jutty

I think the ethos of open source flips this thinking. You should not trust. Microsoft may not be noting down your banking details, but you actually don’t and can’t know if it is. What it is doing is storing other personal data, because that is in its policies. Now, to what extent it takes advantage of this capability and permission, it is again unknown and unknowable.

Microsoft may be a big corp, but some distros are the backbone of highly critical systems, and collectively they run the vast majority of servers.

You don’t “trust” your distro. Or your laws. Everything being done is in the open, so you can see for yourself. If you lack the knowledge to do that, there are others who are doing it and many are sharing what they find. You will “trust” on some level, because of its reputation, how established it is, but trust here means something very different from letting a huge blob of unknown code do whatever it does because I trust you.

That’s the best, safest way. By the way, you can do the same thing from a flash drive too, if it has enough space to hold the system. I don’t mean as a live temporary system, I mean you can just point the installer to a second flash drive as the install disk and it won’t care.

For Debian there’s Preseed, for Arch there’s archinstall, for a Fedora/RHEL there’s Kickstart, for Alpine there’s setup scripts, for distros with fully manual installs, you could just write a script?

Automating your install is something any sysadmin and mainly any distro developer will quickly reach towards, so it is something almost certain to exist.

Though, if I understand you, you’d want that to be “sourced” from an existing system, yes? I can see the use of that… NixOS is likely the closest to what you want, since you are always defining a full declaration of your system.

The PC itself as in hardware? Hardly… Your data is at risk. So ignoring updates for both Mint and Windows will put you at a more vulnerable position from a security standpoint.

If you are asking if not updating Windows will make your Mint system insecure, the answer is no. At least to me an exploit leveraging an unmounted Windows partition is unheard of. It will of course make your Windows system less secure for the 2% of the time you do use it. Another side effect of updating it is that it may break your dual booting.

I use PDF Arranger a lot for that

https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger

I switched recently from neomutt to aerc and yes, if you want less complicated configuration, it’s a great pick. I find it less buggy and just best designed overall.

I never tried Gmail or Exchange on it, but this should have some helpful info on that: https://man.sr.ht/~rjarry/aerc/providers/

After some manual reinstalls and much repetition, I’ve been using a custom script for the past year or so, which I’m slowly open sourcing through a rewrite.