jadsel

The Crock Pot branded essentially knockoffs are good. We've had one for years. Haven't seen anything about ill-advised political pandering there so far, at least.

Yep, and that applies even without any existing health concerns going in. Better hope you don't develop any while living under those conditions.

I'm T1 diabetic, and have an unfortunately reasonable expectation that even a week spent in jail back in the US could very easily turn into a death sentence. It does happen with depressing regularity. That's just looking at one very straightforward (and easily treatable) chronic condition, and a couple of fairly recent examples which have gotten more publicity than most such cases ever will. It's a mess.

Yep. (Though I'm going through Chaotic-AUR rather than Mullvad's own repo.) It does get a little annoying, but hey.

This is using a combo of a phone running GrapheneOS, and Linux on desktop. It's an ongoing process.

1. Infomaniak KMail for anything that matters. I do still have a couple of Gmail accounts, and have continued to use one of them to give out publicly and catch spam. FairEmail as a mobile client for them all. Infomaniak's webmail is decent, and I just use it on desktop.
2. Infomaniak KDrive / just physical backups. Considering self-hosting Nextcloud for some of it. KDE Connect helps with syncing across devices.
3. OsmAnd~ / OpenStreetMap where practical. I do occasionally resort to Google Maps on an old Android phone for navigation.
4. Mostly been using my distros instance of SearX on desktop, DuckDuckGo elsewhere.
5. Firefox still on mobile / preferably FireDragon on desktop / Vanadium is also good on mobile, but I missed the easy cross-device syncing.
6. Strictly local data Fossify Calendar on mobile, importing and sending .ics events as need be.
7. Don't really have a need for contacts management outside of phone contacts and e-mail.
8. My own ad hoc ADHD Brain workaround setup that probably wouldn't transfer well. Quillpad looks good on mobile though, with Nextcloud sync to take it across platforms.
9. LibreOffice whenever I do need anything like that these days, with KDrive sharing as required.
10. Matrix. Using a public homeserver that runs a bridge to Google Chat (among other services), with my partner still using GChat exclusively.
11. Rarely comes up, but probably also Matrix with the bridges.
12. Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, besides obviously Lemmy. I don't really do social media these days.
13. Spotify. Prefer downloading/ripping and keeping MP3s locally.
14. Mainly still YouTube, but through Revanced where possible. One of the biggest gaps in other viable services right now.
15. AuthPass cross platform. Using the same format as KeePass, but I prefer their client.
16. Mullvad /AdGuard DNS on my phone, Cloudflare on desktop / Whatever my partner currently has set up on the network now plus my own firewalld configuration at home
17. Mostly stock GrapheneOS
18. F-Droid / Aurora / (Sandboxed) Play Store only where the others won't do it.
19. Still need to get the archive away from Google. Considering just organizing locally with Immich, just doing local backups for a couple years now.
20. DMI / Vädret apps (more useful locally), KDE's built-in weather widget on desktop.
21. We avoid "smart" anything in this house. The closest is Xiaomi's (Graphene sandboxes) app handling the robovac.
22. It's not Google specific, but I have personally been leaning toward FOSS software storing data locally wherever I reasonably can.

Also early 2000s here, but I was in my late 20s by then. Started out on Debian not that long before Woody came out, then before too long I tried Mandrake alongside it.

Exciting stuff for someone who first set hands (and started into BASIC) on a TRS-80, and then ran GEOS on a C64 for years. I was drawn to the opportunities for more tinkering, among other things.

NVIDIA mostly does fine with Wayland now IME. Running KDE Wayland on a Legion Slim 5 with RTX 4060 myself for over a year now, with minimal problems after the NVIDIA 550+ drivers came out.

I did have definite problems, including on X11, with the 535 drivers that the Debian repos were still using at last check. Your best bet is probably to install the latest drivers straight from NVIDIA's repos: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/tesla/driver-installation-guide/index.html

That's what I ended up doing on a Debian-based distro, and it pretty much fixed my issues. There are specific instructions linked there for different supported distros.

My daily driver now is Garuda, which is essentially just Arch with a GUI installer and some extremely handy extra user-friendly tools bolted on. It's aimed at gaming, and so makes it extra easy to get the drivers set up and kept up to date. That is basically why I decided to give their installer a go in the first place after I got this laptop, to at least let it run hardware detection and see how it was configuring things, to tell where I might have been going wrong in my then-main distro. Then I liked the experience enough that I stuck around. It mostly just works.

