I would be too lazy to, unless I eventually encounter my ‘gateway drug’ to i2p.

In any case, minimize the number of parties that will have their hands on your data. Uninstall anything that’s unnecessary, compartmentalize personal work in a privacy-respecting browser and office suite, and avoid unofficial Windows ISOs.

If your school is going to install monitoring software on it, consider the laptop compromised. Only do coursework, accessing things licensed through the school, exams, the bare necessities, on the Windows laptop. Start saving up for a (refurbished) laptop to learn and use Linux without risk to your work laptop.

If now is not the time to buy another laptop, consider installing Linux on a second SSD, if a slot is available, or even a USB 3.0 drive, if you’re allowed to boot from one. Just back up and if possible remove the Windows SSD before installing so it’s not overwritten by accident.

Be judicious with debloat scripts as they can interfere with some more invasive programs (e.g. Adobe suite, Autodesk) you may need for your studies. Consider making full disk backups before doing anything drastic. Anyway, if you can’t or won’t use LTSC, the yearly Windows updates can and will undo your hard work debloating and ticking privacy checkboxes.

At the end of the day, Windows is closed-source and we can’t be completely sure what it’s doing behind our back. It’s fine for a dedicated work device, but the time spent on taming it for personal privacy could also be spent getting another machine and getting to know Linux.

How odd (and maybe disheartening) to consider that it can be cheaper to fly and expend all the energy need to lift a big metal tube up into the air and back down, than it is to travel along the rails.

Pardon my ignorance, why would those be suspicious?

I’m particular about the temperature at which I eat eggs. Personally couldn’t do cold egg salad at all.

A bottle of Fiji water for 1.25 USD

Are you able to source “IoT” cards without ID verification?

Always did in apartments. Closing the bedroom door gives me another layer between the neighbors and street traffic. I added rubber door sweeps and seals to further dampen the noise. In a detached home, I’d leave the door open during the day but close it when I sleep for added fire safety.

I used to have a downstairs neighbor who stomped loudly and my pleas didn’t work. So I got a subwoofer and played some low-frequency white noise when I needed to drown it out. After reading your comments, I’d highly recommend this if you can’t move out yet.

They seriously need to build more apartments and condos with concrete instead of thin wood in the US. I miss my old apartment when I was in Germany. Nice sturdy concrete walls so my neighbor could blast music all day without bothering me at all.

Got a job at a BYOD workplace, so I ended up having to repurpose my old devices as my work devices. Fortunately I had many from my hoard to choose from. Still get taken aback when I realize that most of my coworkers have all their work stuff connected to their personal devices without a second thought.

For desktops, zram with no swapping to disk. Hasn’t given me any trouble yet, except for the rare news website (it’s always news websites) with a horrific memory leak.

For laptops, zram plus a low-priority swap file for suspend-then-hibernate. My old laptop drains a fair bit in sleep mode and my new one doesn’t have proper S3 suspend because microslop is pushing manufacturers to only support S0 idle.

Always a file, never a swap partition. Everything that can be encrypted lives inside the encrypted root partition.

“why dont you just google it smh”

It’s fine to watch people critique Linux and compare it with Windows, but in my honest opinion, Mutahar is not worth your time.

Except for systems with very limited resources, systemd or not won’t make much of a difference in performance. A lot of tutorials on reading system logs and managing background services will assume that you are using systemd.

I’ve only ever used distros with systemd, not necessarily with intent, but because it was the default and well-supported. Probably won’t switch unless

• Debian switches
• there’s a change that breaks my workflow
• it somehow starts phoning home to a big datacenter.

No experience personally with Lineage or eOS on a tablet, but if you end up with a tablet that doesn’t have official support from either, I can vouch for the LeOS GSI (generic system image). Minimalist and with all pings to Google servers stripped out.

That said, updates can be hit or miss with the GSI. The gold standard is still the Pixel Tablet with GrapheneOS, no fuss with complicated install and update methods.

I could, probably with green more than red

Yes, I wouldn’t lump yellow in with either red or green

no

What items did you like to eat? You could probably start with bringing the ones that require less time to prepare.

I’ll take half a day on the weekend to meal prep for the week, after which I just heat up refrigerated meals. Changes every week, but usually lunch will be some form of chicken with brown rice as the base, whatever vegetables are in season or at least easy to cook, maybe beans or an egg, a piece of fruit, and a couple snacks (cookie, yogurt, slice of pie, etc.)

Wouldn’t advise leaving things unlocked overnight in general, but it’ll depend where in the US. Here out in the exurbs I have neighbors who haven’t locked their houses or cars in years, but I just personally wouldn’t fall asleep without locking my doors. Maybe it’s the true crime podcasts getting to me.

Try installing just plasma-desktop