I’ve just watched the first third of this (original source linked by squirrel) video.

tl;dw This is a great idea: Cory Doctorow explains how

1. all the countries the US trades with were forced, in their trade agreements with the US under threat of losing the US market, to pass their own digital copyright anti-circumvention laws so that US big tech companies can seek rent and collect the personal data of citizens of those countries with impunity, and

2. Now that trump has imposed all these tariffs on them and violated the agreements anyway, there is no longer any reason for them to to keep those laws on the books, laws which only hurt their own people and help US tech companies. He explains retaliatory tariffs only hurt their own people, that the best response is for other countries to stop protecting US oligarch and repeal those laws, which will help their own entrepreneurs and citizens, and withhold billions in rent to the US oligarchs.

And that’s just the first third of the video, but I stopped to post this before watching the rest. edit update: yeah the whole video is worth watching.

I think it’s ironic that the alternatives to Android (graphene, calyx) only fully work on Google phones.

There are so many options. If you’re looking for a free and open source wiki-style setup, a couple I haven’t seen mentioned in the thread yet are Zim Desktop Wiki and Feather wiki (hmm looks like their web certificate is expired at the moment)

I’ll check and see if I can do that with this one!

I should have thought of that. Thanks! Ironically, I have a very old lead-acid UPS in the basement that I’ve been kind of afraid to plug in again after all this time.

Why removing the battery? I was thinking that could be one good thing about using a laptop is that in a way it has its own UPS.

If your package manager is apt, you can get a list of all the packages you have installed with

apt list --installed

There’s also a command to automatically reinstall all your apps from the list, I don’t remember offhand, but I usually just do them manually from Synaptic.

As other commenters have said, some people keep their /home on a different partition so you can reinstall or install a different distro without losing all your configurations (always back it up first anyway of course). But another thing I’ve done a lot is just have a different disk or partition with all my data files on it (called ‘data’ of course :p ), and I put a link to it in my home directory. So when I reinstall the OS I do have to backup my home dir and then copy it over to the new install home dir, but it’s small and just has my dotfiles and things.

Also on the data partition I have a backup subfolder where I keep a copy of any system config files that I’ve edited (usually found in /etc/), such as my pulseaudio config, so I can restore those.

And you can always try out different distros in a virtual machine or with a live USB before making the commitment of installing one on your hardware.

Ubuntu was my entry to linux as well, 19 years ago. But Ubuntu of today is not the Ubuntu of 15-19 years ago, and not in a good way.

When first coming from Windows, starting with Mint is the safest bet for a good transition because things will work pretty much as you expect them to, and there’s a very helpful forum if you have any questions. But I always say to try several distros and Desktop Environments to see how you like them. Everyone is different and it’s all a matter of preference.

I suggest that once you’ve got whatever distro you decided on up and running, install a virtual machine software such as Boxes (very simple) or Virtual Box (a little more complicated but with more options). Then just download various distros and make VMs for them to try them out easily. Have fun!

I’d rather have a linux OS on the phone that can run Android apps.