You can try playing with Arkenfox, installing uBlock Origin, fiddling with about:config, and giving yourself an aneurysm…
…or you could try Mullvad Browser. It’s a fork of Firefox, co-developed by Mullvad and The Tor Project, with impressive fingerprinting resistance (according to Cover Your Tracks). It’s like Tor Browser without Tor.
Also, install NoScript. It helps a lot.
Well, I often just do a bank transfer or card payment. I’ve tried to use Monero, but I’ve had trouble getting ahold of any crypto without selling my soul to Guardarian.
Hey, if you can make it work, it would be a hell of a cool system. Very hacker-y.
Oh damn! Yeah, no, the old Atom series will be slow on anything other than, like, Puppy Linux.
Here are a few distros to try:
And here are some software substitutions:
You will be able to run Firefox and Chromium, but they will be somewhat sluggish and likely to freeze or crash, in my experience.
Also, the suckless tools are really good for this. Back on my old Raspberry Pi, I used to be able to compile st
and surf
in under a minute, and dwm
ran brilliantly.
~Source: my old Raspberry Pi, although arm-based, and my old MacBook had similar specs.~
It’s an Acer Aspire 5742z: a chunky old laptop from 2009.
It requires proprietary WiFi drivers and only has one working USB port because the other two are on a separate board connected to the motherboard by a ribbon cable that seems to have shrunk by a millimetre or two over the years, so it no-longer reaches the contacts.
The keyboard has a decent amount of travel and it’s easy to clean with compressed air. However, the keys are a bit harder to press than on other keyboards I have, so it’s easy to miss out letters when typing quickly. It’s also difficult to put the keys back on once removed; but at least they are removable.
The performance is okay, and I had to pull some extra RAM out of another machine to get it to run smoothly. This machine originally only had 3GB. However, it is easy to upgrade and repair.
To be honest, you’d probably be better off with a late-2000s ThinkPad or a mid-2010s MacBook.
You probably could, but you’d need to use twin instead of Xfwm in order for the deKorator theme to work.
Yeah, it’s pretty cool what you can do with deKorator.
(This is from cohost)
I have a few machines, which run:
Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.
Sone distros I’d like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.
The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it’s often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can’t trust at the moment.
It’s an old program that converts between .deb (Debian), .rpm (RedHat), .tgz (Slackware), .slp (Stampede), .pkg (Solaris), and LSB packages.
I don’t use it much, but it can be handy in a pinch for installing software that isn’t packaged for your distribution. Just don’t use it for anything low-level or that’s already packaged natively, or you’ll break stuff.
You could try running the .deb through alien(1p)
, although it can be hit-and-miss if the package has a lot of scripts or dependencies.
(This is from diaspora*, btw)
A user by the name of electro1 has just told me that apparently it now contains trackers. I had no idea. Sorry.
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.onlyoffice.documents/latest
I’ll keep an eye out to see if anything else turns up that’s FOSS, but doesn’t spy.
Wait, WHAT‽
You could give ONLYOFFICE a try. It defaults to Office Open XML formats, but it can read and edit OpenDocument files just fine.
EDIT: electro1 has just told me that ONLYOFFICE has trackers. One look on Exodus and, sure enough, they’re right. Sorry!
I think I probably meant usable. Essentially, the last time I tried it, software like LibreOffice wouldn’t run and I had a few minor issues with web browsing.
It’s probably been fixed, come to think of it. Maybe I’ll give it another go.
I do quite like Haiku. It’s not quite stable usable enough for me yet, but I have no doubt that I’ll be using it as a daily driver in the near future.
It’s just the headline for this one. The rest of the article is more serious and less ironic.