I daily drive Debian and have a few loose .deb packages and tarballs installed. Also enabled the Librewolf repo. It mostly comes down to an issue of manageability and possible conflicting dependencies. The ones I have installed don’t introduce any dependencies, so they’ve been trouble-free and have survived the Bookworm to Trixie upgrade. They are installed as a last resort option in the absence of a satisfactory equivalent via the official repo, Flatpak, or AppImage.

Loose .deb packages can be installed and uninstalled like any other normal Debian package, but won’t be automatically updated and don’t have any compatibility guarantee. Tarballs are nothing more than a collection of files, which may need to be placed in system directories. You’re on your own for those since there’s no standard and automated way to manage them and it’s possible to overwrite important system files if unpacked and copied in blindly. It’s a good idea to keep a manual record of what was put where in case any issues with them pop up down the road.

My personal ranking:

Official Debian repo > Flatpak > AppImage > Docker/Podman > Snap >> Reputable and known compatible third-party repo > Loose Debian .deb > tarball > Loose Ubuntu .deb >> Unfamiliar third-party repos and PPAs

There are certain occasions where a loose .deb or tarball won’t hurt, but sticking to options further up the list closes off the biggest routes of breaking Debian.

an antivirus program has to be installed on the PC used for online banking

How would they know?

I’m more concerned about rogue browser extensions that may be innocent when you install them, but then change owners, and after an update that you don’t even notice are going to do bad things.

Exactly why the only extensions on my browser are uBlock Origin and LibRedirect. Was a victim of one user agent switcher extension that went rogue back in the day.

5" would be a breath of fresh air in today’s market of monster phones

Seems reasonable to me, although I might be lacking perspective since my latest hardware is already 6 years old.

In previous years, my criteria was to upgrade once the hardware was holding back my workflow and productivity. But with Moore’s Law coming to a plateau, I’ve upgraded my RAM, GPU, and SSD not because I have to, but just because I got an very good deal on them.

Package managers:

• Repositories
• Update mechanism. Many of my friends and family are used to updates being either automatic, nagged, or nonexistent. Not an issue on auto-updating distros, but could get ugly on vanilla Arch or Debian.
• Resisting the urge to install loose executables from websites

File system:

• Write caching. Windows doesn’t do this for most USB drives so people get away without safely ejecting for years. On Linux, the safe eject button does matter.
• File hierarchy and mount points. When I first used Linux, I was very confused by the lack of the Program Files and Users folders, My Computer page, and drive letters.
• File permissions, especially executables
• Partitioning and how to format drives in the absence of a format dialog in the file explorer

Bash shell:

• It’s not the incomplete mess that made cmd or Powershell so intimidating
• Resisting the urge to paste in commands and scripts without knowing what they do

Only downside to this is that if your house burns down you’ll lose everything - but a friend suggested me to have important files on an encrypted tarball stored in the cloud.

For those with lots of files and poor upload speeds but blessed with a desk at work, also consider stashing an encrypted disk in a drawer / fake plant / etc.

I’m not against the use of LLMs in principle, but their responses are for you only. As soon as it rolls out the door onto the open internet, it oxidizes to become slop. Prompt us with an original question, not stuff fresh out the back end of a LLM.

It’s a once-off operation if you’re willing to go the LTSC route. Microsoft likes to undo all your hard work debloating Windows with the semi-annual major updates on non-LTSC editions.

Linux on all of my main machines, so I’m grabbing the popcorn. Got LTSC for all the remaining Windows use cases: VMs, beater laptop for Windows-only stuff, and a couple of computers from family.

Most of my friends replace their computers quite frequently, so they’re living blissfully unaware on Windows 11 or MacOS. The ones who do have older laptops tend to be tech-savvy enough to have figured out LTSC or Linux themselves. On one occasion, a good friend of mine had an old iMac that wasn’t getting updates anymore, so I installed Debian and themed XFCE to look like MacOS, taught them the basics, and they were impressed with the result.

As for family, they’re usually very happy with the Linux Mint Debian Edition that I install for them, but some I know just won’t use the computer if it doesn’t have their familiar Windows-specific software, so I get them started with LTSC.

I frankly have an excess of unused hardware that’s piling up, which won’t be helped by my access to a good source of e-waste. Old computers have already been trickling in, but I’m excited to see what’s next now that the Oct 14 date has come.

I have something like that set up as a discrete print server. Also one as the mini file share for the guest/untrusted devices network.

I have pihole lumped in with a more substantial machine, but these little guys are always nice for retro gaming up to the N64/PS1 era.

Maybe the firmware file supplied by the Pop OS repo is broken? Download the firmware updater directly from Dell’s website and put it on a FAT32 USB drive. Nice thing about Dell BIOS is that you can use the .exe update without Windows - there should be an option in your BIOS to browse for the update file and apply it. Then install a fresh copy of Pop OS and don’t let it update firmware for now.

Interesting. I thought that all but the disk and CMOS were stateless once powered down for hibernation, but I’d love to hear from someone with expertise on how other components know that they were hibernated under Windows.

Pot, meet kettle

On modern versions of common distros, it’ll probably work just fine if you install the driver from your distro’s repos. Don’t touch NVIDIA’s downloadable .run installer.

It’s getting better for Nvidia support on Linux, but there’s more edge case problems than with AMD or Intel graphics.

For me, Microsoft’s original sin was removing the Start menu and the Classic and Aero themes in Windows 8. I wanted something better than questionable UxTheme patches that broke with every major update, and it was during that search that I learned there is more to the world than macOS and Windows.

But it was the invasive telemetry and bloatware that finally made me take action. I’m sure the spike in blood pressure and heart rate whenever I had to undo the asinine default settings on every new install and major update was not good for my health. All of the debloat utilities felt like putting lipstick on a pig.

The ability to customize the interface to my heart’s content also got me to learn about and appreciate the inner workings of Linux. I now have a couple setups on Chicago95 XFCE and a couple on AeroThemePlasma KDE. Despite how much I like the familiar UI of Windows, I wouldn’t ever look back to using Windows itself.

This is for a SeaBIOS system without functional TPM.

Bypassing either password challenge for simplicity’s sake is just defeating the purpose of having LUKS on the full disk anyway. Just encrypt your home of that’s a problem for you and simplify things.

Could you explain this? I do not see how it would compromise the security model since the lock screen would be dismissed only after the LUKS password is entered. The screenlocker is only relevant when suspended to RAM as the LUKS key is no longer in RAM once hibernated.

Killing your lock screen from the session manager is going to cause all kinds of problems, so that’s not going to help. It’s not JUST a plain old process to kill, it’s the session manager. You kill it, and it’s going to ask you again anyway, and likely destroy your existing session.

I am using slock, which is separate from my session manager (startx in ~/.profile), and in my testing, I was able to kill it without issue.

Sometimes I want to create my own products and sell them as a side hustle. Sometimes I doubt it’ll work. But other times I am reminded how long MALIBAL has been kicking around. Ironically inspiring.

Thanks for the explanation. And you’re right - it’s was a nice learning exercise and a “satisfying” stopgap while I figure out how to compile either Libreboot, which has a variant of GRUB patched with proper LUKS2 and Argon2 support, or TianoCore, which is rather involved and scantily documented for the old X230 hardware.