Cool for classified ads kind of stuff. Though personally I'd love to see more of a storefront kind of thing like Etsy. Etsy has become so greedy that it's often not profitable for small businesses and definitely not for individuals doing stuff in their free time out of passion like it used to be.

I got an ASUS Zenbook about a year ago for about $1,500: model UX3404VC-BB99T. But it looks like it's no longer available:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-120hz-oled-touch-laptop-evo-intel-13-gen-core-i9-with-32gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3050-1tb-ssd-gray/6548463.p?skuId=6548463

It has pretty decent specs. Intel gen 13 Core i9, nice looking touchscreen, 32GB of RAM, etc., and it all works out of the box with Ubuntu and now Fedora. It did have some issues with plain Debian, but that's fairly common with Debian and newer hardware.

Although that particular laptop is not around anymore, there might be some other Zenbooks as I have found they tend to be Linux-friendly in general. And ASUS gets a lot of hate for whatever reason, but I've always found them to be good for the price.

The other recent "suicides" of whistleblowers have gone unpunished, so it's no surprise that it's now standard practice. Especially unsurprising given that it's standard practice of the dictator currently in control of a large percentage of American politicians and billionaires.

It's not a private messaging platform, it's an anti-censorship messaging platform among other things. If you're looking for privacy, this probably isn't the application for that. Though it is somewhat possible to make it more private, that's not the primary use case. If you're looking for a platform for public conversations where corporate interests of the day won't cause your messages to be censored, then Matrix might be useful. But moderation of spam, hate content, etc., is also not going to be robust in general.

There's too much of a fine line in what is considered hate and what is considered "alternative facts". The current state in the US shows how language can be twisted to mean the opposite and how easy it has always been to dehumanize some group in order to make laws not apply to them.

Matrix isn't more secure/private than Signal. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Signal has a centralized server, but has no access to the keys to decrypt any of the data flowing through them. Matrix chat rooms live on servers that would theoretically be able to access the data in the rooms, so you need to trust the server owners. Advantage is that multiple servers are involved so no one sever can kill your chat room. With Signal, the disadvantage is if you join a chat room, you can't see any past messages because those are encrypted with keys you don't have access to. Similarly if you move to a new device, that device won't have any of your past conversations because the new device doesn't have the keys for those messages. (though migration is now somewhat possible but done poorly IMHO).

So, they address different concerns. Is your concern keeping your conversations private, or keeping your conversations from being censored? Signal is more secure and private, but more centralized and easier or to fail. Matrix can be secure if you host your own server or explicitly trust the owners of all servers that house your chatrooms to keep them secure and to not sell their servers in the future. Matrix is more distributed, so more difficult to be censored or have your data lost by a single point of failure.

Is it "secure enough" depends on what your concerns are. If you host your own, then it's as secure as you are technically able to keep them secure yourself. Otherwise it depends on the server owner.

Most advertising links are routed through click tracing sites so that they can add some tracking information about what advertising campaign brought the user there and what that user does while on the site among other tracking data. In the rare cases i want to see something from an email, I never click on links, I always copy the URL being displayed and paste it. You can get email clients that have settings to warn you about this or that will automatically use the displayed link and ignore the anchor link.

For what it's worth, I actually had a lot easier time with NVIDIA graphics on Ubuntu and Fedora than Mint. And Kubuntu with the Plasma desktop was the easiest to get my partner converted from Windows without much tweaking.

You could try the booting the live CD and see if you're able to get the graphics working more easily. And I've never seen that second issue on either Ubuntu or Fedora, so not sure what's up there.

I'm not too happy with the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu right now, but it typically has the most documentation for when issues come up and has a very healthy development cycle, so I still recommend it to most people as a starting place. To me, Mint has always been a little too opinionated and catering to the less technical and thus harder to tweak. Ubuntu kind of does it in a way that makes it easier to override the default easy-mode kind of stuff. Just a general observation from decades of Linux use, and may or may not be as true for the current versions.

I use Fedora with Plasma desktop on my other desktop/laptop devices because I prefer RHEL to Debian based stuff, probably just got used to it using CentOS and now Rocky for all my servers over the years.

Unlikely at least in the near future. The remnants of Dodd-Frank and anything that Biden did are high on the list for Trump's chopping block.

I use NFS shares for all of my volumes so they're more portable for future expansion and easier to back up. It uses additional disk space for the cache of course, but i have plenty.

When I add a second server or add a dedicated storage device as I expand, it has made it easier to move with almost no effort.

I never got this kind of porn. I mean I like porn as much as anyone, but why would I want all of the people to have basically the same, "perfect" body parts and skin and such. That's so boring, IMHO.

The only reason I might be interested in seeing a celebrity nude is to see what their individual body looks like after I've been scintillated by seeing them in something sexy. There are tons of attractive porn actresses if I want to see a sculpted body or someone else's body. Though, for me, lack of consent is a big turn off. But I get that doesn't apply to the majority of porn users. They like the scandal of it and think of it as a taboo around an object rather than an invasion of an actual person's privacy.

Anyway, if you consume a lot of this type of porn, doesn't it get boring really quick?

Not OP but I left because of the proposed change in moderation policy to allow "free speech" that basically would negate the anti-hate-speech policy.