Hex Launcher: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.mrmannwood.hexlauncher
Pie Launcher: https://f-droid.org/packages/de.markusfisch.android.pielauncher
Similar approach in both of these
Best coupled with frequent refactoring and breaking of APIs so any community efforts at documentation are eternally outdated.
I've had good luck with finding perfectly working internal R/W drives on the local scrap market for cheap. I guess still lots of PCs from that era being junked by offices.
Sealed 25-50 GB BD RW media go for ~$1 per disc when they randomly show up in the surplus store.
LVM itself does not provide redundancy, that’s RAID.
I think this is potentially a bit confusing.
LVM does provide RAID functionality and can be used to set up and manage redundant volumes.
See --type and --mirror under man 8 lvcreate.
At least Brave is open source, in contrast to Orion.
My next suspicion from what you've shared so far apart from what others suggested would be something out of the http server loop.
Have you used some free public DNS server and inadvertently queried it with the name from a container or something? Developer tooling building some app with analytics not disabled? Any locally connected AI agents having access to it?
You say you have a wildcard cert but just to make sure: I don't suppose you've used ACME for Letsencrypt or some other publicly trusted CA to issue a cert including the affected name? If so it will be public in Certificate Transparency Logs.
If not I'd do it again and closely log and monitor every packet leaving the box.
I adored Budgie precisely because it was still on X11 🥲
Anyway, for a relatively simple and clean holistic GNOME-that's-not-GNOME, it's a very polished desktop. Worth checking out for your F&F.
The need to think about and deal with snaps is the reason I don't recommend Ubuntu to noobs in general. It's confusing and unnecessary and adds to the frustration of being forced to make judgement calls about things you don't want to understand just to do your thing (we have enough of that as it is). And if you do decide against snaps, it's a bit of an uphill battle and it's easy to start feeling that the OS, like what they came from, is antagonistic. Canonical decided to isolate and take control of part of the Ubuntu ecosystem with snaps and that has made the distro a bit more niche compared to before.
For better or worse Ubuntu is also known to be on the edge with new developments on the desktop. Switching to new shiny desktop environments between major versions, being very early on Wayland-first, etc. Having to learn new OS UI after an upgrade is not ideal if you are not an enthusiast.
Other than that, Ubuntu can be a fine distro, both for server and desktop. If you either accept the particularities like snaps or know how to work around them, it can be a very good experience and it's well-maintained in general. But it's less of a no-brainer and more situational if it's appropriate or not.
Like Alpine or Gentoo: Great distros but for different reasons not anything I would recommend a non-technical Linux virgin to replace their Windows or macOS with.
Good first distros for beginners:
Not Good first distros but still getting picked up by people who don't know:
Everyone: If you've only used one of the latter, try another distro before you believe "Desktop Linux is not ready" or "Linux is not for me".
Specifically on Steam: Which hardware you run on can affect on which distro it runs out of the box on and if you need to fiddle with drivers and firmware or not to get things running smoothly. There is also some difference between installation methods (some people swear by the flatpak version and others swear off it).
Maybe also check the health of your SSD and that your firmware/BIOS are up to date.
Separate your personal and work computer
nods enthusiastically
Important for security of both the employee and the company. Don't mix business and pleasure. It's the only thing that makes sense!
Put Windows and all work related software on a separate work laptop and use remote desktop from your Linux PC to do your job.
What? No! Keep them separate! This is how people get pwned. Don't backdoor your employers machine from your personal PC or vice versa!
No errors or output from the add?
I don't see anything wrong in what you are doing assuming you have permissions but if it's just for your user you can
flatpak --userto install in your homedir instead of system-wide.Also convenient for distro-hoppers as you can just share or copy the flatpak dirs between home directories so you don't even have to redownload for every reinstall.