Absurd! No home appliance should require an internet service. More enshittification.

You could say the same thing about cults. A lot of the MAGA movement. A lot of religion. Similarly how a lot of scams and other disinformation methods work. We do not try very hard to stop those things.

Time. I think I will at some point unless I buy and flash a Linux tablet first.

Is there a reason to not just use du? Or use either and just look at certain trees? Or just get a bigger drive so it does not matter?

ASUS Tablet. I like it. Probably will replace with Linux tablet at some point.

I don’t know if this is related, but I can’t use F-Droid on Android 6 since it does not contain the Let’s Encrypt cert without rooting the device, and it seems like F-Droid has stopped using the cross-signed version or maybe it’s Let’s Encrypt itself has stopped cross-signing? This happened a few months ago.

In my case the NID is in the basement and connected to my own UPS that powers everything on my main comm panel.

Distros. Pick something in the top 10 of https://distrowatch.com/ .

I use Debian or one of the derivatives of Debian.

I usually buy System76 laptops. Might look at a Framework one next go around. I like supporting the linux supply chain when I can. If money is the only concern, sure some repurposed thing is likely cheaper.

Lot of angles here. My first reaction is another set of parents blaming tech for their lack of involvement and their sons personal actions.

I also think too the personification of chat bots at all levels is kind evil. Some people are just really suseptable to that and the bot training and AI field itself encourages this miss-conception.

There are lot of other issues with these bots too. I wonder how many people are really up to using them properly with the appropriate skepticism or if our society is ready for all of the missuse.

Fields from magnets can, just depends how strong and this applies to spinning hard drives not SSDs. We had an idiot at work once that decided to store a bunch of magnetic bases on the top of a tower PC. Corrupted the drive. This case there were quite a few of them maybe in a half dozen to a dozen range and they were the strong lockable ones for breadboards.

This is the answer. GrapheneOS still needs the binary blob updates from Google or probably more correctly Googles suppliers.

I am never quite sure if the I in AI stands for intelligence or ignorance.

This is why I do not use a rolling release distro.

Tables are a great starting point. So is something like alternativeto.net and just go down through the list by popularity until you get to something sane.

There is also going to be disagreements about what is best. There is no best app. We all have unique needs and concerns. I know I disagree with many things Op said in such an absolute way.

More of a rant. Post is kind of nuts. They are talking about a comparison matrix not a check list. How else are you going to compare.

Not surprising. The US is a petro state. It will never want to switch to something else. China and the EU are far more motivated.

I like Zim. Used it for years. The big advantages you can have many 1000s of pages and it just uses a folder tree not a database, so you have direct and attachment access if you need it. Zim is a true hierarchical wiki not a simple notes app. There a plugins you can enable for more advanced features.

Zim does get slower with more pages for some operations like searches and some changes. I have one wiki with 4500 pages and do feel it is getting a bit slower sometimes. You can however just create another notebook at any time as long as your content has reasonable dividing lines.

Actually the safest thing is probably to choose a main system and run the other in a VM like with VirtualBox. For you, you could just install VirtualBox on Windows then Linux inside of a VirtualBox VM. Windows does have a builtin Virtualization solution too you may be able to use, but I have personally never done that. Keep in mind too that VMs are not as performant as bare metal. For video probably NO, for images fine, for audio maybe but you’ll have to see if you get the real-time timing you need in a VM. Good way to play in any case. 2nd best if you have a workstation, not a laptop, you could put in a hot mount SATA drive enclosure, and just swap in the drive you want and get full bear metal performance. Dual boot takes some tech skill. Be sure to back everything up if you do that. Should do that anyway before fiddling. Also if you use bitlocker and secure boot make sure you have all your recovery keys and know how to work with your bios settings too.

Maybe I am missing something, not sure why you care about NTFS. If this is a separate computer you don’t really care about that, just the sharing protocol (SMB for example). If it is on the main box, then you’d probably convert this to Ext4 or something similar. No reason to stick with NTFS with Linux. There are a lot of great FS options on linux plus BTRFS, LVM, or RAID to if you want redundancy.

Regarding apps. The alternativeto site is great. Linux has a bunch of audio and photo software. If your a pro, you may not find any of it sufficient. Especially a lot of people cannot do without Photoshop. The common quoted photo programs are GIMP and Darktable. There are many other photo and image programs. Common audio program is Audacity. Again, there are many others. Looks like some handle vst but I have no personal experience.

In project management lore there is the tripple constraint: time, money, freatures. But there is another insidious dimension not talked about. That is risk.

The natural progession in a business if there is no push back is that management wants every feature under the sun, now, and for no money. So the project team does the only thing it can do, increase risk.

The memory leak thing is an example of risk. It is also an example of some combination of poor project management including insufficient push back against management insanity and bad business mangement in general which might be an even bigger problem.

My point, this is a common natural path of things but it does not have to always be tolerated.