FDE requires third-party software (veracrypt)

There’s bitlocker, I think it was added in 7 or Vista. What do you mean?
But other than that, I would rather use VC too.

standard system utilities (think ssh, git etc.) are not available on a fresh install

Hmm, depends. It has a built in openssh client and server, but the “feature” (automatically installing package) is off by default. It can be enabled at install time with the use of the standard windows image modification tools (DISM I think?)

And then you’re supposed to download and install .exe files from the internet? Since microsoft controls what goes in the windows store

I think it’s better that Microsoft does not have that much control over software distribution.

But again, most things you want aren’t there, and you can’t even trust the things that are there.

Of course you can’t, nobody can tell by looking at the store page if it was modified by anyone, including Microsoft.
The amazon app store for android explicitely tells that they are adding tracking code to every uploaded app, and to make this possible they replace the digital signature of apps uploaded. Google with the play store does not tell anything like this afaik, but for a few years now it also basically compromised the digital signatures of developers, by requiring the private keys to be mandatorily handed in for continued app updates.
I don’t trust that these companies that already rely on mass surveillance as a revenue stream, they won’t add tracking code to apps unauthorized by the devs. If not right now, it will happen in the future.

For some reason, a billion dollar company cannot curate a software repository of the same quality as the ones maintained by unpaid volunteers in the Linux world.

Besides quality, I think open source distro’s repository and it’s packagers are largely more trustable. They are not motivated financially to modify the packages in unwanted (by the user) ways, and they are transparent.

So yeah, I think it’s just not there yet. Maybe in a few years windows will be a viable alternative for desktop systems.

I think they are drifting farther and farther away.
It was an option. But the shitshow of 11… thanks that’s too much. I’m not installing that for anyone. And 10 is soon end of life…

imagine KDE would actually run well as it doesn’t need all the bells it offers and is actually a well written performant DE.

RAM usages on a 8GB system, 4 hours after boot.

• plasmashell: 312 MB
• kwin_wayland: 165 MB
• akonadi_* summed: ~2 GB
• kded5: 130 MB
• kalendarac: 119 MB
• xdg-desktop-portal-kde: 107 MB
• kwallet5: 103 MB (unused)
• kaccess: 103 MB
• kiod5: 103 MB
• polkit-kde-auth: 101 MB
• X, Xwayland combined: 202 MB
• org_kde_powerdevil: 48,5 MB
• kactivitymanagerd: 40 MB
• startplasma-wayland: 39 MB

There’s also various other things too. Now obviously, looking at the total used counter, these cannot be just summed up, there must be some overlap through shared libraries and such, because if I close my web browser and all I have open is Konsole, total memory usage drops to 2,35GB. 3rd party programs, like opensnitch and syncthing, only contribute 400 MB (opensnitch is surprisingly fat, but it’s UI is not efficient with the CPU either), so the system itself needs around 1,9 GB, but that’s a lot when all you have is 2 GB RAM.
Then, my system uses an additional 2 GB for cache purposes. Such an old system will probably have an older, much slower storage (unless upgraded, fortunately that’s often easy), and won’t have nearly any capacity to keep a filesystem cache.

I’m only using a single widget on the desktop to periodically run a command and display it’s results. Other than that, the taskbar panel has the default widgets.

I think you can disable most of the toolbars in the main screen if it helps.
You can do that in the “Docks” menu in the topmost bar, unticking any you don’t need.
I think you can freely hide these, maybe more: stats, audio mixer, scene transitions, sources (after you have set up your capture source), scenes.

Then if it’s still a lot, you can untick these in the View menu besides Docks: scene/source list buttons, source toolbar, status bar.

At that point you only have the controls dock, the preview, and the thin top bar.
Don’t forget to reenable the sources dock and the audio mixer if you want to change those settings, though.

What do you mean by bloated? Isn’t it 2 clicks at most after the one time next-next-finish setup?

Thanks! :)

Yeah you’re right, I even needed to use my distro’s live system (which is also the installer) a few times to reinstall grub after something overrode it, so that too.

What’s your use case for the gparted system, though? Systemrescue also contains gparted, and it also has a better quality environment (easier to switch keyboard layout, I think correct display resolution from the start, fewer questions on startup)

I can’t tell you what I would do for a remindme bot now to know to check back later

Systemrescue is a pretty fine live system for such tasks. It’s mostly centered around data recovery, and recovering a fucked up distro by having firefox, keepass and such. It starts in a text terminal, but it only takes a startx to start a graphical environment.

It’s certainly possible, if not else than with the use of FUSE. But I did not see such a project yet that can do this.

Definitely ddrescue. Unlike traditional dd, it can deal with failing drives, it’s operation is resumable, and has some other features that’s helpful. I would recommend using it even if your drive is fine.
What it produces is a byte for byte copy just like dd.

If you want to invent and maintain your wheel then go ahead… but I think we have better things to do than maintaining half the code of an operating system.

Udisksctl has a variety of relevant features, and it works good, kind of.

Is this a joke?

Obviously, 8 wide tabs are too much. That’s like defining Pi as 5.

Hmm, with a similar technique one could even create git command aliases for running git with specific ssh private keys

Except if you are locked out of system management and you just can’t switch. Or only at the price of hardware incompatibilities and consumer apps refusing to work when they see you after practicing your ownership of the device.
See Android.

The metadata seems to be pretty close to full. I’m not using BTRFS, but I’ve read earlier that this is solved with rebalancing, or how is that called. Btrfs’s management command is able to do it.

But possibly the metadata is unreasonably large, so maybe the solution is not rebalancing.

A few hours later I have read it too, possibly the same website. Still weird.

The reason I don’t like selinux is that it’s quite complicated.
I don’t like flatpak, prefer wayland, but also apparmor, even if I haven’t used that much yet.

As I see on debian and derivatives apparmor is the way, but not sure if that’s preinstalled.

The extractor probably takes the timestamps from inside the archive

They don’t shouldn’t need to see the screen just to position themselves on it. Or do you mean the screen size?