external cam haha. I use the laptop cam daily to video call family

I actually did that on desktop recently and I enjoy being able to unplug and physically remove it as I don’t use it daily. Same for the large external microphone, it’s only on my desk when I’ll have meetings planed. Maybe you could also use a mobile phone as camera.

Anyway kudos on leaving Google! It’s a great step.

For Samsung chips maybe https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Samsung could help.

Don’t be too sad, I’m playing and working daily with an NVIDIA for years now and it’s just working.

voice actor, artist, and musician. My main concern is recording software and to a lesser extent, art software

Even if you are not based in Brussels where we have https://resonance-mao.be/ you might have a local equivalent, namely open source and open hardware music enthusiast and profesisonals who meet monthly at least to learn and jam. They know this domain a lot more than I do. There are a LOT of software for all that but I wouldn’t go as far as advising you. That said yes it mostly likely will require a bit of re-training. Still IMHO you have done the hardest, namely you understand the concepts behind what the tools do. The interface will be different but how it is actually done should be the same. My advice is to find “your people” and discover together.

Regarding hardware Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. I have an NVIDIA GPU and I play (and work) with it daily. Sometimes sleep/resume is buggy but pretty much never ever while actually working or playing. Regarding the Webcam, it’s not super convenient but until it gets supported (hopefully) you might have to rely on an external camera.

Neat! Two quick things :

I’m not convinced Linux has comparable software I need).

Feel free to ask here. I might not know alternatives but others could, no matter how niche.

Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Ultra […] didn’t play well unfortunately

Same advice. I don’t have one of these but what fails and how? Any specific error message?

The lack of support seems very daunting at first.

I started thinking “Oh I wish I could transition to Linux, away from Windows, but what about the latest hardware or random gadget?”

The trick is to flip the question around, namely not “Does my current hardware work with Linux?” but rather “Am I sure my next hardware work well with Linux BEFORE I buy it?” then this remove 99% of headaches. It’s typically 1 Web search away from either a lot of complaints or positive feedback… or not much, and then it’s up to you to see if you are ready for an adventure. If there is not much but there is some standard interface, e.g. Bluetooth, and no need for a proprietary application, it’s nearly sure the main features will work. If a proprietary application is needed, then safer to avoid.

So… yes maybe surprisingly a LOT of hardware does work well with Linux!

What does not work for me, to give a random example, is the LED controller of my desktop case, which I bought several years ago while Windows was still my main OS. I didn’t put a lot of effort into it, cf https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB/-/issues/1683 but the recent article posted on this instance, namely https://lemmy.ml/post/32389687 makes me want to give it another go at some point!

Shit… kind of makes me want to learn Rust now!

Anyway, wonderful write up. No BS, both shortcuts if you just want to the code and in depth links e.g. https://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb1.shtml all written with a fun tone. Plenty of actually useful content showing us all that sure, it is not trivial to write a (USB) driver but it is also probably not as hard as we imagine. Particularly enjoyed the :

• userspace driver, namely being able to tinker locally without feel the pressure to push back the work to Linux the kernel itself
• libusb and other drivers, namely that there is a myriad of points to start from already, not just writing reverse engineering bits in memory to the new device and hoping it’ll work

Focus on productivity and pleasure, so make the transition easier :

• try Linux without dual boot, e.g. https://distrosea.com/ (I made a 30min video discussion if you are curious)
• try Linux on a USB stick to get persistence and not be afraid of using private data
• try dual boot with default on Windows, your important data backed-up (e.g. music you created)
• try dual boot with default on Linux and Ableton or whatever you need on Wine, if it doesn’t work in virtual machine
• try boot on just Linux with Wine
• try boot on Linux with Ableton FLOSS equivalents (few listed in this thread)
• try boot on Linux with e.g Ardour or LMMS but genuinely benefit from FLOSS by making and sharing your own plugins

The entire process must be risk free and fun!

Start kdeconnect-app from a console and share what the actual error message is.

To answer your question realistically I did history | sed "s/.* //" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

which returned as first non standard command lr which from my grep lr ~/.bashrc is alias lr="ls -lrth"

require buying additional hardware.

Trade with someone?

irks me that it’s mostly idling

Well it’s a small processor and relatively efficient one at that so… how about going the opposite direction? How about measuring the power draw on idle? With other task? I don’t actually know if that architecture handles that but I saw some things on the do https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100095/0002/functional-description/power-management/dynamic-power-management?lang=en

Also what about using a RPi Zero instead?

As others suggested the backend is probably already installed on most computers but not setup, namely :

• ssh to manage passworldless across multiple computers (you need that for data to be safe)
• scp/rsync/rdiff-backup to actually copy the data thanks to ssh keys

One could imagine a dedicated user per machine that is for read-only of data (maybe after some encryption, limited to very specific directoriess) and another for storing only of data (with no access except to write on disk and with a maximum quota).

What this highlight though is that the centralized managed cloud model is challenging to replicate as purely p2p at home, namely backing up your phone to your desktop might be find but the other way around, probably not. Maybe even more challenging, what do you actually backup? I would argue your home directory but… clearly not your e.g. Steam games (humongous) or other backups or video files downloaded from the Web. So… probably a select set of directories in home then, but which ones? ~/Documents only? This specific part implies some decision from the end user.

