Maybe I missed something, but with your proposed solution, what would stop someone from just handing the adult cryptographic token to a kid? It sounds like it would be a similar situation to or even easier to do than fake ID cards or adults buying alcohol for underage people.

It’s not just 1 alone. It’s the combination of 1 and 2 that’s the issue. It means that if for any reason you’re unable to continue paying for the service in the future, your old email address could be taken over by someone else.

I see a combination of issues with Posteo, mailbox.org, fastmail, and many other commonly suggested providers that made me steer away from them: 1) they don’t have a free tier, and 2) they recycle your email address if you stop paying. Using a custom domain for email is not generally considered a best practice for privacy, so I avoid that too. This greatly reduces the number of options available to me.

Edit: my issue is not with 1 alone. The problem is the combination of 1 and 2. It means that if you’re unable to pay for the service for any reason in the future, your old email address can be taken over by someone else.

I just don’t understand some of the downvotes on Lemmy. It’s happened to me too. I wrote what I thought was an entirely positive post without anything controversial and one person downvoted me. I wonder if this is some cultural thing that came over from Reddit.

Good article, thanks. I haven’t followed this saga closely, but between the intense political pressure and manipulation from both sides and China shutting down any ability to investigate further over there, I get the impression that we will never know the true origins of the virus.

Edit: BTW, browser reading mode bypasses the paywall on the article. It’s worth a read.

Yes, I’ve seen it recommended in the past, but just wanted to mention the caveats. Might as well go for Tumbleweed, which appears to be their main distro. In fact, if I recall correctly they had announced a couple of years ago that they were going to sunset Leap but then walked that back when the community protested.

openSUSE. Either Tumbleweed (rolling) or Leap (stable). A few reasons for this:

• Their snapshot system is awesome (they develop snapper) and configured by default when you install it. It takes a snapshot of your system before and after updates and at other times as well. Uses minimal space because they use BTRFS and also have maintenance jobs by default. This is the main factor that made me settle on it. To me, it was the best of both worlds between the stability but restrictive nature of atomic/immutable distros and the freedom but potential for breaking your system of the traditional distros.
• They’re reputed to have one of the best KDE integrations of any distro. I’m not sure what this means in practice because I’m still a newbie, but I’ve seen this mentioned by others a few times. Other major DEs are also options at install time.
• They’re one of the traditional big distros. SUSE has been around since the early days of Linux. SUSE is also a commercial corporation, similar to Red Hat.
• The rolling distro, Tumbleweed has a reputation for being one of the most stable rolling ones because they apparently have an extensive automated testing system for updates.
• Their system configuration tool (YaST) is also supposed to be awesome and one of the best around, minimizing the need to resort to the command line, but I also haven’t used this too much.
• Their community is supposed to be really helpful as well. I haven’t experienced this myself, but have heard it.

Edit: it’s probably best to avoid their “SlowRoll” distro for now. It’s rolling but with less frequent updates than Tumbleweed, which many may thinks is a sweet spot. However, it’s still in beta and I’ve heard of people having issues with it occasionally.

That’s a possibility but it seems odd. I seem to recall that not all of them were as obvious to enable encryption as Bazzite (and probably Fedora). I think that that setting was if you chose to customize the storage settings.

Haha, no doubt. I seem to recall that the Windows code was leaked a few years ago too?

Interesting, thanks!

Thanks! If I’m reading that second link correctly, they rank “Babbel” with a higher score than LingQ and Rosetta Stone?

They require the least amount of minutes using them to achieve the highest scores in standardized language tests.

What’s the source of this info?

Yeah, I was thinking along similar lines when I first learned about Malus a couple days ago. Fine, so they get a “free” copy of open-source software that they can use without restrictions. What happens as time goes by and their “free” copy no longer receives any updates, fixes, improvements? I guess they can keep repeating the process every time a new version is released, but the whole thing seems counterproductive for anyone trying this.

Interesting, thanks. Maybe it’s something with the entire Ubuntu branch.

That’s odd. Maybe it’s a limitation with Ubuntu or their downstream distros. I’m now positive that all 3 of those distros I listed gave me the option to encrypt the disk during installation. This was in the last 3 months or so.

In my recent experience, I’m pretty sure all distros I tried (Debian, Bazzite, openSUSE) had a simple checkbox to do full disk encryption.

For sure!

I don’t know about spambots, but here is one explanation of the Piefed karma mechanisms I’ve read here:

https://lemmy.zip/post/57943283/24279809

Oh, yes, I only noticed after replying to you that the OP mentioned gaming. I generally wouldn’t recommend most SFF PCs for gaming either.

Though spend a bit more for a solid i7 and avoid SFF.

The SFF’s can be great for just browsing, office use, light photo editing, etc. Obviously nothing too demanding, but they save a lot of power for their intended purpose. I picked up a USFF Lenovo ThinkCentre about the size of a Mac Mini for $100 a couple years back.