What is the date and faces thing measuring? lol

For dual booting with windows, I find this guide from System76 to be pretty good. https://support.system76.com/articles/windows/

A good way to check out mobile Linux is through postmarketOS. They have a list of older android phones that the OS can be flashed on to and have a near mainline Linux kernel. I would just give the caveat that since it does not run android then you cannot use android apps unless you use something like Waydroid to emulate.

You can use a VoIP or SIP provider and then to send SMS and MMS messages you can install an app called Chatty: https://flathub.org/apps/sm.puri.Chatty

For my ISP it’s actually cheaper to not use their modem+WiFi router as they charge a monthly lease on the equipment. I declined it and they provided me with a modem for free. All I have to do is plug the modem to my own router and that’s it!

The features you listed seems pretty standard to all routers these days.

I get what you mean, but the way you worded it makes it seem like you experienced dependency hell for 20 out of 25 years…

Its cool to see people thinking about how to donate when they can. I think about it as well, and when I have donated I think most if not all fall into your list.

An immutable distro with a heavily customized KDE desktop is Nitrux. Check it out at nxos.org

I used to use nitter to view stuff people sent from twitter. Now I guess I won’t ever look at twitter ever again.

I see you use Arch, btw

usually when I have problems with YubiKey being detected it is because the pcscd service has not been started, or I forgot to enable it so it would start automatically on boot.

You can follow the instructions here on how to do so: https://linuxhandbook.com/systemd-start-service-boot/

It sounds like you have a few devices, so I would recommend trying out this testing distro with MauiShell. There is a testing iso under the heading “Downloads and Sources” in this most recent blog post about its development progress.

https://mauikit.org/blog/maui-release-briefing-4/

When I did some research on hardware keys I was between Yubikey and Nitrokey. I ended up going with Yubikey because KeepassXC supported it.

Something to keep in mind is purchasing a backup key. I bought one for my wife and we use each other’s as a backup.

For KeepassXC it does not support registering multiple keys (at least not that I have figured out), so I have a copy of my database where it uses my wife’s key as a backup.

That’s really what I use the terminal for too. GUI stores still tend to feel very slow to install things. If I know the package name it’s much faster to just type the command in a terminal.

Same for making simple modifications to config files. ‘Sudo nano filename’, make the tweak, save and exit.

What if, sometime after Win 10 loses support a virus takes advantage of the lack of patches and propagates across all the machines with a simple message “This operating system is no longer supported, please click here to upgrade.” The button then runs a script to download and install a user friendly Linux distro. The world is then saved.

True, no one was arguing against repurposing, and I wasn’t accusing you of such.

Your comment said the answer was not to purchase an old iPad and use the money to get a cheap modern android tablet. My response was just to point out that not everyone may be aware of the planned obsolescence, and the particularly aggressive stance Apple takes.

Although if the OP found Lemmy I guess there should be some assumption of being knowledgeable about the tech world 😅

I think its reasonable to assume a perfectly functioning, yet old, piece of hardware could be repurposed. We have all just grown accustomed to mega corporations’ design of planned obsolescence; when maybe we shouldn’t be.

If you want to try some niche music service there is resonate.coop which encourages exploration by making it cheap to listen to a song once. However, if you like the song and keep going back to it it will be considered “purchased” and you will no longer be charged when you listen to it. Last I checked there was no offline mode for purchased songs but they were working on it.

I get wanting a distro to look modern and cool by default. One that I like a lot that uses a modified KDE is Nitrux https://nxos.org

There are already a lot of great suggestions posted already. I thought I would toss in https://mauikit.org/ which is working in making a convergent UI for desktop and apps.