S410

1k USD. Should be enough to leave my shithole of a country, if I'm lucky.

I use Arch + Gnome with VRR patches on my main PC.

It find it actually easier to use than e.g. fedora or ubuntu due to better documentation and way more available packages in the repos... With many, many more packages being in AUR!

By installing all the stuff commonly found on other distros (and which many consider bloat), you'll get basically the same thing as, well, any other distro. I have all the "bloat" like NetworkManager, Gnome, etc. which is known to work together very well and which tries to be smart and auto-configure a lot of stuff. Bloat it may be, but I am lazy~

Personally, I think it's better to stick to upstream distros whenever possible. For example Nobra, which is being recommended in this thread quite a lot, is maintained by a single person. In reality, it's not much more than regular Fedora with a couple of tweaks and optimizations. Vast majority of those one could do themselves on the upstream distro and avoid being dependent that one person. It is a single point of failure. after all.

Corporations have been trying to control more and more of what users do and how they do it for longer than AI has been a "threat". I wouldn't say AI changes anything. At most, maybe, it might accelerate things a little. But if I had to guess, the corpos are already moving as fast as they can with locking everything down for the benefit of no one, but them.

"AI" models are, essentially, solvers for mathematical system that we, humans, cannot describe and create solvers for ourselves.

For example, a calculator for pure numbers is a pretty simple device all the logic of which can be designed by a human directly. A language, thought? Or an image classifier? That is not possible to create by hand.

With "AI" instead of designing all the logic manually, we create a system which can end up in a number of finite, yet still near infinite states, each of which defines behavior different from the other. By slowly tuning the model using existing data and checking its performance we (ideally) end up with a solver for some incredibly complex system.

If we were to try to make a regular calculator that way and all we were giving the model was "2+2=4" it would memorize the equation without understanding it. That's called "overfitting" and that's something people being AI are trying their best to prevent from happening. It happens if the training data contains too many repeats of the same thing.

However, if there is no repetition in the training set, the model is forced to actually learn the patterns in the data, instead of data itself.

Essentially: if you're training a model on single copyrighted work, you're making a copy of that work via overfitting. If you're using terabytes of diverse data, overfitting is minimized. Instead, the resulting model has actual understanding of the system you're training it on.

So... You say nothing will change.

Do you expect to find a company that sells a calendar-only subscription? "Calendar - 49c/month"?

I've been looking at lot at all kinds of services and most start their pricing at around 5 USD/month. Regardless of how much actual features they actually provide.

I'd say your best bet is NextCloud. You can rent some, self host or use a free instance (there's a couple around).

Personally, I'm self-hosting stuff on a VPS. For whopping 5USD/month I'm getting things I'd be paying 50, if not mere, if they were offered as separate products by your average service-providing companies.

You do realize you can use a service that provides a bunch of different things, but only use the calendar feature and ignore everything else, right?

You can also use a local calendar app. Just don't connect it to anything.
I use the default Gnome Calendar (because Linux), but Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android have calendar apps as well. Obviously.

OpenSUSE + KDE is a really solid choice, I'd say.

The most important Linux advice I have is this: Linux isn't Windows. Don't expect things to works the same.
Don't try too hard to re-configure things that don't match the way things are on Windows. If there isn't an easy way to get a certain behavior, there's probably a reason for it.

I've heard that he passed some of his duties onto other people.

However, I'm not aware of anyone within the team criticizing his behavior or statements, which, while might be a bit of a stretch, likely implies that everyone related to the project, at the very least, tolerates, if not outright shares the the views.

I find it practically impossible to trust claims of people like that, to be honest.

"Accusing with no concrete proof" is exactly what GrapheneOS developers are doing in regards to other projects. Claiming other products are a scam, particularly when those products somewhat compete with yours, is a pretty big red flag.

Reviewing the source code of an entire operating system is not a task doable by a single person, particularly when that person is not an expert in the field.

A proper code audit needs to be done by a team of professionals capable of spotting things like actual security vulnerabilities and logic errors that might result in more data being exposed, than advertised.

Considering the lead developer of GrapheneOS bans anyone from their chat for asking how an Android phone with GrapheneOS compares to a non-android phone, such as a PinePhone or Librem 5, in terms of security, because, according to said developer, PhonePhone and Librem5 are "scam products" and even asking questions about them is "spreading misinformation" and "promotion of fraud", I'd be quite, quite vary of the claims GrapheneOS developers make about its security.