Depends on how much privacy you need and how much tinkering to get things to work that you’re willing to put up with.

In general, using a variety of services will be more private than going with a single entity like Proton.

Bitwarden is self-hostable, which makes it potentially more private than Protonpass… assuming you actually set up the self-hosting.

Signal isn’t a good long-term plan, as it’s entirely hosted in the US. I don’t think there are currently any known compromises to the encryption model, but iirc the company can see all your communications metadata (which means the government could potentially as well). I don’t mind it for talking with friends, but I would recommend against it for extreme privacy needs (e.g. the government starts getting overzealous with who it counts as enemies of the state, and you or your friends become targets).

At least some level of human review is going to be needed.

So… completely negating the point of a User Repository??? Introduce some kind of authoritative oversight, and it’s essentially just another regular repository, erasing all the benefits of the AUR. The whole point of the distro slapping a huge disclaimer of “DISCLAIMER: AUR packages are user produced content. Any use of the provided files is at your own risk.” at the top of the homepage is because these kind of compromises are the trade-off one makes

That’s optimistically quick

Sincerely,

A Debian user

I get where y9u’re coming from, screen-sharing used to be a massive pain point for me. I regularly host movie nights thru discord on my Debian + GNOME pc. I haven’t switched off Wayland in a few months on that one. Besides the occasional audio issue, which gets resolved by unsharing and then sharing the window again, I haven’t had issues.

Idk about remote desktop. On the same PC, I used to use Remmina to access my work (windows) PC, starting about 2.5 years ago; the only problem I had back then was that I had to run Remmina as root for the multi-monitor support to work correctly (which could be done as a regular user in Xorg). All this to say that remote desktop hasn’t ever really been FUBAR for me, and I haven’t tried it in about a year. On the other hand, the “you’ve gotta be root” was a deal-breaker, and even back then I only tested it in one direction (never tried accessing my Debian pc via RDP).

Wouldn’t this be better achieved with udev rules instead of an always-running script?

I use AntiX (core) with runit, and it’s basically just an opinionated Debian with less systemd bloat (and extra packages from MXLinux repo). It works swimmingly on my laptop with an i3-4030U Lenovo Flex 2 (although I did upgrade to 16 GB of memory). It worked blazingly fast headless, but is still remarkably performant for Sway; as for not looking old/ugly, Sway is beautiful as long as you put in the time to customize it

I actually got into Sway bc of my love for i3wm, and Wayland has gotten to the point where I’m no longer seeing any benefits from sticking to Xorg (although there are probably edge cases); I predict that Wayland will be superior option for older hardware within a couple of years, unless XLibre makes some major leaps.

they benefit people who only don’t want their network-provider watching, but don’t care who else may be.

Proxies and VPNs seem like the most obvious targets. They mostly prey on people who don’t understand the technical workings thereof (had my mom ask if she needed to get a VPN bc firefox opened on ad for theirs, claiming it enhanced privacy), and serve little benefit to people who are doing the kind of illegal activities that make governments take notice. They serve as a single point of compromise for anyone, and they work worldwide so that all your traffic can be monitored even when you’re on a different ISP/in a different country. It’s like the perfect MITM, and people are even willing to pay to have themselves monitored.

The truth is that at best they benefit people who only don’t want their network-provider watching, but don’t care who else may be. It’s the perfect setup for a 3-letter agency to just sit and monitor everything anyone does, waiting for someone who’s just a little too careless to access illegal content thinking they’re anonymous.

Reject Convenience did a pretty thorough rundown on what they’re doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3JT6q3AxA

It’s been a minute since I watched, but my key takeaways were that they just reach out to one type of broker which barely scratches the surface of the Data Economy iceberg, and since there’s no legal precedent outside of California and the EU, it’s purely up to the brokers to decide whether or not they want to comply.

So I think it’s probably more likely they really are just private companies preying on people’s anxieties about privacy and relative ignorance about the topic, rather than some kind of governmental conspiracy

I had very few issues with a GTX 970 and i7-4790k. The only issues I hear about with either any more is the linux kernel not supporting some of the features of newer GPUs (e.g. I know ray-tracing was a pain-point at one point).

I don’t like recommending distros based on such a general use case, mainly because every distro can be tweaked and configured to exactly what you want. Instead, you should research the different mainline distros that have been around for decades—Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Guix, NixOS, OpenSuse, Slackware—and see what they’re about, what sets them apart from others, what the maintainers’ philosophies are, and what kind of package management system they work with. Once one sounds better than the others, look into it and try it out.

#Dos and Don’ts:

Don’t try a niche distro. They are harder to troubleshoot and less likely to be actively maintained.

Don’t use Ubuntu. It’s just a suckier version of Debian. It used to be user-friendly Debian, but now Debian is more user-friendly than it.

Don’t dual-boot with windows. This just solidifies your reliance on windows, especially if you’re the type to give up on problem-solving issues that you didn’t have in Windows. It also can cause issues with making Linux unbootable.

Do try a live usb with persistence before you commit entirely. It’s not exactly the same as a complete install, but it’s close enough to let you know how the OS feels and what hardware will or won’t work with it. Some people say try a VM first, but that won’t have direct hardware access.

Do problem solve the little things. Anything that irks you or bothers you or just slows down your workflow. It doesn’t have to be an actual bug or glitch, just anything that could be better. This not only solidifies the feeling of ownership over your OS—you no longer have to settle for anyone else’s lousy design choices—it teaches you the resources for troubleshooting larger issues.

Do plan around things not being plug and play at first. Want to test if a game runs on Linux? Great, set aside a couple of hours beforehand: first to install steam and set it up, then to figure out Proton, then to troubleshoot the game not even booting up, then to fix any glitches or whatnot, then to get your controller working. This won’t always be the case, but it will irk you a lot less when it is if you expect it. The more you make time for solving these issues now, the less time they’ll take up in the future (either they’ll be gone, or you’ll immediately know how to fix them, or your troubleshooting will be more streamlined).

Do set aside time to learn about Linux “under the hood.” You don’t have to become a computer scientist, but it will save you a lot of headaches, show you cool things you can do, and make your computer a smoother experience. It especially helps if you take the time to learn as they come up: e.g. installer asks you what “bootloader” you want, but you’re not sure what that is, what it does, or why it’s necessary? Now’s the best time to take a little learning detour.

Do ask questions on forums.

Don’t listen to the people who shame you for asking.

Do listen to the people who try to show you a better way of doing things, even if it’s not your way.