j4k3

::: spoiler With Linux over the years, I have learned to ignore all hardware marketing as (basically) scammers. The supporting software is the important part. If the software is not open source, the product is only available to rent and likely includes or has the potential to become an extortion scam of subscription parasites. When I shop for products now, I do so by searching for the open source software first. Once I find a large project with several contributors, I git clone the repo and then I run an app called gource on the command line. Gource creates a 3d visualization of the project over time and its commit history. Have a look at the Linux kernel some time or just watch a video of someone that has uploaded the visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iFnzr73XXk

With the actual visualization, you can zoom in and select the individuals or watch branches specifically. The trick is to get an idea of who the main contributors are in the various spaces and how consistent they are. Find who is working on what hardware and how they are working on it. Some times you'll see a person comes in and only makes a single commit or a few that contain everything for a device and then they disappear. These are often subcontracted devs that a company hires and gives a checklist. Issues, bugs, and unsupported features are unlikely to get fixed unless you see someone else that is making commits in this space. What you're really looking for is one of the main project devs that makes ongoing commits to some specific hardware over longer amounts of time and fairly recently. It means they have the device in question. That generally means the device has or will have excellent support in the long term. It also generally means the person either really liked the product or the company is smart enough to supply the dev with the device or supporting documentation.

Sorry if this seems unsolicited. It took me a long time to break out of the hardware spec shopping fallacy and all of the troubles it can cause. Prioritizing true ownership and shopping for the software first is a far more enjoyable life experience. It likely won't help in this niche, but for computers in general use: https://linux-hardware.org/

You will likely find that search engines attempt to obfuscate this information. Expect that. Use offline open source LLM's, ask the community, or more advance searching methods to find relevant info. Both m$ and the goo are the two biggest beneficiaries of the proprietary software ecosystem and they are the only two web crawlers that exist at relevant scale. All search engines use one or both of these sources either directly or by proxy.

TBH: tl;dr (...but read ~1/4 and skimmed the rest.)

Emacs can likely do most, if not all, of what you're looking for.

As far as distros, go with either Fedora Workstation or Silverblue. If you can run SB, try to avoid messing with the base system as much as possible, skip using the toolbox containers system and just use distrobox. With distrobox, you have almost all Linux distros available as containers, so you build on them. The only exception I know of is NIX. You can't run NIX in distrobox. You probably could run the NIX package manager, but that involves this weird setup where a user owned directory exists in / root. Personally, this is just too weird for me to use it. I expect all user activity and configuration files to be confined to /home/$USER/

Fedora just works, but try and lag behind the release cycle a little bit. Like right now F40 is pretty solid, but there were some issues in the first month or so after F40 first came out. I have lagged in every release since ~F28 and never had issues. I switched to F40 within the first week or so and a few packages were wonky. Basically Python was super fresh and did some odd stuff with containers where it did not work without manually removing and replacing Python in each container. I think that was the only manual intervention issue I've had with Fedora. I have a 3080Ti laptop with the 16 GB GPU. The Anaconda system in Fedora builds the Nvidia kernel module automatically in the background each time the kernel is updated. It works flawlessly, even with secure boot enabled.

If they choose feudalism, I chose to join (or start) the siege outside their walls. I am a citizen. I refuse to submit to a king or a lord albeit in politics or this anti capitalism move against democracy and an open market. You cannot have citizenship and democracy without the fundamental human right of ownership.

While it is outside of the scope of most people's abilities, the bios is on a flash chip that can be removed, read, and disassembled. I'm no expert here by any stretch. That said, my usual check with software is to simply check for http in strings. Even with a binary like a bios ROM, I can pass it through the $ strings command to look for any addresses. No matter what kind of malicious nonsense the software is doing, it has very low value unless it can dial out.

My lack of a complete understanding in this area is why I use a whitelist firewall for most of my devices. It is also the ultimate ad and tracker blocker as I only visit the places I chose to access. I don't conform to the lowest developer's ethics and will simply stop using any site or service that fails to be direct and transparent.

