Fully agree. I started using OnlyOffice about 6 months ago but wouldn’t go back to LibreOffice at this point. I feel the interface is way more intuitive and helps with productivity.

I’m a fan of the LibreOffice project too, but they need to invest some time in improving the interface. The Word 97 look isn’t cutting it for me anymore and even with “ribbon mode” enabled it’s vastly inferior to OnlyOffice’s UI.

Obsidian is really good. Very feature-rich and customizable.

I personally prefer Joplin for a couple of reasons. It’s fully open source and while it has less features and customizability, I also feel it keeps out of my way more to allow me to focus purely on taking notes and not messing around with other features. Obsidian encourages me to play with its extra features more, which for my case usually just reduces the productivity of my note-taking.

Probably just a me-thing. I tend to gravitate to more straightforward and minimalist solutions generally.

Good question! There’s a few reasons, I guess:

• There’s a large element of “because I can” to this, just to explore how stupid the scope of systemd is as a suite.
• There’s a small practical element. GRUB itself is quite a hefty tool to accommodate all kinds of boot setups, and it works well. If you have a simple boot setup though you could probably shave a couple of seconds off of the boot time just by using the simplified sd-boot and loading the kernel via its EFIStub.
• A learning exercise in self-signing EFI binaries, enrolling a MOK (if I use Shim), and setting up scripts to handle updates.

All boils down to my enjoyment of doing weird nerdy things though, ultimately. =)

Turned out, this model was hard coded to only allow a boot entry named “Windows Boot Manager” to be loaded by default.

Holy moly that’s absolutely shocking. Yeah I didn’t quite realize how scuffed various UEFI implementations were until I encountered this issue and started looking around. Wild.

In part because some of my education research led me into looking at how data was being used by social media and big tech and led me to a greater understanding of just how much was being collected and how it was being shared and used.

After learning about the landscape of data collection, I decided I wanted to minimize my part in it.

Unless you’re using the TOR Browser or Mullvad Browser, you’re already fingerprintable with a high degree of accuracy for those determined enough. If you’re that worried about fingerprinting, you should probably be using one of those.

There’s no magic number of extensions that would be considered “safest” from a fingerprinting perspective. Any you add will likely adjust your fingerprint in its own way. But as I said, since you’re probably uniquely identifiable anyway you can’t really get “more unique.”

With that said, it’s best to keep your extensions to a minimum for other reasons too. Each extension represents an increased attack surface and you have to trust more developers to not be implementing exploitable code directly into your browser. Generally, I find UBlock Origin to be enough and maybe an extension for your password manager or a few other things. I don’t generally run more than 5.

Supporting the Chromium monopoly is a valid point, but there’s also a reason why a lot of browser companies, even those who market their browser at more privacy-conscious individuals such as Vivaldi and Brave, choose to fork Chromium over Firefox/Gecko. A good portion of that reason is Chromium’s superior security architecture that is a lot more battle tested and mature; the rest of the reason often comes down to compatibility and mobile-readiness.

A lot of people are wary of any browser engine attaining a monopoly since IE achieved this back in the day. It’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison though, since Chromium is actually open source and IE/Trident was not. For that reason, anything problematic can be stripped out by those who fork it which is exactly why we have browsers like Brave, Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium, and others who remove anything that feeds data to Google from their releases. The option also theoretically exists to hard fork the project entirely and take it in a different direction which was never a possibility in the IE days, although that would be a monumental effort.

I get it if people want to support Firefox/Gecko for philosophical reasons. In an ideal world there would be several projects of equal maturity to the browser engines we have today. Realistically though, for all intents and purposes, the vast majority of the world is already using Chromium in some flavor or another and it’s a project that has a lot of the world’s best browser engine developers contributing to it. As a user, I care most about using a secure, privacy-respecting browser that I find innovative which caters to my needs through its features rather than fighting a philosophical battle that’s already been lost. Naturally if you find Firefox does cater to all your needs though, more power to you.

Brave and Vivaldi are very different companies. I don’t use Brave specifically because I’m not comfortable with the fact that, essentially, they’re an advertising company primarily looking to push their crypto.

It’s true that using a Chromium base poses some additional privacy challenges. Due to its customizability, it’s certainly possible to harden Firefox to a better level than any Chromium-based browser currently; projects like Arkenfox certainly help with this, as well as the tweaks ported to the browser by the TOR Uplift project. With that said, stock Firefox as shipped by Mozilla isn’t exactly privacy friendly without going to lengths to harden the browser. Mozilla collect an absolute ton of telemetry by default, complete with a unique identifier attached to each download. FF also comes with pre-installed addons with questionable privacy policies like Pocket.

I think concerns about fingerprinting are somewhat overstated, or at least over thought about. The reality is there’s an absolute ton of metrics that can be used to fingerprint a browser by advanced scripts and if a site wants to fingerprint you it will, and it doesn’t really matter if you’re using FF or Chromium. The only realistic way of avoiding this is by using browsers like TOR or Mullvad, which aim to all have the same fingerprint so you’ll be able to blend in with the crowd. Preventing naïve script fingerprinting is the best you can ever hope to do on any other daily driver browser, and addons like CanvasBlocker for Firefox or JShelter for Chromium are typically enough to prevent fingerprinting by opportunistic scripts.

Vivaldi is an awesome browser and the people and company behind it continue to inspire me with confidence that they’re truly committed to providing a Chromium-based browser that is as privacy conscious as it can be.

Debian. I always come back to Debian.

It’s just a rock solid, multipurpose distro that has everything. If you have an issue with some older software versions, you can just track testing or sid and treat it as rolling release or use flatpaks for GUI apps.

To me, Debian is almost perfect.

Pretty much any store-brand toothpaste is probably going to be a lot cheaper than “branded” products, and will have the required amount of fluoride within it to keep your teeth healthy which is far and away the most important ingredient in any toothpaste. The entire toothpaste industry is mostly all marketing.