I think it would be fine if it were opt-in, but then you wouldn’t get enough data to get accurate traffic estimates

Most 10xx work perfectly fine, and were also still being sold till recently.

I’ve had mixed experiences myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it randomly breaks. I just wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wants it to “just work” and be stable and not do maintenance. For me, I’m someone who’s happy to do maintenance, but I don’t want that to extend to my graphics card, which in this day and age ought to just work.

nvidia cards are always giving people grief, especially on Wayland. Technically supported but practically not recommended if you want an easy time

I was also confused at first, but OP is using “plausible deniability” to mean “depending on what decryption key you attempt to use, you get different ‘decrypted’ data”, so you can have an alibi I suppose. Not “plausible deniability” in the sense of “plausibly this isn’t encrypted at all”.

I think those three will be completely fine, but also I think base Arch would be completely fine for you. I have no idea why it’s a meme that Arch is so “hard”. I wouldn’t recommend it for someone coming from Windows or Mac who has no idea what they’re doing and had no poweruser tendencies on Windows/Mac either. But for someone who’s used Linux for a few years, I think doing a base Arch install is no biggie at all. It’s got a very annoying meme reputation but I think it’s completely inaccurate.

That’s an aside, and I’m not saying you should use base Arch, just that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it if that’s something you’re interested in. Although if you’re coming from a “beginner” distro and your intent is to learn, I do think doing a base Arch install (even if you don’t stick with it) is a good idea. You’ll be entirely capable of the install process and probably get a better understanding of how your system works. Then after you install it you can switch to some other distro you prefer.

Oh amazing. Seems like it’s still in early development and only supports Stardew and Cyberpunk but I look forward to it being more mature and supporting more games.

I’ve not really tinkered with any kind of settings and just use Steam’s default which is to have a separate C: drive for every Proton game, so does that mean I’d need a separate install of a mod manager for every game? Ideally I’d like to have just one mod manager that recognises all my games

Depends on your threat model, the degree of interest in you from states, the resources and competency of the states interested in you, etc… Also, I think privacy for privacy’s sake and without any real threat to which it’s responding to, is entirely fine and understandable. If nobody were interested in my data at all I’d still practise a reasonable level of privacy because I think it’s creepy for other people to know my business.

LeechBlock for just the browser? And yeah AppArmor for stopping programs from launching.

Don’t bring your phone? Either that or a faraday

I’m not sure about markdown but plenty of IDEs can fold eg a method or a class. Off the top of my head I know Geany, Jetbrains, probably most gui text editors/IDEs do. Not sure about markdown specifically, I only use vim for markdown which I know can fold.

They meant that they wanted to do a test to see if they would get any gpg-encrypted emails from people who saw the hat in real life; the “experiment” doesn’t work if you allow internet strangers to email you too, as then you don’t know where a person may have gotten the email address/key from

OP never claimed the encryption of WA and iMessage “work for us”. They just said they were encrypted. That’s a neutral statement.

??? What does that have to do with what OP asked

What do I use the most or what do people use the most? I use Matrix the most as most of my friends are on it (+ have it bridged with some chats that aren’t on Matrix). Then after that SimpleX. I don’t know what the most popular encrypted messengers among the general population, except for the ones you listed, are.

You don’t have any way to find out about these things outside of Discord and Snapchat from your classmates??? How do your classmates find out then? It’s not going to spontaneously generate into a Discord server. There has to be an official channel where people find out about these things.

I don’t know what info is so critical that you can’t miss it but also can only possibly get it on Snapchat or Discord. If you use it to talk to other students you could get them to talk to you on another platform, otherwise it doesn’t really sound like they’re worth talking to, but you do you.

Fair, I don’t live in the US and IME cops haven’t stolen my cash, although tbf I’ve not really had cash lying around when raided or arrested.

Forced? How? Why can’t you just uninstall them?