It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s a challenging concept to have to explain to immigration officials at the airport.

What’s more, they require you to periodically log in on your phone. If you exclusively use the desktop client, you will get a message that access will be blocked if you don’t sign in on your phone.

I feel you.

Signal still centrally collects metadata and requires a phone number to participate.

If you’re serious about privacy, ESPECIALLY if you’re part of a group looking to organize in a clandestine fashion, you should look into the vastly superior SimpleX Chat.

There’s probably many different ways to achieve this but I would probably use a shell (zsh or fish) that does this by default

Big fan of both fzf and tmux!

Good advice!

That’s what I actually use (and ctrl-r also quite a bit), but up arrow for the meme

I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I’m pessimistic that any flavor of Linux will be an acceptable experience for the person you’re describing. Something like Silverblue may be least obstrusive, but compatibility will still be a prominent problem.

Alternatively, you could show them surface level cool stuff that’s easier to do with Linux. Like blocking all ads, running your own Minecraft server, downloading YouTube videos, building your own PC with cheap parts (and maybe even pirating movies and TV shows, depending on your own practices and relationship to that person). There’s a lot to love about Linux even if you don’t care about privacy and open software as abstract values.

The way I usually start teaching using the console to my (very much non-tech) students is set up a safe container and then let them type whatever, invariably generating a lot of error messages. Then I challenge them to generate different error messages, “gotta catch em all” style. Then we talk about the error messages and what they might mean. After this exercise they usually get the basic idea of command – response, what to look out for and how to compose valid commands.

I don’t know of such an alternative. A quick solution would be to use something like GeoNotes to take geolocated notes.

As far as a self-hosted solution goes, I’d just like to point out that you wouldn’t need a self-hosted database of places. You could query Ouverture (or Google, OSM, etc.) for places near you, and you’d just need to store the check-in on your server with a basic API. This is an interesting problem, and not super hard to implement.

This sounds like a good idea, but I think the problem here is that a lot of popular software runs great on Linux but is very clunky and ugly on other systems (looking at you, LibreOffice). So keep that in mind if you try out FOSS on Windows as a sneak peek.

Navigation on Android: Osmand lets you download and cache OSM data so you can use it offline. Cache is unlimited if you download Osmand via F-Droid.

You can put together a media server and build a catalogue so you can watch movies and series offline. Maybe not a huge priority in that situation but definitely nice to have.

Jellyfin is a good option for streaming from a media server to other devices. The *arr suite is an option for building the catalogue.

I understand it’s easy, but I don’t want to sully my omnipotent flake with a casual nixpkgs.follows = "nixos-cosmic/nixpkgs";. It’s probably fine, but I can wait.

I’m waiting for Cosmic to be merged into NixOS stable which I learned is just around the corner (May). I’m super excited because Cosmic seems to strike a sensible balance between polished, full-featured, make-everyone-happy mainstream DE and performance-oriented tiling WM.

Although I’ve never tested the Alpha, I have a feeling that I might finally make the switch (from Gnome) on my daily driver once it’s mature enough.

If I’m not mistaken, ffsend generates a link that you can share with non-tech people (which is a big difference in my book).

ffsend targets Send which is an actively maintained community fork of Firefox Send.

It’s not centralized, you can host your own or choose from the public send instances.

You can load bitmap images into Inkscape and manipulate them to a degree, but Gimp is much better at that. You can probably also load vector graphics (svg) into Gimp, but I’d assume they would be converted to bitmaps.

Vector vs bitmap is a good topic to be familiar with for anyone who works with computers, I keep running into professionals who really should know the difference but don’t.

Helpful answer: vlc, libreoffice, gimp, inkscape, zathura, obs-studio

Real answer: gnome, run-or-raise, foot, fish, tmux, fzf, silver-searcher, neovim, neomutt, vifm