Croc or syncthing depending on what kind of experience you are after. Syncthing if you want to have a shared folder like expert. And croc if you just need to send something. Croc has an app on f-droid, and syncthing is on the app store. Both are open source and pretty for excellent in their own right.

I have an old Lenovo W550s Thinkpad with a 2GB Dedicated Nvidia and an i5 5500U. It's got two batteries and sips power. It's only 4 cores, but for what I run it does great. I get fairly consistent 60fps on low settings for "boomer shooters" like Selaco. The thing is an absolute beast and hardly flexes. The plastic is cracked and I can just hand it to my kids without a care in the world. Dump a drink on it, drop it, I could care less. I had them help me change out the RAM and SSD because it's essentially bound for the dumpster and any value I get out of it is the cherry on top.

That and I can run pretty much and retro gaming console on it to about the Wii/GameCube, which blows my mind. All for probably like $200 of hardware.

Think of the profits corporations will be able to make curing the impacts of this!

Syncthing, micro, fish, btop, podman

I distro hop so these are usually the first that get installed.

It consistently ran slower on a few benchmarks I care about like language model performance, which was surprising. Baulders Gate was also jankyier for some reason. I love that people are out trying to do this stuff and the community was nice. Just like anything the reality is often less exciting than the marketing. It is bundled together arch with some hopeful optimizations that I am certain will work for some hardware and some applications, but not all hardware and all applications.

My favorite strategy is literally putting crap I need to remember in my way. Remember my daughter's jacket for school? You belong in front of the door now. Need to remember making a meal? Gonna leave out a bunch of ingredients on the counter. Everybody is different, I just find that kind of stuff works for me too.

For what it is worth, it is useful to come to the conclusion that the brain is an awful place to store something you want to remember. It may not be a list, but I certainly remember better outside my head than inside. Developing tooling that works for you is important to coming to grips with your brain.

I constantly check out dell refurbished for deals on workstations. Pretty good Linux compatibility in my experience, workstation hardware, and they have 50% deals all the dang time. The precision line of workstations looks like it would meet your needs.

You can either count blessings or curses. Both you can probably count endlessly if looked at hard enough. I cannot deny that threats loom over my life such as climate change, totalitarian thinking, gun violence, and a whole host of other ills that I feel completely incapable of impacting. Consider me the boiled frog. I cannot live my life in constant anxiety and fear. I have good things, good things happen to me, today I can breathe, today I can walk. I woke up in my own bed with a healthy body. Tomorrow I am unlikely to be blown up by an artillery shell or to executed by some brown shirt goon of an evil regime.

I can hold both the evils of the world and the good of it in my mind at once. I agree one must not grow complacent at the things that go on. But I also must not become paralyzed by the overwhelming number of things going wrong. At least that is me.

I find great comfort in history personally. Dan Carlin (a favorite podcaster of mine) always says we must grade history on a curve. Sure, to us it looks like everything is falling apart and existence is pointless. But by very real measures things are better than they have ever been. My favorite is violence against children has been normalized as being bad.

Within living memory it has gone from being completely socially acceptable to beat children as being the preferred method of parenting to people getting thrown in jail for that behavior. What does it mean that previous to 100 years ago all of society could have been considered battered children? We are extremely aware of the negative effects of violence against children and for the very first time we are seeing a generation raised in an environment that kind of behavior has carrots and sticks motivating parents to behave properly. Of course all manner of horrid things still happen, but I call it progress that it have become widely condemnable to beat a child with a stick or take them to public hangings. It's a small victory, but it gives me hope for the future. That we may yet still build a better human being capable of taking on the heroic task of fixing this world.

Further, history has shown to me low points that I am glad to have missed. I never knew how ghastly WWI was. I am currently in a warm bed and not in a trench filled with mud, flys, dead body parts, with shells exploding constantly, seconds away from needing to charge out into near certain death. But my great grandfather knew that feeling. He watched as whole generations of young men were gassed to death and blown up uselessly. The numbers who die in war are less now. Still tragic, but less. Again, we must grade on a curve.

