Walking Coffin

I definitely agree that more constructive discourse needs to take place instead of some needless fights that happen way too often.

About Brave and the view some lemmy users express about it, I feel some of the distrust is valid while the way many express it is with no other regards to the good there might be or without any technical knowledge behind words being shared around. Exactly how you mentioned Google being awful at privacy but great at security.

Thank you for taking the time to write all this.

First of all, you do touch up on some good topics with sources and I appreciate that. However I would like to say that you may have either oversimplified or misunderstood some concepts you talk about here. Just so we’re clear, the whole topic of privacy/security is vast and knowing everything about it all is impossible so this is not an insult but a simple remark.

While I will not tackle everything you mentionned, mainly because you have your opinion, which is valid, and you do bring up good points, I will point out the last two topics you bring up.

Debian is indeed less secure than a stable release Linux distribution based on sane defaults, however they do backport security issues into their older kernel which is how older kernels are maintained. So while yes, they may still use kernel 6.1, they also may have backported 6.12 vulnerability fixes.

The last topic you end up with is the constant fact that some “groups being at odds with each other” and “privacy being at odds with security”. Groups being at odds is not all good and neither is it all bad. Just like Lemmy or federation, it brings diversity in an ecosystem that needs said diversity.

You yourself bring up project 1 and compare it to project 2 at first while they are so different that comparing the two is like saying that an orange is blue. Many people will stop there and you went a deeper and properly laid out that it wasn’t the case but you fail to do so some place else.

Like I said, all of this is a very vast topic. However, while you have “fights” and groups being at odds with each other for sometimes good or not so good reasons, it brings out one of the best things in open source sometimes. “I dont like you or the way you handle that project so I’m going to make my own fork of it and do it my way”.

Thank you for your time and I do hope your text will help some people out.

It is indeed somewhat frustrating not to be “able” to share the whole adventure for the sake of privacy but that’s just another part of the lonely journey that is personal privacy in itself.

I think what most people lack is a roadmap or a goal. From your post, you achieved you goal and that’s great. More often than not, people spend years looking at all the horror stories and all that they can put in place without sitting down and looking for a goal they themselves wish to get to.

I like this. I think it may be one of the only post I have ever seen that shows where a privacy minded folk came from and their journey to end up in a place they’re comfortable at. Way too often stories about one’s privacy journey is them being in the pit of despair (understandable) or those crazy stories of how someone who spent years researching privacy and hardening their device ended up picking windows and all their old habits from all those years ago because it was too much for them.

On that note, great job. I’m happy for you and wish you a good time on your regular (perhaps minimal) maintenance.

The quality of the tool. Newpipe is mainly here to watch content. Sure, it has the ability to download said content but not in a granular manner.

Its like climbing mountains in cheap sandals or doing digital paintings in paint. Yt-dlp has a lot of options to get exactly what you want. Seal gives a simple interface which in itself has a bit more than what Newpipe has. The real power of Seal comes from the custom commands. Said commands being the ones you would use in your terminal or scripts using yt-dlp directly without a frontend.

To top it off, Seal can download everything yt-dlp allows you to download. It is not limited to the few sites that Newpipe support.

Thanks for the information. I wasn’t aware of that.

If the pdf files are properly formatted (no compression/all text selectable), you should be able to open a terminal and do (I know it works the other way around, not sure if libreoffice can actually do the reverse but it doesn’t hurt to try)

libreoffice --headless --convert-to docx *.pdf

Just know that since docx is a proprietary format by microsoft, the results may be flawed. As a last resort I guess you could run a windows VM and try to convert your files with any big software known to be able to handle such files.

You did mention a “main drive”. I don’t know what’s taking all that space on your SSD but if you have a media library that takes some space you could move that to a connected HDD. While HDDs aren’t good as a boot drive it does the job well enough with most “standard” quality media. So can be said for documents and more obviously. You can then auto-mount your other drive to be inside your home directory for seemless access.

One thing that isn’t mentionned but I’ll just say this just in case. Always have external backups. I’ve scared myself way too many times thinking I had lost my main drive’s data just to find it the next day on one of my backup. Really a life saver if your setup has a problem where you find that one forum post from 12y ago with a “Nvm I fixed it” marked as [FIXED].

Other than that, thanks for sharing and with the solution at that.

Please do share. What better thing to do than to take a break from a broken install to read about someone’s own hardship with the endless quest that is maintaining a rolling-release distro.