I’ve known my lady friend for 30 or so now. She lives in her house and I in mine. We value our time together, but we also enjoy our own time alone. When she comes over, she is not as concerned about all the intricacies of privacy, anonymity, and security, she just wants to watch her shows, and doom scroll her phone for tasty recipes and such. She is an accomplished chef as well as a painter, and her confectioneries are divine. I set up a small NUC that is backed up with the main backups. On it is Mealie, so she can transfer recipes to a digital format for preservation.

She does acknowledge the validity of preserving her data, but that responsibility rests on me, the network admin. I made her a special vlan, kind of a ‘dumbed down’ version of my own where she can be reasonably protected, yet enjoy all the things she is used to doing on the internet. Other than that, when friends drop by to visit, they sometimes want to use the wifi. So, I have a guest Wi-Fi which is rather restrictive. So my core network is never accessed or by anyone other than me. It took a lot of time to assemble it all and make it all work, and I’m not going to willy-nilly adjust firewall rules on my core network so you can surf TikTok. Nothing against TikTok other than the shady specter that hangs over it. The content is fine. Some of the videos I’ve seen are funny, educational, etc. but it’s just not my thing.

So, yeah, I’ve had to make accommodations for a handful of people. Her laptop was giving her fits, so I introduced Mint into the mix. She has no problems driving the Linux bus. It looks like Windows, responds like Windows, she’s able to do the same things she did on Windows, so she is comfortable with the installation.