Death, despair, and hopelessness may be in 8K live streamed constantly now, but I assure you the analog version was something to behold. Not saying the horror of the past makes living any easier now. It is not to minimize your own pain. I just find hope that others managed to break the back of an unshakable world and hope for a better one while surviving a suffering I have not yet known. I am made of the same stuff. That gives me strength.

Something that produces a wealth of plausible web traffic on my connection and browser that woefully misleads anyone monitoring it as to what I actually am browsing. Rather than hiding my traffic or ensuring some hyper level of encryption I simply want to use maybe an LLM or something to create such a close facimilie to "normal" online traffic that my online fingerprint becomes useless as sub 5% of my traffic is actually real.

Essentially I want privacy through drowning out everything with noise. It seems like the harder the to unwind in the end if done in a clever way. That plus some basic security protections and I will feel fairly secure.

Portainer has been great. I almost don't need ssh

I mean, certainly one could pick out a few test cases to indicate a democracy. Do the citizens have the apparent right to...

• criticize the government freely
• due process and unpartial justice
• fair treatment of minority groups
• run for office when qualified
• free press

The US has a lot of headwinds on this short list but at least I am aware of the atrocities it has committed, can ask questions without being disappeared, and can theoretically run for office without being shot. Our democracy is ugly as hell, but at least I can see it. I question all governments that claim some higher ground.

Bottles has isolation. You can further that with the flatpak version of bottles.

I'm a chronic distro hopper and here is my advice. If you want to try out new OSs make sure to backup your data as the probability of screwing everything up is relatively high. I use syncthing to ensure all documents I have exist outside my laptop so there is no cost to me breaking everything, but you can also just use an external hard drive and not be fancy. Whatever works for you.

Arch really isn't hugely different especially through the Endeavoros route which gives you sane defaults and packages without grinding through documentation. Just be prepared to be the car enthusiast of computing. Car people love understanding internals, messing with stuff, fixing issues that bother them, looking under the hood, asking for help, etc. That is the best analogy for the more, let's just say, enthusiast Linux environments.

Don't let that scare you though. Be prepared to learn a thing or two, backup your data, and make sure you have a backup stick with another OS on it to undo whatever you break and you'll be fine. I think I have literally gone through 100 reinstalls on the low end and everything is fine. Unlike a car your computer is fairly cheap to fix if it is just software.

I'm pretty sure it is your job to stir the pot as a teenager. I'd better be pissed at each of you young people. Do something outrageous in support of your values. Fuck whatever world we currently find ourselves in. It is bullshit.

History has given me something similar to comfort, context. It's not to minimize the problems of today, but the mind numbing horrors of the recent past show that humanity is capable of just ridiculous levels of evil. As much as I dislike the current state of things In the US I am not worried about being drafted into a war only to die uselessly like in WWI. I am not concerned about general warfare between the states. So as subpar as our world is right now you could be in a wet dirty trench filled with rats getting fired on with so many shells you go insane. Doesn't make anyone's life easier of course. I'm just grading on a curve.

I was a tutor in college and have been working for over a decade at this point in professional settings. I would gladly substitute aptitude with a proper attitude most days. Showing up to work, presenting more potential solutions than just problem identifying, and a willingness to learn will get you further than aptitude. Nobody has aptitude in Autodesk 2023. Nobody has aptitude in ultrasonic non destructive weld testing. You need to learn, be willing to learn, and be willing to try. It does not hurt to be able to communicate strongly either.

What you are strong in can also just be what you are not weak at. Finding all the things you struggle with is just as useful. Don't expect to find "The thing" you are just gifted at. Far better to be resilient and accept failure as it comes and learn. Natural talent is only a small part of the equation unless you are in sales.

In a way it designed itself over time. I am a collection of accidentally acquired traits that happened to survive more often in the world that used to be. Mercifully it appears that I am somewhat adept at living in this world, but damn does it feel like I am a fish out of water being in this world.

Mainly just my absolute shock at the openness of saying "We really need to see a weaker labor market." Seriously??? That is where we are at now. The complete and transparent assault on the worker by people I personally fund. Outrageous! At least lie to me about your motives like I might have a modicum of power over you. Now you just tell me to eat shit and die right to my face.