After you eventually settle on bitwarden, rotate all passwords and uninstall or clear out the contents of other password managers. From your replies in this thread it seems like you’ve used many different managers.

I wasn’t able to reproduce what you described about apple ai and signal.

The foss-ness of an operating system or application doesn’t matter for the purposes of encrypted messaging, what matters is if the user has the application and operating system configured appropriately and understands how to not give up secrets.

Use bitwarden, go to Settings -> account security -> unlock with pin and turn it on. If it’s already on, toggle it off then on. You will be prompted to set your pin. Dont forget your master password.

Perhaps it’s the misty air of memory, but I truly hope this new driver is as good as the 20 year old one we used to use…

It’s cool that you got downvoted for answering this question. You can take em out of reddit but you can’t take reddit out of them.

The thing that stops google (or proton for that matter) is that you don’t give them the keys.

Email isn’t and can’t be made private without something like pgp.

A company that handles pgp for you can be legally compelled to give up the keys.

Windows sandbox like everyone else is saying is a great answer, but bear in mind if you’re sufficiently paranoid or security conscious that many, many exploits exist to escape VMs and sandboxes. Esxi and cell phones pretty much made that happen.

Keeping a cheap old computer to run weird bullshit on isn’t a terrible choice if you’re truly worried about it.

Are you sure the animations it’s giving you are ai? Android recently got the thing where the phone actually takes a short movie and picks a frame, processes it and hands it to you as the “picture”.

Thanks for the informative and detailed answer! I’ve only ever installed and used arch for fun so the finer points of how pacman handles manually installed packages never came up.

You said mostly safe, what kinds of issues can doing what you just described cause? You said pinning it through pacman would be an unsupported partial upgrade, even though that would give the package manager visibility on what you’re trying to do it would result in types of dependency resolution that aren’t supported or tested for I imagine?

Yeah I didn’t want to make the bold and refreshing assertion that arch isnt appropriate for situations where gracefully handling an old package is a requirement but that was my initial read on the situation.

I’m not as familiar with the aur as I am with apt and now dnf, is there a function to keep it from automatically installing something newer? That’s why I meant when I referred to pinning.

If arch doesn’t have version pinning then switch to a distribution that does.

Debian has version pinning, nvidia runs a third party repository and it has a pinning package you can install to get and stay with the 580 branch.

Pardon, your replies in this comm. It’s not precise language on my part but I think the meaning should be clear.

Without knowing what games you want to run or what your budget is it would be hard to give more helpful input than “anything will work, give serious consideration to not virtualizing”.

What were you looking for, models and specs?

E: you are absolutely looking for models and specs. I assumed you were just feeling around to figure stuff out because of your other posts in this comm. My apologies.

The short answer is that it doesn’t matter for the requirements you’ve given. Just to make sure I wasn’t lying when typing that I created and ran a windows 11 vm under kvm running on Debian installed on an old thinkpad from ten years ago and it ran fine. The specs were i5-3320m 16gb ram. I was able to start and run affinity and nuclear throne. I only made a 30gb qcow device for that vm so you probably don’t need a 1tb disk…

Assuming you want to run more modern games, both the recent (<5 or so years ago) intel and amd integrated graphics perform decently on 1440 and 1080 which is what a lot of laptops have for screens.

Laptops with replaceable ram are rarer than they once were, but can still be had and any laptop with ddr4 will be less expensive than one with ddr5. You don’t seem to have any use case that needs faster ram, so that’s a cost/performance tradeoff you may be willing to make.

I would personally stay away from “gaming” oriented laptops because they’re generally optimized around performance and price with build quality, durability and longevity left by the wayside.

So for specs I’d say a recent cpu with igpu (it’s hard to find one in a lap nowadays that doesn’t have the igpu!), 16gb of ddr4 if it’s upgradable and 32gb of ddr4 if it’s not and maybe 512gb of storage if it’s soldered and 256 or whatever if it’s not.

Again, if you have specific games you want to run then that changes things.

Most games run good under wine/steam. Most of the ones that don’t are using programming techniques intended to catch a vm, hypervisor or host os like anti-cheat.

So you can probably take gaming off your vm uses list. If you can’t because you wanna run games that use anti cheat as above, skip to the bottom of this reply.

I do not use affinity, but my experience with applications that have an “output” like design, modeling or productivity is that it’s often not worth it to run the under some compatibility layer or virtualization system. Every time you start that program up you need it to run so you can blast out an idea, show someone how the project is going or open something someone sent you and it’s infinitely more frustrating to have to figure out what changed since last night to make it not work or cause the magic marker brush (and only the magic marker brush!) to cause an immediate crash. This might also be a “jump to the end” scenario. Try it first and see though!

Windows 11 has relaxed requirements for its iot versions. It both loads less into cache and requires less memory in addition to opening up to CPUs as far back as third and fourth generation Intel core chips from 14 years ago. So use that version of windows for your vm and you can easily scrape by with 16gb of ram if you see yourself needing to.

Most people like amd gpus better on linux, I tend to like nvidia better at the moment. I have a lot of experience with linux and high tolerance for troubleshooting though so your mileage may vary.

This is some counterintuitive input and I will not be answering questions about it, take it or leave it: if you plan to keep your computer for a while, buy something with a cpu manufactured on the largest “process” you can reasonably accept. As chips’ features get smaller and smaller it takes less time and energy for electromigration to fundamentally change their behavior.

If you find yourself needing to run games or even software packages that care deeply about knowing they’re on bare metal windows, just dual boot. It will only take a little time to boot back and forth and the only prerequisites are learning your distros grub repair process for if windows overwrites your bootloader and keeping backups so you don’t panic which you should be doing anyway.

Do you have a 12k or 16k one?

Then use facebook. Go where the people you want to be around are.

Just recognize that all the stuff you put on social media is public.

Why do you want to do this?

She’s happy. Let her be happy.

You can use any distribution but will most likely have to load the Broadcom wireless modules manually.

If you’re able to use a wired network connection then this is no problem and might not even be something you’re worried about.

When you do decide to get wireless running, make sure to figure out a way that’s copacetic with your chosen distributions package management so everything “just works” on a system update. If you don’t take the time to integrate third party modules into package management then system updates can unpredictably break the functionality those modules provide. You may not remember what you did, how to reproduce its effects or even that you did it in the first place, leading to some pretty unenjoyable situations.

Consider keeping macos on there and dual booting: you will need it for any firmware updates, it’s a good fall back when something breaks and when you want to sell or give away the machine you’ll use macos to get it back to good to other people. Many Intel macs can have their macos installation loaded onto a usb device and depending on how you do the bootloader and efi situation still easily start it up.