Note: This would be from someone with experience on Arch. If you're not cool with rolling releases, that may not be a good choice. Garuda does default to a BTRFS/Snapper setup that makes it easy to just boot into a previous snapshot if anything does break, which does come in handy occasionally.

But, as other commenters have already said? The distro itself doesn't really matter. That's mainly just down to personal taste. The important part here is getting the right drivers and configuration going on whatever you do prefer to use. Some distros just make this easier than others

I'm also in the Nordics (so accustomed to the overall electronics prices by now), and going to echo that their prices are looking kinda steep for what you're getting. Unless you're somehow extremely uncomfortable with picking up a refurb machine somewhere else, and installing whichever distro(s) you want on it yourself. That should be a simple enough process, maybe especially dealing with a Lenovo--and really on just about any laptop you can find, as compared to 20 years ago. Or probably even the 10 since you were last using it.

Just getting a refurb elsewhere and making an install USB is the way I would suggest going. If you use Ventoy to write it, you should be able to try several different live system options off the same stick before deciding which to go with for now.

That site did not seem to be actually specifying what distro they're installing for you, but their "Linux installation" service page (for the equivalent of $150US or €130+!) shows Mint and offers the option of several desktop flavors of Mint, Ubuntu, or Fedora. If you're happy to pay that kind of premium for someone else to spend maybe 15 minutes on likely a Mint install set up however they decided was best? Sure, it might be a decent way to go. Doesn't really seem necessary even for a complete beginner, however.

I came in just about as Debian Woody was coming out, in 2002. (Main reason I can even date it beyond "Idk, about 20 years ago?").

Tried Mandrake a while after that, often recommended as pretty much the equivalent of Linux Mint at the time in terms of noob friendliness. I did enjoy that but stuck with Debian for my main system for years, though.

Very much agreed. I ran into some similar issues for a while on KDE Wayland, also with strange freezes--and was concerned that it might be a (fairly new at the time) hardware issue. No, it was evidently some weirdness involving the then-current NVIDIA drivers, which was thankfully fixed not that long after.

If you do have NVIDIA graphics, you'll probably want to make sure it's using the latest drivers from them--and maybe particularly on Wayland. More stable distros do tend to ship older versions.

Primarily Garuda these days. It's basically Arch with some user-friendly additions. The major reason I tried it on a then-new gaming laptop was the actually really good IME hardware detection and minimal fuss NVIDIA setup using their latest drivers.

I was having enough headaches trying to get graphics actually working properly on the Debian-based distro I had been using, that I said fuck it and tried something that would hopefully get things working for me so that I could at least see that configuration to figure out where I'd been going wrong. Then I liked it enough that I have mostly just stayed there on this machine. (Did finally get things fixed on the other side, though.) But, I was already fine with Arch, which probably helps.

I still need to rack off another batch that's taking up a good chunk of my brewing corner. But, the next batch planned for hopefully this weekend is a hoochy melomel concoction involving some frozen strawberries that need cleared out and compatible fruity-flavored black tea. (Kobbs Sörgårdste) It may also get some blackcurrant drink concentrate if that seems like a good idea flavorwise.

I was wanting to get a test batch of some Thai black rice and blueberry Franken-doburoku going, but the pressure cooker I've been using for glutinous rice has decided not to seal properly even after a gasket replacement. I don't feel like messing around with steaming wholegrain rice on the stove, so that'll just have to wait until I can troubleshoot and fix that/snag a second cooker. May need to wait for next month on that one.

Seconding this. I'm also using Infomaniak here with my own domain, and would definitely recommend it. Their free tier comes with 15GB cloud storage on top of the 20GB mailbox cap, which is better than a lot. I'm more focused on data privacy these days, and haven't seen anything concerning about their service so far.

Infomaniak offers their own mail app for Android, but the accounts are easy enough to set up over IMAP in whatever client you prefer. I've been favoring FairEmail personally. The same developer is behind NetGuard, which you might also find handy if you're on stock Android. (I'm using GrapheneOS now, which already has app network access control covered.)