Forge her? I barely know her!

I know it’s officially for-hey-oe, but I always say forge + joe cause I find it easier. I used to say “forjo” (like “forge” ending in an “o”, or “for joe” sped up) as well.

OSS Document Scanner is the PDF scanner I use. Works completely fine for my purposes.

Last 4 or so phones have all been GrapheneOS (I’m not buying new phones all the time to be clear; I use phones till they break; I’m just a long-time user) and yeah I’ve really had no problems to speak of. I currently have a separate profile with Play services for certain apps, and also just to isolate non-privacy-respecting apps that I have to have installed for whatever reason.

Almost all the apps I use are FOSS apps who are aware that a significant amount of their userbase will be using various AOSP forks so I’ve not run into any app compatibility issues. Even back when I used banking apps, I’d used 4 different banks’ apps on GrapheneOS and all of them worked completely fine. Now I don’t have a banking app because I won’t install proprietary software unless I actually have to for some reason, and I can bank on the web just fine.

“datum” is the singular, but you’re right that it’s not really grammatically plural since you’d say “the data was stolen” not “the data were stolen”. I think the latter would technically also be valid; my interpretation would be that the latter is “countable” plural, so there are specific discrete datums that were stolen.

I wouldn’t say that I go to the effort of making myself unidentifiable, but my “defaults” are with relative anonymity and privacy in mind anyway, ie donations in Monero, anti-fingerprinting, VPN, lack of persistent browser storage, full disk encryption. So I guess I don’t take steps because my regular browsing is already reasonably private, private enough that I don’t feel the need to take extra steps for minor shit like buying drugs online or donating to things. I do take extra steps to make sure there’s no simple way something can be traced to me for more serious stuff but I don’t think making a donation to a piracy website is serious.

In terms of using paypal, unless it’s illegal or criminalised to donate to piracy in your country, it should be fine too. Normally it’s just actually pirating (or sometimes only distributing) that’s illegal so donating shouldn’t be prosecutable, again unless that actually is a law where you live.

I think “couldn’t get past partitioning the drive” means they managed to partition the drive but couldn’t get beyond it ie couldn’t do any more after that.

Almost no one using Windows installed it.

I think Windows installs are really common, at least going off of the size of online gaming communities who generally build their own PCs.

You do not risk going to jail, come on lol. People are so dramatic about doing the most minor unenforced crimes I swear

Which one are you calling fringe? These are all popular distros, with the exception of maybe Gentoo but that’s still very well known even if not that many people daily drive it. Also still makes sense in this context to include a well known distro that’s also known for being relatively hard to install

Really? Never installed win11 but I remember win10 installs being similarly straightforward to e.g. a calamares install or something like that.

If you want to paste into VMs, you can use spice, or if there’s no graphical environment in the VM then SSH into it and paste into your terminal

It’s fine to be paid for labour eg programming.

Yeah, I do miss that, but idk how much of it is nostalgia and how much is an absolute aesthetic preference. I think the main reason for the change though is Microsoft trying to make Windows work well on mobile devices though, meaning forgoing the aero and more expensive VFX.

Wish some DEs would make their default style more like a win7 era style. Would be nice to have the variety.

Unless law enforcement is out to get ya

Seems like a huge oversight in privacy communities, which are frequented by people with state actor level threat models.

Others have already advised you on how to run Windows games, but in my experience with these games:

The Sims

I’ve been playing it just fine on Wine, check EA App on AppDB

Cities Skylines

The first game has a native Linux version, not sure how the second game runs on Proton

Stardew Valley

Native Linux

Minecraft

It’s Java so cross-platform, including Linux

Generally you can check ProtonDB for Steam games, and AppDB for others.

I also haven’t had issues with my self-hosted Nextcloud, DAVx, and Fossify Calendar. Has worked without hiccups for me.

If only the user has the key then there’s no real concern with the data being handed over

Sure, but tracking period data can be very helpful for people. For a threat model of abortion criminalisation (or maybe trans healthcare criminalisation with treatments stopping periods, or really any kind of restrictions on medical autonomy), encryption at rest of locally stored period data is perfectly sufficient. They are not going to send military intelligence agencies after a random person having an abortion. It is actually a relatively low threat model, like equivalent to buying drugs online or something like that.

I wonder how many average users would be bothered to export their period database and transfer to a new phone every time they get a new phone. I do that when I get a new phone (not often, I use my phones till they break/are literally unusable and unfixable), but I’ve had real trouble getting other people to do these kinds of things.