in privacy controls and permissions so you know what’s being sent, where, and when. Make sure we know to edit $HOME/.config/systemd/ageverificationd/birthday.conf whenever we want (yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if systemd handled this, too).

Don’t forget the off switch and don’t give it unnecessary dependencies. Let me be able to install it if I need it (spoilers: I won’t) and if you include it by default, let me be able to remove it without removing the whole GUI.

I wound up switching to Debian. It’s stable. It works. It lets me tinker and upgrade some packages without compromising the whole system.

My only gripe is that OS upgrades are a manual process. I miss Ubuntu’s do-release-upgrade command, though following a process isn’t hard.

Agreed. I use Secure Boot on my Linux systems with my own keys. Let’s not confuse it with Restricted Boot, which is awful.

Nah, he Base4017’d it. That’s Base64 plus all the emojis. It’s actually quite efficient.

Good question. It seems like Debian has been speeding up a bit. The software is still a bit older, but it’s not too far behind compared to some other Debian releases. I switched and it’s been rock solid, despite me running a Trixie Backports system.

Agreed! Though give me the backports any day.

Username checks out.

Maybe. Some people have used SpinRite 6.1 to rewrite every sector, and that’s improved performance on some SSD’s. It rewrites each sector and restores the cell’s charge. That’s great if you need the data on there now.

Now, if you’re erasing the disk (by any means, including just a quick format C:), any sectors you use will be written with new data, so that shouldn’t matter.

Just erase the disk (securely, if you want) and get going, and it should be fine.

I’ll second this. I’ve got tons of FLACs. I let PlexAmp do the transcoding in the background.

Because I never learned Bash scripting, for whatever reason, and WSL wasn’t yet available to load on my work PC at the time.

This is literally what dd does and what I would have recommended, if this person hadn’t beaten me to it.

However, if you’re cloning to another disk or partition that will be plugged in at the same time as your existing installation, you’ll wind up with two partitions with the same identifier — a recipe for eventual disaster. In that case, I would run through setup (with your current disk unplugged) and then rsync over the new root partition.

I’ll second Debian. I run it on backports and it’s reasonably stable, but if you want it rock-solid, don’t do that.

You might want to keep your browser more up to date than the rest of your OS. That’s up to you as the user. Mozilla has a deb you can add to Apt manually, should you choose.

That’s almost identical to the ThinkPad I use every day. Sounds like a great daily driver.

It’s clear that MALIBAL sucks. Whoops, just got all Lemmy users and their mothers banned. My bad.

It shouldn’t matter. When you get hired, they’ll give you a new email address to use.

Extended Security Updates.

I agree with you on throwing out perfectly good hardware. Either you hang on it until it’s useless, or you throw it on eBay and let someone else have it.

That’s fair. My UniFi gear has added that in recent updates, though that’s an investment. If your system works for you, that great; stick with it!

But, I would try to find an alternative to Windows 10. Paying for ESU’s would be better spent getting something else. What that might be, I’m not sure.

Is there a reason you’re making your own access point instead of buying an off-the-shelf one? I know you said you don’t want to spend more, but a proper AP would let you simplify your server and remove the Windows VM entirely while still providing greater than Gigabit speeds (depending on the speed of your switch ports).