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Cake day: April 26th, 2025

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  • every mobile device I ever owned is encrypted and protected with a reasonably secure pass-phrase so losing it is no big deal. it is conceivable someone could forensic the shit out of my setup but that is highly unlikely; it’s far more likely it’ll get wiped and sold or parted out.

    I’ve done no benchmarks but I haven’t experienced any issues ever. the oldest linux device I own is a 2011 MBP (i7-2635qm, so quadcore) and I don’t perceive any speed degradation; it’s possible 1st gen Core i5/i7 could have issues as those don’t have AES-NI in hardware or sumsuch plus they’re SATA2 only, but those would be 15+ years old at this point.

    with btrfs that has on-the-fly compression, copy-on-write, and deduping, everything works seamlessly, even when I have database-spanking applications in local development.

    so the only thing I’ve changed recently is encrypting every device I have, not just the mobile ones. the standalone devices get unlocked with a key-file from the local filesystem so they boot without the prompt. selling/giving away any of those drives, mechanical or SSD, is now a non-issue.



  • to add to what others already said, the work from linux-surface is being adopted in the mainline, so it is possible that your hardware is already supported in a modern distro, like Fedora. boot it off a live USB image and poke around, you’ll get a better feel for it.

    pro tip, at the GRUB menu press ‘e’ to edit the first item and then add rd.live.ram and that should load the image to RAM. you can then remove the USB and it’ll be way faster to navigate and it won’t touch your existing SSD install.


  • all Apple devices are part of a covert peer-to-peer network and its primary purpose is to facilitate the Airtags and find-my-shit apps. it runs on desktops, laptops, phones, ipads, watches, etc., including when they’re supposedly off. you can’t turn it off or opt out of it and what that crap additionally does and how secure it is is unknown.

    having said that, if you run linux on an old intel-based macbook or similar (say, up to 2015 models) you’re out of that racket and similarly all Apple or iCloud based crap. they do have a permanently enabled IME but that’s true for the majority of devices sold and, dependent on your threat model, isn’t an issue per se.

    not sure about the “credit card” angle as you can’t buy a new Apple device that runs linux, the asahi mess is limited to M1/2 models which are like 5 years old at this point.







  • I ran something similar a while ago; it automated the steps you’re describing so it downloaded every new video from the channels I’m subscribed to along with metadata. I gave that up as it’s hella inefficient. what I have now is just a media sink by way of macast and I can send videos for playback to my media PC. so if you don’t need those videos for archiving purposes, try it out.


  • don’t go with server variants of the OS. they are intended for boxes that work without display and keyboard, which you have. instead, install any normal distro you’re familiar with. it’s infinitely easier to fix something with the full GUI at your disposal.

    this is just your first install, you will iterate, and through that process you’ll get better and leaner, in terms of underlying OS. think of it as training wheels on a bike, you’ll pull them off eventually.

    wired connection only, leave wireless turned off, and assign it a static IP address.

    don’t do containerS, do one container first. figure out where you’re gonna store the compose files, where it will store data, how you will back that data up, etc. then add another. does it fit into your setup? do you need to modify something? rinse. repeat.

    casaOS, aside from it’s murky background (some chinese startup or sumsuch, forgot?) doesn’t provide that path forward nor allows you to learn something, too much hand holding.

    good luck.