I enjoy Fedora. I can complain all day about Redhat being evil, but I haven’t found a desktop distro that scratches the same itch, so I’m happy for the time being.

On the server side, Debian is perfect for me and I have zero qualms with it.

Luckily for you, there’s a version 2!

Sadly a lot of the privacy switches are exclusive to enterprise and education users, but our endpoints are running Pro (we have our previous supervisor to thank for that). I guess I’ll hope this is one of the ones we can just toggle off without any fuss.

I’m curious whether the increasingly invasive telemetry of modern Windows will have legal implications surrounding patient privacy here in the US. I work IT in the healthcare field, and one of our key missions is HIPAA compliance. What, then, will be the impact if Microsoft starts storing more and more in-depth data offsite? Will keyboard entries into our EHR be tracked and stored in Microsoft’s servers? Will we subsequently be held liable if a breach at Microsoft causes this information to leak, or if Microsoft just straight-up starts selling it to advertisers? Windows is our one-and-only option for endpoint devices, so it’s not like we can just switch.

I genuinely don’t have the answers to these questions right now, but it may start to become a serious conversation for our department in the future if things continue at the trajectory they’re going at. Or, maybe I’m just old and paranoid and everything will be okie dokie.

Thanks for reminding me that Pinta exists. :D I remember not enjoying it as much as paint dot net, but I’m a dirty Linux user so if I ever need to do some photo work I might give it a shot instead of fumbling around on GIMP forever.

As someone who does not do any sort of professional photo editing, I find GIMP and Photoshop to be equally confusing as hell. The only photo editor I’ve used with any degree of success is paint dot net, which obviously doesn’t have the same firepower as the bigger options.

Funnily enough, I don’t know that I’ve ever even paid attention to contact photos (not that 99% of the people I email have would have them anyways.)

I’m mostly just protecting the mountain of old stuff in my archives that I’m too much of a digital hoarder to delete. ;D

a lack of sender authentication is another one

This one is a nightmare. We spend bucketloads on DMARC shit in our department, only to still have loads of issues with email spoofing.

Based on the reading I’ve done, it doesn’t really seem like one exists - it’s just not what email was designed to do. I’m not an infosec professional, but that’s the impression I’ve been given by others in the field.

My experience has been fine. If you go into Proton Mail with the understanding that you’re doing it to stop Google from data mining your email, and not for the sake of truly private/anonymous email, you’ll have a good time. The aliasing feature is super nice as well.

I’ve had a pretty smooth experience with both the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 7 Pro.

Are you doing personal file storage, or is this for backups from a server? If it’s the latter case, and if your use case would benefit from deduplication, you could just stay on Backblaze and use something like Duplicacy (available as a free CLI app or paid web UI) to deduplicate and encrypt your files. This is the approach that I use for my homelab. The only issue you run into is that, in the case of Duplicacy, you have to use the CLI or web UI to restore your files (and god help you if you lose your keys).

Curious question: what does the business internet plan get you over the home plan? I’m on Comcast Business right now, but I’m always looking for better options (plus we’re looking at getting a 5G failover at work).

If you happen to have a Nextcloud instance, there is a decently robust Notes app that can be used from either the web browser or from a standalone app on Android (available on f-droid and Google Play).

Nevermind the government or hackers, I use a home-grown VPN to keep Comcast off my ass.

I own and have opened Factorio but I feel like I’d need a firmware update for my brain to be able to play it well.

Unfortunate but completely understandable.

Just do what I did. Build a server that runs a Windows VM with GPU passthrough with the intention of using it as your own cloud gaming service, realize the performance is shit because you bought old Xeons with horrendous single-core performance, and give up and just accept that some games won’t be playable because of anticheat. Nvidia please make GeForce Now usable at more than 1080p60 on Linux

Finally I can put my modded Minecraft experience to the test

One thing I like about about Flatpak in particular is it allows me to have newer applications on distributions with older package bases (for instance, Debian.) I don’t much care for rolling release distros, and I’m not a fan of having to hunt for a 3rd-party repository, so for that purpose I really love the option to just get a Flatpak.

Also Bottles. Bottles is great.