The internal microphone is on the same board as the webcam in laptops.

Pop the bezel and disconnect the cable when not in use.

It’s cool. But the music player landscape has changed so much, I just don’t need library features and what not anymore. I find myself just queueing things in MPV using a terminal in a directory full of music, launching playlists and stuff. I’ve tried a ton of music players for Linux, from Amarok to Cmus, and I find that it’s all cruft and all you need is a media player and at best a file manager.

Yeah archive then

My library almost got wiped out when my backup HDD started to fail. Managed to duplicate it onto a new SSD, now I’m fine.

Don’t trust services, trust yourself.

Yeah I do. “On your own” is used very loosely here. You get a graphical installer, you pick from a list of DEs or WMs, make sure you want all the default software, done. You don’t have to do the Arch thing, which is the hard part, and you still get an Arch desktop. And once Arch and your environmemt are installed, it’s so much more user friendly than Ubuntu or Debian, you’re “on your own” with any Linux system once it’s installed and working, it’s not like you have to dig into the guts of the system just to use it with any of them.

I installed Debian with XFCE a while back and it didn’t even have curl installed. Ubuntu tries to force you to use snaps. I installed EndeavorOS, I haven’t had to do anything extra except install the programs I want to use personally, all the graphical and terminal utilities you’re going to need are just there and work the way you expect them to.

While this is true, Ubuntu is not quite the shining example of user friendliness anymore. Debian is a little janky nowadays in my experience.

EndeavorOS is fantastic.

A notebook and a pen.

FolderSync on android. It’s the only automatic sync application I’ve found that syncs to mydrive.ch.

Also a couple of UI apps, BarLauncher, which is a notification thing that let’s you put app icons to launch from the notification drop down, and LaunchyWidget, like a scrolling “fence” to dump app icons in on your home screen. They’re both so simple, I’m surprised that nobody has built FOSS versions of them.

On my PC I don’t use any proprietary software at all.

I would drive the shit out of that car

Not too hard to do with wireguard. You have to split traffic, because if you tunnel all traffic to the paid VPN, you can only access it by pointing at the IP address of that paid VPN so it doesn’t really help. If youre using firefox VPN, it’s just a private labelled Mullvad VPN, so no port forwarding so this wouldn’t work at all.

So what you have to do is allow your home machine running the wireguard server you use to connect to your home network accept direct connections from your devices. Then all outbound connections tunnel to your paid VPN. It’s a bit convoluted but there are plenty of walkthroughs online as to how to set up your firewall and network rules and wireguard configs to do it. You’ll be working with iptables and then traffic splitting with wireguard.