It’s not even about trust. It’s that I am confident I will have no clue who is a real life human being anymore soon. Autogenerated images, video, and text is practically in its infancy but already exists in the uncanny valley of being impossible to determine which is real and which is not. Imagine 5 years from now when perfectly lifelike high res video of practically anything you can imagine can be generated on the fly. Essentially the only thing I will have any certainty on is what I can witness in person. Or, if I have a circle of trust I can choose to believe content published by certain organizations or groups.

It may actually push us away from tech and back to the community, which could be good assuming we survive the transition.

Good luck watermarking plaintext and locally run models. There is no good option. If you want certainty that you are dealing with a human you lose privacy. If you want privacy you cannot know where the plain text came from unless you sign each file cryptographically. Then you only know it came from a certain source, but there is no guarantee how that source made the text. Welcome to the new world.

I second the motion on ghostwriter. Had a nice focus mode, looks good, isn’t distracting. I use syncthing to backup everything. It’s my jam.

Ghostwriter and syncthing. Ghostwriter really has a good focus mode that really gets me in the right spot for writing. I use Markor if I am on Android and syncthing still works there as well.

Something that produces a wealth of plausible web traffic on my connection and browser that woefully misleads anyone monitoring it as to what I actually am browsing. Rather than hiding my traffic or ensuring some hyper level of encryption I simply want to use maybe an LLM or something to create such a close facimilie to “normal” online traffic that my online fingerprint becomes useless as sub 5% of my traffic is actually real.

Essentially I want privacy through drowning out everything with noise. It seems like the harder the to unwind in the end if done in a clever way. That plus some basic security protections and I will feel fairly secure.

You can configure the system for backup and auto updates which is handy to keep it secure without any interaction. Only reason I ever had it fail was entirely me screwing it up, usually by distro hopping and formatting wrong.

Mint is surprisingly loved and disliked from what I have seen. Having used it since 2007 I am in the category that likes it for what it is. But I am somewhat surprised by the open hostility it gets for simply existing. Main arguments being that it is a dinosaur, uses X11, should not exist because anything not KDE or GNOME is just diluting desktop Linux and is part of the problem. It has no fancy corporate sponsor, it has a small team, and it for sure has warts, but you can claw Linux Mint from my cold dead hard drive because I have distro hopped like an addict and it just checks the boxes for me. It shows up and works, even on newer hardware with a little tweaking here and there, but I can use Nvidia, find network printers without effort, scan, install and update flatpak, backup the system, game, and get actual work done that is not fiddle farting around with esoteric configs all the time. I can post on actual forums with actual users on it and not some discord where someone will just post memes over my questions. I have a strong feeling it will exist for a long while given it’s history. And it is mind numbingly borning as an OS. I just sit down and compute, what a concept.

Portainer has been great. I almost don’t need ssh

Could also use scoop, but people get a little nervous running random powershell scripts off the internet. I have no fear of it. Scoop is also excellent for people with a little more tech savvy.

I prefer to leave edge never clicked by using winget. It comes default on Win 11 (Most likely new install, not an advertisement for that dumpster fire). For windows 10 you can use the Microsoft Store to install AppInstaller which will get you winget. Winget is a MS product.

I mainly like doing this because Edge does a bunch of setup when clicked for the first time. This avoids all that.

winget install --id=Google.Chrome -e

Or you can ever do slightly prevent the backslide in marketshare for Firefox.

winget install --id=Mozilla.Firefox -e

Just run powershell or windows terminal and use those commands and you can leave edge where it belongs.

More info here. https://winstall.app/apps/Mozilla.Firefox https://phoenixnap.com/kb/install-winget

I jumped on that waayyyyyyy to early convincing people to install Ubuntu or Mint on their machines in 2007. I learned a lot unscrewing up a lot of machines. The winding path of learning.

Can always install xanmod if you want a newer kernel and more recent improvements. There are plenty of ways to make it more exciting, difference being you get to choose those from what I would consider a rock solid base. Many distros sort of foist the making things exciting upon you because all of the sudden you’ll want to use a printer and become dismayed that your network printer doesn’t just work, or that Bluetooth isn’t doing what you want, or you’ll run into an issue and find only a disorganized discord for support. When your beard turns gray you tend towards the boring because, at least for me, editing esoteric configs to make my printer works has lost its excitement.

You are absolutely right today is a far cry from 15 years ago, but just looking at raw marketshare Linux is like 3% of gaming machines. large portions being steam deck. Linux is excellent in a lot of ways but having what I would call mainstream popularity is not one of them. Though with continued effort on the part of the community to make everything better and MS for making everything worse, who knows what the future holds.

I can’t think of an arch base that does not require fiddling of some sort. In a similar way, desktop Linux is more or less the enthusiast OS. You are kind of like the car person of computing. You do need to be comfortable with messing around with the system to get what you want.

I can think of a few nin-arch bases that require much less messing around with, but they are more “boring” than arch. I use Mint with auto updates and time shift backup. It doesn’t get more boring than X11 on a stable Ubuntu core. Flatpak install OBS and steam and set your computing on cruise control.

If you demand more excitement that a decades old DE Pop_OS shares a similar stability with some newer trimming. I also had a lot of success with Nobara if you want a non-Ubuntu core and desire something slightly with a little more pizazz.

Ubuntu should be fine especially given GNOME clearly borrows some visual concepts from OSX. I prefer Linux Mint myself, but that uses Ubuntu as a base so I’m not exactly blazing a brave trail. Most games I have work. Unless some anti-cheat is involved that the dev does not support Linux with you will most likely be OK. Baulder Gate 3 works excellent and that has sucked up most of my time. Join the ranks. Pump up the valve hardware survey Linux numbers. Make the business people in control of the devs care about linux support somewhat. Free yourself form the whims of Microsoft.

MicroOS has worked well as a server for me. Run everything as a container. Use caddy and portainer for reverse proxy and container manager respectively. Auto updates, immutable, and has been bulletproof for me for awhile now.

Bottles has isolation. You can further that with the flatpak version of bottles.

MicroOS has been great for me as well. Run essentially everything as a docker container, manage it using portainer, use caddy as the server/proxy, and everything is easy peasy now. It restarts every night for an update but you can adjust that if needed. Rock solid.

Natural, which is somehow not default. Despite being called natural. Not weighing in ok what is right. Just interesting how the language came to be.

To me it is blocking expression that presents no plausible harm to anyone. Yelling fire in a crowd to start a panic, making a specific threat, and intentionally spreading lies as to defame all strike me as harmful language and should be curtailed somehow. All expression of any kind not plausibly causing harm should be allowed and equal in the market of ideas despite my personal opinion of them which is a bitter pill to swallow when neonazis appear all to common. The is my opinion.