monsieur_jean

Same. i3wm first, or XFCE for a “real” DE.

I am currently running a debloated i3wm rig based on EndeavourOS/Arch and I really enjoy the low mental load of a truly minimal desktop. Only luxury I’ve allowed myself is CLI colors. I’m not ready for B&W yet.

Speaking of thwarting piracy, how about Japan stops slaughtering whales and respecting the treaties they have signed first?

The 90s are calling, they want their UX back.

That’s a great setup. Until someone breaks in and steal all the hardware, of the house burns down.

I would add regular backups from the NAS to an archiving cloud like Backblaze, Amazon Glacier, Azure Archive… Doesn’t eat too much bandwidth and it cost very little (until you need to recover the data, but hopefully you won’t). :)

You’re a senior CS person and you are asking if you should have a backup system in place? o_O

Sorry if this sounds like a personal attack but it’s something you should have though of a long, long time ago, as a CS person. Even when still using Windows.

Assuming you are serious, then yes there are ways to save your data under Linux, with different levels of complexity and privacy.

The bare minimum is some basic cloud backup. Not ideal for privacy, but at least if your drive dies you won’t lose your files.

Local backup in the form of a NAS or home server is also an option, and allows different systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) to save a copy of their files. Way better from a privacy perspective if setup properly BUT your are one fire or one burglary away from losing everything.

If you want to reconcile privacy AND safe storage then to me there are a few options :

• End to end encrypted cloud storage if you trust the third party (Proton drive, Tresorit, etc)
• End to end encrypted cloud storage that you control (requires very high skills and a lot of work and money. And a lot of maintenance)
• Local network storage (NAS/homeserver) with an encrypted backup regularly sent to the cloud
• Hybrid end-to-end encrypted cloud using a non encrypted cloud solution (like Google Drive) with Cryptomator or equivalent (if you trust them).

So many options, depending on your sensibility to privacy and your technical knowledge. You can also mix. For example most of my personal files are hosted on Microsoft OneCloud because it’s stable and fast enough. I mean almost my entire home folder (excluding configuration) is replicated there. But some of the sensitive files, mostly scans of official documents like tax returns, healthcare receipts, etc, are end to end encrypted using Cryptomator. Also my passwords are saved in an shared encrypted Keepass database. And all my drives are encrypted (with LUKS) including my external drives.

Anybody who has dug that topic long enough knows that total privacy and total security are a myth. It simple doesn’t exist. You need to find the balance between privacy, security and practicality that suits you. If you are paranoid, then getting to a reasonable level of all three is going to be a LOT of work and money. If you are just cautious, and are willing to trust reputable third parties, then it’s quite possible to have a working solution without spending too much time and money. And the very bare minimum is to chose between a backup with little privacy, or more privacy with the acceptance that you may lose everything.

Sorry just saw the answer.

Virtualbox is very easy to use out of the box, even if you have very little experience with virtualization. Everything is in one place and pretty much self explanatory.

Hyper-V is more complicated and requires that you have a Enterprise, Pro or Education license. It cannot be activated on the Windows 10 or 11 home edition.

You just want to get a feel for it, so I suggest what I’ve used with success in the past :

• Windows host
• Virtualbox
• Linux Mint with the XFCE desktop environment.

All free, Linux mint is newbies friendly and XFCE is light enough to run well in a VM. It is Ubuntu based so it’s very well documented (basically 99% of the tutorials for Ubuntu work with Mint) but it comes with less bloatware and a more ethics.

Of course no single Linux distribution is perfect or we would all be using it but I suggest you don’t lose time looking for a distro. Just pick one and install it. If you don’t like the look and feel, then try another. You can distro hop through several of them to taste the variations. But the general principles are pretty much the same across the board.

Completely agree on Linux Mint, even though it’s still one of my favorite distributions and the one I’m using usually. I’m comfortable with the base Ubuntu system but it comes without all the Canonical garbage (like Snap trying to quietly install itself back when I install an APT package).

Still too much bloatware though, and to my knowledge there is no modern, well documented APT based distro with a community active enough that I can fix my issues reasonnably fast.

I guess I will have to make the jump to Arch. Currently happy with my Regolith install now though, so I’m a bit lazy to explore other options.

It looks really messy to me. As far I am concerned it’s either short and nicely trimmed beard with long hair or big beard with short hair. As I am loosing mine, I went with the second option (also I’m a bit fat so I still keep my sideburns very short. A bit like this)

I say no to the goatee. You should, too. Trim that off so you have a straight line bellow the jaw, it will look less messy. I don’t know what this barber was thinking.

Also is the combo long hair + long beard a conscious choice? :)