Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is my pick.

I’ve got two study laptops and apart from Tailscale giving me some grief very recently with DNS resolution, I literally haven’t had any problems with either machine. Both have been going for 1.5 years.

I like the LMDE route for the DE already having pretty decent defaults and not requiring much tweaking from the get-go. Xfce (as it ships by default in Debian) absolutely works, but I end up spending an hour theming it and adding panel applets and rearranging everything so that it… ends up looking similar to Cinnamon anyway, because default Xfce looks horrible in my opinion

This isn’t the first time they’ve had an ad supported Office for free. Anyone remember Office 2010 Starter, that shipped with only Word and Excel and also had a permanent ad banner.

I no longer have any complaints about Beszel. Thank you!

Seconded. My only complaint (which this might already be a feature I haven’t found yet) is it doesn’t seem to support multiple drives. But yes, it is shit easy to set up and has a beautiful UI

Seems that everyone else has said the same as what I mostly already do, but I’ll just make a couple comments on the student communication topic:

My university already created a Microsoft 365 account for my university user, which included Teams. For my threat profile, I don’t consider Teams a terrible option if I’m only using it for study purposes, so I’ve communicated over that for assignments before (web UI only).

Otherwise like others have suggested, some students are open to something like Signal (a fellow student got me onto it years ago) if you kindly ask and mention upfront that it just requires a phone number. I did an assignment over Signal with two other students, so it’s very doable.

Everything but the fingerprint readers just works.

Good to know the struggle for the fingerprint reader wasn’t just me. I did “get it working” but it was extremely hacky and it wasn’t what I was after; I only wanted fingerprint for login, not additionally for sudo, but that’s not how it set up and I didn’t want to spend even more countless hours trying to fix that

Hey guys, my Dad was always a neck bearded Unix admin so I’ve grown up my whole life on FreeBSD, then moving over to Gentoo during my teen years.

I’m starting to have thoughts about switching to Windows given that’s what my new job uses, but I couldn’t find any instructions on compiling Windows outside of very outdated releases like 2000. Also, does anyone know if emacs and htop are compatible, as those are my most used applications?

Aussie chiming in: haven’t heard hands up before, might be a US thing

Yeah, my iPhone 4s still has the last version it supported and with a tweak it still works fine. It still even has the random quotes submitted by users, which have been long gone now.

For me, I was a curious and inquisitive 15 year old that wanted to try out something different to Windows. I didn’t really have any gripes with Windows at the time, so I tried Ubuntu and it went from there. I mostly remember after that installing Xubuntu on everything because it was just so lightweight and to this day I still love Xfce.

Ah, good old VGA brings the memories back

But my 1998 Windows CE device that’s made obsolete by those meddling modern security practices!

From my own experience, I’ve also seen it on price checkers (Kmart Australia), navigation devices (Navman GPS units) and older Clarion head units.

I’ll second the other comment suggesting KeePass, but the biggest issue I had with it was syncing the database across devices. Ultimately I stored it in OneDrive, but it occurred to me that at that point it wasn’t much different to a cloud password manager, which I especially didn’t trust.

I now self host a Vaultwarden instance from my Raspberry Pi, and that works perfectly for me, but it does require a bit of Linux experience and a spare device to run the server.

Its okay, once Microsoft introduces EdgeOS, they can claim that Edge is an integral part of the OS, and therefore cannot be removed.

…oh wait, that’s just Windows 10 onwards

With logging, one thing I deal with at an MSP is BSODs. Maybe I’m just not experienced enough, but it feels like the event logs in Windows only help if it’s something obvious like a poorly written or buggy application. If it’s a driver issue they just are near useless. I usually end up downloading WinDbg (which has such an archaic UI on Windows 11) and read the minidumps, and it’s like a 75% chance it’s helpful.

In the meantime on *nix, yeah there’s literally logs for just about everything if you look in the right places.

Legetimately that was so frustrating for them to kill off, I thought it so novel to browse compact Reddit on an iOS 6 device.

If it helps give a bit of reassurance, I grew up after the Digg era, and I didn’t even know it was a thing until the whole Reddit thing.

Maybe in ten years time, the next generation will be the same about Reddit, or at least, one can only hope.

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I always saw it as her just saying in her mind, “This. Statement. Is. False.” thus just being some four individual one word sentences.