I can totally understand that. In case you still want to give it a chance, I can highly recommend EndeavorOS. It’s basically pre-styled, pure Arch. But it has a welcome dialog, where you have a warning banner at the top if you need to be careful regarding an update. This directly links you to their Gitlab and forum with the steps you’d need to take to not break anything. This saved me multiple times already and I never broke my system, despite not even reading the Arch RSS feed or changelogs.

Besides the EndeavorOS forum is waaaay friendlier compared to the Arch one.

According to my wife, I do indeed have a decent amount of rope on my person. Though I don’t know how that has anything to do with entering the US, I’ll take the safe route and stay home.

IANAL so please don’t take my word for it. But if I understood it correctly, this is indeed legal. You don’t have to offer your stuff for free. And as long as you let the user decide if they want to pay with money or with data, it’s legal. The important part is, that the user needs to give consent, which is the case here. Not talking about the morality of it though.

Thank you again for this great post!

I’m a little skeptical about Manjaro on the ZOTAC. I used it for quite some time on a PC but it was always just a matter of time until it broke due to version conflicts. Developers for AUR packagages assume that you’re using the main Arch repo. So when you use the Manjaro repo, which is always a few weeks behind the official Arch one, the AUR updates break pretty regularly. Though you probably don’t want to use the AUR on a handheld anyway.

Thank you again for this high quality post! It’s always a pleasure to read.

I’m happy that GOG finally added proper F2A, though I’m a little sad that they didn’t implement FIDO U2F. It’s not only way more convenient to just use a hardware token as a second factor, but if my knowledge is correct, it’s also more secure.

And if you need it in a browser, there is Collabora, which exists as a paid business version with support or a free non-support version, that can easily be deployed with Nextcloud. Another alternative would be CryptPad.

If you also need your mails in your browser, there are multiple providers like mailbox.org that offer mail encryption even through the online mail interface.

Thank you for your amazing posts! I really enjoy them!

I grew up with trackballs because my dad preferred them to the old mice with a ball underneath. So for office work I still use one too. But it’s still just a pointing device so I’d say it would be similar to learn using a split keyboard or a dvorak layout or something. You’d still press one key after antother.

The CharaChorder is so different in the way your “typing” multiple keys at once. I feel like it has such a steep learning curve because you have to not only learn another button layout but the whole way your thinking about typing and writing in general. I’m afraid I’d just get frustrated and never use it, even though I thinks it’s extremely cool.

Do you mean the CharaChorder? I thought about getting one in the past bit it looks like a super steep learn curve and I’m not sure if I’m willing to subject myself to it.

They dropped the Tidal integration and I’m still heartbroken. It was the best setup for music discovery. Haven’t found a replacement yet.

There’s Betterbird, though I don’t know exactly what makes it better, except for still allowing to manually load external content in encrypted mails, which Thunderbird just removed for whatever stupid reason.