It’s not. Neither is triple checking. Notice how the alias doesn’t actually run dd? That’s on purpose.

They call it disk destroyer for a reason. You gotta alias that shit.

alias dd='echo Did you triple check which device you picked? Of course not, dipshit. Check again'

Linux runs on almost anything these days. I’ve installed Mint on Lenovos, Dells, and HPs without issue (even media keys all worked out of the box). As others have suggested, I’d probably look into used business workstations from the last five years to ensure you’ll get a solid five to ten years out of it.

This is a bit like saying “Honda Civics are Tamagotchis for car people” because there’s a community of people who enjoy modifying them. The rest of us just drive, and they run perfectly fine if you’re not doing a lot of invasive customization.

Arch is great for tweaking and customization, but it’s also fine for a simpler use case.

Satan called and said that seems a little over the top.

YoU wOuLdN’t DoWnLoAd A kErNeL

When I tried to migrate to W11 a number of years ago, the wireless drivers weren’t installed automatically (plus major issues with my GPU and lots of other quirks). They’ve probably gotten better since then, but I wouldn’t know (after about three hours of trying to get basic things working, I tried loading Mint on a thumbdrive and everything worked out of the box, including things like function keys and adjustable keyboard backlighting–I never went back).

I’ve considered looking into some sort of faraday bag to disrupt ones that can’t be easily isolated.

I’ve only had one exposure with a multi-head printer, and it was incredibly messy. No matter what settings I used, there ended up being drips from the unused nozzle.

My most recent printer is an Anycubic Kobra Max 3, and I’d take the wasted filament over the sloppy prints any day. It’s a bed slinger, so maybe not what you had in mind, but they do make one with an enclosure.

Me, a programmer who indexes from zero: 🫤

You might be able to use something like distrobox instead of a full VM. That would at least put it in a container that you could either run from an encrypted partition or something.

Different users would be the “simple” way you’d normally do something like this under Linux. But if your regular users have sudo access, you can’t really lock anything down.

I don’t know if it would give you as much hard drive space as you want, but I got an Odroid HC4 a while ago and it’s been great. One of the very few SBCs with two SATA slots ready to go.

I’ve used both, been daily driving Cachy for a year or two now. CachyOS is a bit easier than plain Arch, in my opinion. I’ve been using Octopi (a gui tool that fronts the package manager) because I never fully got the hang of pacman yet. And I use Btrfs Assistant (another gui tool) instead of configuring snapper from the CLI.

Overall, it’s more involved than something likr Ubuntu or Debian, but it feels manageable.

Buco seems to be having a good time. 9/10, unsure how Eaton feels.

Just cleaned mine up a bit recently!

PC on the left, RPi for simple stuff and an Odroid HC4 as my media and backup server.

Not pictured: another RPi dedicated to HomeAssistant, a magic mirror, and networking stuff.

Also not pictured: my workbench tools on the upper shelves, which have not been tidied recently.

Idiocracy was a plot by big dumb to sell more crocs

If my 3 year old could read he’d still ignore it

2006: “Install our browser toolbar! It offers a marginally useful feature, and it definitely doesn’t slow down your browser or send all your personal data to an evil corporate overlord! Promise!”

2026: “Install our browser AI addon! It offers a completely useless feature, and it absolutely slows down your browser and sends all your personal data to an evil corporate overlord! Promise!”

NZ wins again

As far as Arch-based distros go, CachyOS has a lot of helper tools included, and a lot of GUI programs. That’s probably why people consider it beginner-friendly.

I wouldn’t really consider CachyOS as a beginner distro. It’s probably the most accessible for anyone looking for something highly optimized, but there are plenty of others that are easier to set up and use.

Been daily driving Cachy for a couple years now, and I love it. It’s not for everyone, though.