Anyway I believe all the tools are there, but I think what most people lack is to view the result and for that maybe some equivalent of https://gitlab.com/ikus-soft/rdiffweb/ which shows when was the last backup done, how big it was, etc basically some form of visual to feel safe.

Finally to skip the CLI key management part the closest I know, for end users, is KDE Connect https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ which I discovered after building my own https://git.benetou.fr/utopiah/offline-octopus kind of equivalent, namely a way to use devices on LAN. Backup is not a default feature though but could be.

I use ffmpeg to record only the top left corner of my screen but I don’t have any visual for it.

I used https://github.com/ftorkler/x11-overlay/ in the past for another tool, maybe this could help you.

FWIW and even though that’s not what you implied Android is far from perfect either, just reading https://www.zeropartydata.es/p/localhost-tracking-explained-it-could right now and… even though Google does try, other, arguably not malware (very arguable!) do manage to go through anyway.

a majority of their computer experience is probably in the browser, with an office suite and maybe an email client.

Exactly, and for whatever is left there is

• Web based equivalents, e.g. NextCloud, ProtonMail
• LibreOffice
• Gimp
• Inkscape
• Kdenlive
• Blender
• Cura
• OBSStudio
• Lutris or Steam with Proton
• Audacity
• VLC or mpv

and finally, the most important “etc” namely you can have a poster on the wall with post-its where they write what they miss, you write down a matching post-it in front. You might not get 100% coverage but I’d be shocked if you don’t have 99%. You can also “seed” that poster with existing ones, e.g. https://trustonteachestech.blogspot.com/2017/06/open-source-alternatives.html

My hope is actually that standard compliant (that’s the important bit) hardware keys and passkey, e.g. WebAuthn, get more broadly accepted. This way open source and hope hardware solutions, e.g NitroKey, would allow anybody on any OS supporting those standards (which does include Linux without proprietary blobs AFAICT) to work.

Thanks for doing that.

IMHO it’s show, don’t tell. I’m assuming you have few laptops laying around here but ideally :

• have a working Linux computer and let them play with it. You can have few documents on the desktop to help kickstart the process, few browser tabs opened with e.g. ProtonDB to show that most games do work, etc. A little “trick” you can do is have an email client (Web based or not) opened so that they can (if they want) email to themselves a message like “I wrote this on Linux!” and a link to some documentation your wrote online about the event.
• have another one where you can do an installation live (or play in loop a few minutes video recording where disk formatting, package download and installation, are sped up, easy to do with a VM)
• have yet another one where … they can install themselves! I’d suggest a VM there so that they don’t fear they would wreck your computer

Few “gotcha” I would warn people who are genuinely interested in (as I wouldn’t waste time with this for people still doubting) :

• backup your data (documents, family photos, work, etc but NOT games, music, downloaded movies) on a USB stick before you do anything!
• you might have to tinker with BIOS settings but that is not scary BECAUSE you backed up your data
• there are plenty of distributions, even though that’s beautiful, … just pick a popular one at first because that’s how you get help more easily
• peripherals are not all made equal, even though the vast VAST majority do work with Linux, they don’t have little stickers to help customers buy them so rely on standards (like BlueTooth or WiFi) AND if it’s something expensive or bulky, do check online reviews with product name + linux in a search engine like DuckDuckGo.

Now… the actual argument I usually share with people is the browser. Most people don’t use their computer, really. They use their browser to connect to the Web THEN do their “work” or entertainment. In that case then it should be no problem because browsers are properly cross platform. I would let them potentially use Chrome (sigh) or Chromium just to show how familiar it is and hope that, as they learn more about freedom, they do consider other browsers, like Firefox or WaterFox, Pale Moon, etc but just like with distributions, starting with whatever is popular and they feel comfortable with.

I would consider that VERY sophisticated. One needs to basically conduct identity fraud, so have enough information to port your SIM via your phone company. I imagine that if you do not call your phone company with your existing number they have a few extra steps to allow anything to happen.

Anyway, beyond that, which as you shared (thanks for taking the time to put those links) is indeed not infeasible (but still requires targeted work and skills) this is only 1 step out of 2 for authentication against a bank. One still needs to know the bank and the login/password pair the Website requires.

Even once that’s done, I believe most banks do not allow large transfers, e.g. above 10K EUR, without another verification. Typically transfers have a daily and weekly limit that can be modified temporarily.

So… IMHO it’s sophisticated (in the sense that a “script kiddie” or scammer without technical skills can’t do it) and has limited economical value.

I will remember it (again, thanks for pointing it out) but I won’t lose sleep over it.

PS: I’m wondering what’s the consumer law on this actually because arguably some steps, e.g. no limit transfer or SIM porting would be on failure on the side of companies, not consumer. I wouldn’t be shocked if companies had insurance for that and might have to pay back whatever amount would be stolen. Obviously this would be regulation dependent.

Linux applications can access your entire home folder

That’s the default because that’s what most people want, or at least expect.

You can perfectly start an application within a container or even a dedicated user.

Nearly nobody does this not because Linux does not permit that, it does, but rather because most people believe (rightfully or not) they do not need this level of separation.

use SMS but that can be hijacked by social engineering attacks

Can you please share an example? I’d be curious how that would work, especially if it works while understanding how it works.