Sounds like your USB is fucked to be honest.

A year or so ago this would’ve been welcome news. But now the real world has become so appallingly dystopian I’m not sure there’s much incentive to watch a TV show based on an appalling dystopia.

The great thing about a lot of very good Linux distros is that you can run them from whats called a ‘live USB’ meaning you download the ISO of the distro you like the look of, put it on a USB drive, then reboot your PC and boot to the USB you just created (you might need to alter your BIOS boot order). There’s a full guide here. The point here is to give the distro a try without putting anything on your harddrive so Windows is safe. If you like it, most distros will let you dual boot so you can have Windows and your linux distro on one machine.

In terms of the right distro a lot depends on what you’ll be using the PC for. For a really good, stable general purpose distro I think Mint is perfect.

If you stick to the apps that are indicated as being well supported it’s good. The main reason I use it is because I’m part of a team that includes people not comfortable with the command line so having a web interface to manage a server means not everything falls on my shoulders.

What I’d really like is LibreWolf level privacy protection whilst the browser is running but that allows me to retain cache, history etc but also encrypts everything locally when the browser is closed and is password protected and only decrypts everything when the password is entered.

This feels like a filler post. What can we usefully learn about a browser that’s over a year away from an alpha release?

And it’ll stay that way until people use, and keep using, this space. So, to use an overused phrase, be the change you want to see :)

I pay Bitwarden the tenner a year as I have no reason to distrust them and they’re definitely providing a more reliable, securer service than I can self-host.

I also do an encrypted export once per week and store that export to an encrypted cloud based service and an encrypted USB stick. Takes 2 minutes.

Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.

Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall

We do tell people. For example, when you get off the train at Reading station it clearly says “Welcome to Reading”.

In my own personal experience, Nextcloud;

• Needs constant attention to prevent falling over
• Administration is a mess
• Takes far too long to get used to its ‘little ways’
• Basics like E2EE don’t work
• Sync works when it feels like it
• Updating feels like russian roulette

Also has the huge advantage for me that it actually works. I could never get Syncthing to work no matter how much I tweaked it. This worked instantly.

And the interface is not a mess too.