The thing is, even most whitelist firewalls are inadequate. They only filter incoming packets. That is really an inadequate model in most cases now, especially with local large language models where it is impossible to verify their capabilities. My reason for all thus bla bla bla is to say, a whitelist on a trusted 3rd party device is a PITA but an effective low barrier way to prevent any bad actor from communicating with the questionable device. It still leaves you open to a potential situation where the device could be sending a packet stream to the outside world over something like UDP.

Otherwise, the main thing I would be concerned with, if it is a UEFI device, are the UEFI secure boot keys. Whomever holds these keys has a lower ring access than the operating system kernel. Anything happening in kernel or user space is effectively under their control.

Anyways, the main way to monitor and check the device is a trusted 3rd party router that blocks any unauthorized connections. This can be challenging to setup with something like OpenWRT. There is a forked OpenWRT device running a version that makes a lot of this easier called PC WRT. That can make a whitelist fw a little easier than sorting out NF Tables and scripting a whitelist firewall.

Went out with this girl I really liked but brought a friend too just to make it less one on one and more casual. I really liked her and thought it went well. When I drove my friend home, in conversation, he told me I could do better. It was such a stupid destructive thought. All three of us were into the arts. He was into videography, she was photography, and I was painting airbrushed graphics on motorcycles. I dated her for a little while again later and more seriously, but my life was more of a mess then and it didn't work out. That was one of my biggest mistakes in life; not realizing my lack of emotional depth and letting other's opinions hold sway or weight. I partition my emotions now. I'm not sure how I feel in the moment. My first reaction is likely worthless, so "I'll have to get back to you later" - is my usual response. People who whine about how everyone is about to lose their job at work, or tell me how I should feel about others are like giant red flags telling me to avoid them as toxic. Really, in a way I do not lack emotional depth as much as that part of my inner voice speaks quietly and I need to take the time to listen to it carefully. That girl and life lesson are the same thing to me; an abstracted patch, forever holding that part of my personality. When that red flag flies in my head, she is the one waving it; holding me back; telling me to think it through.

This looks a lot like trolling. The community here certainly doesn't seem to care for it.

I would go with hard science fiction futurism. You get to write your narrative future history of humanity and nothing about your choices are restricted to following the styles or decor consumerism.

For example, humanity has moved into thousands of 35 km × 9.1 km O'Neill cylinders with centrifugal spin gravity, mostly in cislunar space. We renamed the planet Wild Earth, and only a small scattering of indigenous humans choose to remain planetary caretakers. The age of scientific discovery has long past. Science is primarily an engineering corpus. Our primary technology is entirely biological, and in complete elemental cycles balance. All phenomenon of biological nature are accessible to us with a few genetic # inclue libraries and a few lines of code. We grow a banyan frame of a building and dial in our colors and patterns on living chitin walls, while more regal structures of ginkgo trees last nearly forever. Biocompute is a thing with the synthetic brayn. All is accessible with a complete understanding of biology.

Allowing your imagination to run freely in this space is therapeutic on a level that I find deeply satisfying, and dare I say hopeful. Getting others talking about this can create change. Futurism is anti dystopian. Many will try to call it utopianism, but I counter that they simply lack depth of imagination. The full spectrum and challenges of such a future creates a powerful lens for inspecting and critiquing the present. That is the best way I can imagine the experience of creating a space and the type of space that inspires positive conversations I want to share with others.

The 4004 is that tiny dip-16 chip the the top left, second box marked CPU. A working 4004 is worth around $300+ https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=intel+4004

They are quite the collectors item as the first microprocessor

Multiple passionate independent hobby interests with curiosity and depth. Really, that is my indicator of a potential unconstrained abstracted mind; a potential coexplorer that can find interesting tidbits in almost anything in life—which is what I've always wanted. I choose to remain an unconstrained nomad otherwise. I successfully avoided a few reality-TV-evenings zombies from my younger years and avoiding those anchors was one of my best choices in life. I would have made them miserable.

local mealitia forces

The system in android has turned insidiously covert. I make more than my share of mistakes but Andy likes to toss in some randos