Focus follows mouse and unchecking the option to auto raise the active window. Couldn’t live without it and being used to it has made me extremely clumsy when I do pick up my Windows work laptop.

I change the taskbar clock to be a one-line MM/DD HH:MM:SS format, drop in my customized locale (based on en-US for maximum compatibility, but without having to deal with US formats and units that I’m not fond of), and point the taskbar shortcut for my text editor to a script that creates a pre-named file and launches the editor with autosave enabled. Because having to manually save and come up with a name for your spur-of-the-moment notes sucks, automatically generating 20260831_text_1 is so much better than a, b, a2, etc.

XFCE specific, I get rid of the second panel full of launchers. Acquired taste, but also Chicago95 theme and icon pack.

Habit. And I’ve become good at finding outfits that look nice and are just as comfortable as ones that look more casual.

Have you thought about writing and publishing your experiences from life and hobbies that other people could learn from?

Many moons ago I’d struggle to fall asleep quickly, but now I can whenever I want. Even more effective if I think about a task on my todo list I’m dreading.

I don’t want to say that it’s due to the pandemic, but it definitely became a thing for me during the pandemic.

Side-effects: does not imply that I use this ability to establish a good sleep schedule. Zero productivity on trains and planes; first-class service is wasted due to being conked out.

For anonymity alone, no. You ought to at least aspire to live the nomad lifestyle first and put up with its challenges, then enjoy whatever anonymity comes from it as a bonus.

If you don’t mind apartment living, you could consider the arrangement I had at one point. Private landlord who didn’t run background checks, accepted payment in any reasonable form, many tenants, communal mailbox without apartment numbers or names required. Internet, utilities, etc. all rolled into rent and not individually metered. Might be harder to find but they exist.

The US response to Microsoft’s monopoly was meager, this time, they will cheer Google on.

Trying to get coreboot to run on the nvidia variant of the ThinkPad T510. I guess it boots now, but I’m probably going to shelve it if I can’t get rid of the random freezes this weekend.

Eating one of those mini pecan pies

Anything that requires PII in a separate browser that doesn’t clear on exit. General browsing on my main browser, which clears data on exit, except for a small list of exceptions. It doesn’t defeat non-cookie fingerprinting, but I at least get rid of all the cookies that I don’t want.

I’m happy that you are at a point where you find life to be stable and well-paced. For a lot of people, whatever comforts they might be enjoying are riding on a razor-thin margin. Holding together well at first glance, but only one financial, health, or other incident away from a world of hurt.

Also, whoever downvoted me right out of the gate could you please take a moment to explain yourself. The thought I had of someone in an ivory tower dismissing my comment first thing as I’m commuting to work wasn’t sitting right with me. Yeah, I’m stressed.

Nearly everything that both requires a phone and disrespects my privacy has been work-related, so using 2 phones has been a solid choice for me.

The work phone has a sim from a mainstream carrier and only gets powered on while at work during work hours. Maybe I’m spoiled that my workplace tolerates this arrangement. I couldn’t imagine having to be reachable any time of the day. I didn’t intentionally buy a separate phone, it’s just my old phone repurposed.

The personal phone has an “IoT” SIM which can be purchased non-KYC where I live. All FOSS apps and a personal number via VoIP.

I know it isn’t by any means airtight, but it gives infinitely more peace of mind than just trusting whatever sandboxing mechanism available on one device will be sufficient.

Minimalism. Compared to AOSP, Google components and pings removed. Compared to other privacy GSI ROMs, no weird, quirky, or flashy functions or themes the author decided to bake in.

Whatever the choice, there will be trade-offs. From a technical standpoint, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with the upcoming Motorola phone with GrapheneOS as long as the bootloader is still unlockable and relockable so that the user can install a known good copy of GOS instead of trusting what Motorola put on it.

A laptop that I use every now and then today was already manufactured when I was 10 years old.

As much as I trust them with passwords. Which is not too much trust. Implementations of passkeys also tend to be frustratingly bad.

As long as you have a strong backup strategy, I would recommend full disk encryption during installation, especially if for a laptop. Peace of mind with negligible cost on modern hardware. Even accessing the encrypted disk from a live USB takes only two extra commands compared to an unencrypted disk. As long as the LUKS header doesn’t corrupt, hence the need for good backups.

Not going after a bug though, it’s just the way the included battery meter in Xfce (and other X11 battery indicators I’ve found) works, while things like Android track usage over time to give a better estimate.

But based on the other responses, it looks like I’ll have to cook it up myself.

It’s scary to think about it, but I don’t dwell on it since I can’t do much about it without really disrupting my life.

As a daily LibreOffice user, I agree with you on the UI. I can’t even keep track of how many different settings menus there are and each of them are a labyrinth unto themselves. What ended up saving my sanity was setting the UI to single toolbar and purging every unnecessary button in Calc and Writer. Might be unpopular, but I then arranged the remaining toolbar features the way they do in Google Docs. For Impress, I set it to the tabbed ribbon-esque interface.

Not that I’m aware of