OCR support seems really cool. Currently for OCR I either use NormCap, or on Android some random OCR on f-droid which doesnt have any crazy perms.

For higher quality Text-to-Speech, install Pied (Flatpak or Snap), which offers a GUI for installing and configuring Piper TTS voices.

Chimera Linux uses musl libc, Void Linux has the option of musl libc, and of course Alpine uses musl libc.

I tried Waterfox and didnt really get it? Why use it over for example Zen or Librewolf? It just seemed way to close to Firefox but like with a couple of preinstalled extensions. Idk, just wasn’t for me.

My browser(s) is just a tool. I use many browsers for different things. I wish there were good alternatives to the main browser engines (Gecko, Blink, WebKit), but I am fine with just using good derivative browsers like Librewolf, Mullvad, Cromite, etc.

Waterfox is Gecko. I still agree with the comment that mentions it is written by a right-winger. I rather root for Servo, especially because Ladybird is just another web engine written C. Memory safety vulnerabilities are the largest represented class of vulnerabilities discovered every year. Servo being fully written in Rust is a good thing for its security, as long as they also design a strong sandboxing/isolation strategy on all OS platforms.

It is only going to be disabled-by-default

The permission OP should look for is DRI.

I actually really like GNOME and haven’t had problems yet with extensions. I have it the way I like it, and no matter what I do, I haven’t found features that are half-implemented or broken like on KDE (eg. theme search missing/hiding 90% of themes, desktop effects broken after install, weird crashes, freezing when accessing system apps or app menu). I think Qt is ugly (personal preference) and I prefer libadwaita GTK4 apps for their stability. People are going to hate, but there is no such thing as a perfect project that fits everyone’s needs. I am not saying GNOME is perfect or that it isnt opinionated (i wish app status indicators were supported, ability to modify Flatpak app permission in the system settings, and support for dock/panel), but GNOME is solid and (dare I say it) is a good DE.

Btw I love KDE and it is the DE i am currently using. I also love GNOME. There aren’t really any DEs I hate except maybe Deepin. Any DE that doesn’t support Wayland (or doesn’t plan on it) is not something thst I ever plan on using because security and stability are BIG requirements for me, I don’t like technical debt or legacy cruft.

You don’t have to sandbox he browser with Bubblejail if you don’t want. I was only suggesting it and providing instructions in case you wanted an extra layer of isolation.

The browser can’t create unprivileged namespaces because Flatpak blocks access to namespace creation. This DOES interfere with an important method of sandboxing used by browsers on Linux. It makes site isolation weaker, which could allow an attacker from a malicious site to steal information from any open tab, or possibly escape the sandbox. Browser sandboxes are multilayered for a reason, one less layer makes exploitation exponential easier. The Firefox Flatpak is official, but that doesn’t mean it is safe. Flatpak sandboxing is substantially less strong than a browser’s isolation strategy This because Flatpak is a general purpose sandbox mostly meant for making distribution of software easy by providing an identical environment across all Linux distros, not for rigid security. Browser’s provide a more fine grained sandbox that is designed around the threat model that the website is compromised/malicious and is attempting to hack you, since websites are effectively just apps. Don’t use Flatpak’d browsers at all, or the very least not as your default.

Dont install browsers as Flatpaks, very bad for security. Flatpaks use Bubblewrap, but that isnt the reason they degrade browser security. Bubblejail is an app that makes sandboxing with Bubblewrap easy and didn’t integer with the browser’s own sandbox (unlike Flatpak). I don’t know if Firefox supports hardened_malloc now.

To use Firefox, you need to use ujust with-standard-malloc firefox (or something like that). It also needs user namespaces (same with Mullvad VPN/Browser), run ujust set-unconfined-userns on

Follow these steps to make Firefox run with standard malloc:

For Firefox with no sandboxing …

• cp /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/firefox.desktop
• Edit the newly created file so any line that starts with Exec=firefox to Exec=ujust with-standard-malloc firefox

For Firefox with Bubblejail, assuming you have already created a profile named Firefox and generated the desktop entry. Edit the file ~/.local/share/bubblejail/instances/Firefox/services.toml and add the following snippet:

[debug]
raw_bwrap_args = [
    "--ro-bind",
    "/dev/null",
    "/etc/ld.so.preload",
    ]

I recommend Secureblue.

To install Firefox on Secureblue, run rpm-ostree install firefox To install Mullvad VPN, run ujust install-vpn, select Mullvad, wait for it to complete, and run rpm-ostree install mullvad-browser

For browsers, you obviously are going to install Mullvad and Firefox, but no need to install a Blink-based browser because it comes with Trivalent (significantly security hardened Chromium). Since Trivalent only supports MV3 you will need uBl Lite and NoScript supports MV3.

I recommend sandboxing your browsers (except Trivalent) using Bubblejail. For Mullvad/Firefox, create a Bubblejail instance using the config app, create a profile, give it access to Wayland, PulseAudio (sound), Pipewire (screenshare), and use slirp4netns, then run bubblejail generate-desktop-entry INSTANCE_NAME --desktop-entry /usr/share/applications/INSTANCE_NAME.desktop. I recommend adding access to ~/Downloads for the browsers.

Consult the FAQ for more tips/tricks and security toggles. Also use the ujust command line utility to configure the system.

Valhiem

• Most “Open source” LLMs are really just open weights, which is useless without the training data. This dilutes the definition of OSS. There is no way to train the model as a normal person (aka not Google or Meta, etc)
• LLM producers don’t credit the OSS they trained on, no attribution. Most models violate the licenses of all their training data (eg. GPL).
• LLM scraper bots put high stress on server infrastructure, creating a DDOS attack.

Alma is an LTS enterprise distro so gets pretty out of date after some time, and I don’t think it is significantly more bloated than Fedora because AlmaLinux is downstream of Fedora. Just uninstall the apps you don’t want on install. Even better is openSUSE Tumbleweed because the YaST installer allows for you to pick and choose every package (or group of packages) that makes it onto your final system.

What I usually do is sudo chown $USER -R /media/drive1

They specifically asked for a desktop operating system, so I recommended systems with a GUI. Proxmox comes with its own bloat, Arch would be far more minimal without the need for a bunch of dependencies.

If all you want is KVM, than any Linux distro + virt-manager will work perfect. My general recommendations for Linux distros are Fedora and openSUSE, because they are usually pretty up-to-date. Arch is also a good option, though not as stable. Choose KDE Plasma or GNOME when using GPU passthrough (because most guides will be made for either of these DEs).

I can’t tell if you are saying you literally mounted the drive at /media or that you mounted it at a subfolder, example: /media/drive1. The 2nd is the proper way of doing it.

Either way, glad I could help!