If you’re feeling even more paranoid, go with something even more obscure like Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It’s Unix-like but differs so much from it that a Unix or Linux type malware would do nothing to it.
Andaman and Nicobar Isles can probably get more tax revenue if the North Sentinelese pay their fair share. But they’re more likely to shoot you with arrows instead, being an isolated civ.
It’s like that everywhere lol. Once you’re the “computer person” expect to be the resident IT person for the rest of your time there, whether it be academia, industry, or family.
I once had to coach a coworker on how to attach a PDF to an email…
I hear ya. Grad school did a number on my mental health. The fear of failure is embedded in just about everything, from the high GPA expectations (even from your first semester), to the quals, to the thesis. The pressure on yourself can be too much to bear.
I find myself less stressed in industry having worked in various positions over the years, and despite all the college I have yet to use calculus at all (it’s spreadsheets as far as the eye can see) and rarely have to use any of the other number of subjects I took in college. The one school course that had helped me the most in my actual work career has been my middle school typing course, I can type super fast as a result lol. Maximum productivity with my mechanical keyboard at work, keycaps go brrrrrrr.
I used to feel ashamed at myself for not going all the way, for withdrawing soon after I got my masters. I felt like a complete failure. This has lessened over time as I realize that the entire rest of everyone’s working life is a grind regardless of how far up in academia you go, and that I would be in a very similar position otherwise.
Honestly the best thing you can do is to remove and reapply thermal paste to the CPU / GPU. Go for something with a high thermal conductivity. There are plenty of videos online on reapplying thermal paste and that will definitely cool off your laptop when done correctly as it increases heat transfer to your heat sinks and fans.
The entire post-PhD phase put me off getting a PhD. I’d rather work an office job than trying to constantly scramble for Grant funding literally all the time on top of the demands of teaching, research, and the constant pressure to write papers.