Let me scroll through your phone, see if there are some nice pictures or chats, the google search history, browser history… Uuh what’s that Lovense Buttplug App for? Do you have any medical conditions or mental health struggles? How do you approach people on Tinder? What’s your salary?
I don’t think so. I can’t find any good information about those new ‘open-source’ kernel modules in any of the Linux wikis. Just news articles from 2022. Something isn’t right there. It’s either a marketing stunt and nothing changed or something else. I would dig deeper if I were you.
Concerning NVidia’s history: Don’t rely on them making user-friendly decisions. Especially when it comes to Linux. The usual drivers work. They have some hiccups and you’re going to have some annoying issues with things like Wayland, if something major changes in the kernel you have to wait for NVidia but they’ll eventually fix it. It’s not open source and you have to live with what they give to you. It mostly works though and performance is great. I’d say this is the same with the newer ‘open-source’ drivers that just shift things into (proprietary) userspace and firmware.
The true open-source alternative is the ‘Nouveau’ drivers. For newer graphics cards, expect them to get only a fraction of the performance out of your GPU and having half the features not yet implemented, including power management. So your game will have 10fps and fans on max while it empties your battery in 20 minutes.
On my laptop Nouveau started to be an alternative after several years when development kept up and it got comparable performance and battery life to the proprietary drivers. But you might replace the laptop at that point. Waiting for NVidia or the open source drivers to keep up hasn’t been worth it for me in the past. I did that two times and everytime I had to live with the proprietary drivers instead.
So my advice is: Be comfortable using the proprietary drivers if you want to buy NVidia.
Intel Arc got really bad performance reviews. It’s not worth spending lots of money on them. But fortunately they’re cheap because the gamers don’t buy them (for that reason). I live with the iGPU that’s part of my CPU. It’s alright since I don’t play modern games anyways.
But you missed AMD. There are some laptops available with the Ryzen 7040 series and it seems to be a fast CPU. They also made the integrated graphics way faster than before, albeit probably still not on the level for proper gaming. But I bet there are desktop replacements out there that combine it with an AMD GPU.
I wouldn’t consider WA secure. They do tracking, they have your phone numbers and those of all of your friends and know exactly who you talk to, when, and how often. Even if they don’t know the content of the message because it’s encrypted, that’s a lot of information for the algorithm to feed on. Apart from that, I’m not sure if they have access to the encryption keys. They might be able to decrypt everything if they want.
I’m sure someone wrote a lengthy blog article about WA. But unless someone does a proper security audit including where the encryption keys are stored and the implications of that and how extra features like breaking encryption in case someone flags an inappropriate post turns out… The ‘it’s safe’ is just a claim by your brother or Meta. You’re free to believe in anything you want. But it’s not necessarily true.
I think I’ve been using K-9 Mail for 10+ years or something. The settings were kind of all over the place but it has always been one of the email clients with the most features.
Maybe you want one of the turnkey solutions. There are several solutions that offer you a NAS box with everything pre-configured and a management web-interface. Assembling a RAID and creating a network share is just a few clicks with those. And they should come with documentation.
I don’t really know which one is best. There is openmediavault, unraid, EasyNAS, TrueNAS, …
I agree. Configuring everything yourself, Learning about RAID, filesystems, networking and file servers on an operating system you’re not familiar with is some work. And although Linux has adapted quite some Windows-workflows, setting up Samba isn’t necessarily the right-click - properties - share you learned from using windows.
For security cameras there are solutions like Frigate which can be installed in a container.
I think you can mount network shares with the Kerberos token you got from AD. Sometimes just the user credentials suffice. At least that’s how it used to be when I last tried something like that years ago.
You’re well above average. I’d say pretty good. One thing you didn’t say: Are you often logged in into the services like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Discord, … Because if you are, they can tie everything together with your account. And did you sign up for those services with your phone number? That’d be bad because it’s a unique identifier. Regarding the phone it depends on which apps exactly you installed from the Play store. Most have trackers and there are shady apps out there. I also mainly rely on F-Droid and that’s the way to do it. Another thing is email. If you use gmail, all your correspondence gets scanned, regardless of what you do at home. And you shouldn’t use membership programs for discounts in real life.
Other than that. I think I do more or less the same things you mentioned. Plus I replaced the Android my phone came with.
You need to try it. Don’t just roll it out in your business. Try it yourself before. Get an old/secondary computer and install it, try your templates and workflows. See which version (distribution) you like. Get your E-Mail connected and so on.
I can tell you Linux isn’t Windows or MacOS. For me, it works very well. I can do lots of things Windows users can not do or that are very cumbersome there, and I don’t have any advertisements or privacy issues. It respects my rights and freedoms as a user. And I’ve had way less issues with my printers and stuff than my windows-friends. I’ve never had a virus on my machine. I can’t tell you if it works for you.
I also don’t like selling it. It’s (arguably) better, faster and more user-friendly than Windows in many ways. But you need to find out if you can make use of it. One big factor against it would be familiarization with a different product. Except for that, I invite you to try it.
If it’s not an issue, it’s not an issue. If you need to change the settings at some point, you could look up if there is a way to reset the password. Or sometimes there are tools that let you change the EEPROM settings from linux, without needing to open the BIOS. Depends on the hardware.
Open street map data is created by volunteers. Where I live, you can practically put in any address into OsmAnd and it’ll know it. Maybe you live too far out. Or there aren’t enough people contributing in your area. Putting in the house numbers is a tedious task.
You can also have a look at how other people did it. There should be a button somewhere to view the source text of any post or comment. In the Lemmy web-interface this button is hidden behind the three dots icon.