Yep. In the same way, bolt-on wheels are better than quick-release wheels in a city.

This is the biggest problem that I have with the Windows ‘Just download the program from the internet’ mentality. All that it takes is one brief moment when you let your guard down and everything falls apart. On top of that, modern search engines seem to be very happy to show bogus results as prominently as possible. Package managers aren’t perfect, but they’re a big step in the right direction. When I have to use Windows outside of a corporate or managed setting, I use something like Chocolatey.

I’m a married person and I had a few reasons. First and foremost was the feelings-based subjectivity of absolutely adoring my long-term girlfriend who was also my best friend. I wanted to be there for her for as long as we’re both around and I wanted her to trust that I would be there for her. She felt the same way and wanted to demonstrate that she was all in, which was just as important. For a lot of people (if you look at the divorce statistics), marriage doesn’t offer peace of mind. For us, it did. This has everything to do with our temperament, how we are with one another, and the things in life that we want, and what makes us worry about the future. I had a lot of options, but I certainly wouldn’t have married anybody else that I’d met.

We also have careers that could involve moving to another region from time to time. There’s a significant cost to walking away from a job to be with your partner, so being on the same page about the long-term nature of the relationship is an important part of the decisionmaking process. Health insurance/other benefits is a small but significant thing. It wasn’t a factor in our initial decision to marry, but marriage makes it easier to share some things depending on where you live and what type of people are running your government. For me personally, it also made it easier to wrap my head around estate planning, life insurance, and stuff like that.

A minor note based on post-marriage experience: The wedding ring is a decent weirdo-repellent. It isn’t foolproof, but it cuts down on some of the social nonsense that single people have to handle. If that interests you, you could just stay single and wear a ring.

It sounds like you want something that doesn’t lend itself to troubleshooting or useability. It can be done, though: pull your hard drive and run everything from a live USB with no persistent storage. Or just don’t use computers.

Something like 4 out of 10 important for me, but 10 out of 10 if I share a computer. I keep xfce4 on my computers because I like some of the utilities that come with it by default and I’m not the only person in my home who logs in. The default setup is close to what my people expect and it can be modified easily enough.

That being typed, I use a window manager after spending years adding custom shortcuts to an increasingly modified xfce setup to match my day-to-day use patterns. I got tired of dealing with stacking windows and wanted to try a setup that tiles the windows instead. It made sense at that time to try out a window manager that came closer to what I was looking for. I still use xfce4 if I want to run an x-11 type of environment for some reason, but I’m using sway for my personal day-to-day environment. I’m willing to use KDE or GNOME if that’s what is installed by default, but I’m working against muscle memory when I do so.

I’m not sure that there is a consensus at this time. After reading some conflicting information, I opted to install syncthing via the F-Droid version of Termux until things settle down. When I run it in a terminal the default browser opens the web interface and I’m good to go from there. Power management is not great, but it works and runs the current version of syncthing.

For me, Trebuchet goes straight to my brain. There are plenty of fonts that look nicer to me, but that’s the one that I settled on after trying out dozens. I read it faster, I don’t lose my place, it works equally well for me at several font sizes and on both traditional ebook readers and tablet screens.

Teleporno and a quiet room?

Gotcha. This is replacing one nonsense black box with a different one, then. That makes a depressing kind of sense. No evidence needed, either!

All of that being typed, I’m aware that the ‘If’ in my initial response is doing the same amount of heavy lifting as the ‘Some might argue’ in the article. Barring the revelation of some truly extraordinary evidence, I don’t accept the premise.

Wow. If a black box analysis of arbitrary facial characteristics is more meritocratic than the status quo, that speaks volumes about the nightmare hellscape shitshow of policy, procedure and discretion that resides behind the current set of ‘metrics’ being used.

I tell a lie: the specific computer that I mention in the above post has a cleaned-up version of coreboot on it, not libreboot.

I had a much smaller chromebook with libreboot on in a few years ago. Booting was fine, the rest of the hardware was too weak for my daily use. It was an Asus C201. I vaguely remember having to disconnect the battery and bridge some board contacts to get it switched over.

I have libreboot on an old chromebook that I converted a year or two ago. I followed a guide. Minor disassembly but nothing weird.

The computer boots just fine with one issue that is hardly worth mentioning. I accidentally left some cruft around when I switched from one distro to another, so it fails to boot to the old system before successfully booting the current one. That’s a ‘me being lazy’ problem, not a ‘libreboot’ problem.

One thing to note about the Kobo store is that it (unlike Amazon) lists the DRM status of a given book towards the bottom of the store page below the reviews. If you see something like “Epub 2 (DRM Free)” then that’s the format that the book will be in if you download it.

You can download a book that you’ve purchased directly from the website on the My Account/My Books subpage. I’ve tested this out and it can be a good way to get paid DRM free ebooks, if that’s what the publisher wants to sell.

I came here to suggest the same thing. I switched from an end-of-life Asus to a Flint 2. I’m quite happy. About a year of use and It only stops working when I turn it off.

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Bahhahhah!

Syncthing is an option on the desktop side and it works with Syncthing-Fork on Android. It takes a bit of setting up, but I’ve been using a setup like this for years now.

Make friends with some PC repair people. Depending on where you live, a LOT of Win10 stuff is getting thrown out right now. If you present yourself as an alternative to recycling/scrapping, you might get a good deal.

I used one of these (might even be the exact same model) as a little music player attached to an old soundbar. I could connect via ssh and play music through the speakers. The main challenge was finding a distribution that worked well with the internal sound card, since I wanted to use the aux output for sound. I don’t think that I ever tried connecting a monitor to it, but it worked well for what I used it for, right up until I needed the sound bar for something else.