I choose not to think about it or include it in my mental threat model, the same way I choose to not worry about thermonuclear warheads.

If there’s some exploitable backdoor and Intel gets owned, we’re all boned and there’s nothing we can really do about it. I don’t have anti-ballistic-missile systems, and I also don’t have the capability to make an entire hardware/firmware/os from scratch.

So instead focus on the things you can control and are more likely to happen. Don’t plan for doomsday, plan for every day.

I don’t need artificial intelligence in my terminal. Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other removedty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs? Not letting that anywhere near my prod servers with valuable data.

I did it back in 2020 when we all had nothing better to do. Got as far as installing X11 and Openbox, and halfway through setting up the toolchain for Firefox.

It was fun - the kind of fun digging a big hole is. It’s not for everybody, but I sort of enjoyed it.

Not an arch user, but it’s possible they moved dbus to a user scoped unit now. Might be possible to start it like this (or something similar)

systemctl —user start dbus.service

Most desktop environments you just hit alt+f2 to activate the launcher which lets you run any command you want

I use plain old bash with the plain old .bashrc that ships with Debian. I’ll bolt on a git-branch-aware function into the prompt here and there, but that’s about it.

Why? I ssh into a few dozen machines most days and my removedty little lizard brain can’t deal with everything being different on each box. So as much as I appreciate zsh, powerline plug-ins, all that glitzy stuff, I’ll be a late adopter when it comes to plain old Debian stable…

I’ll never participate in one of the “master race” communities because of the chronically icky association with fash removed. I get it, it’s an old reddit-ey joke from like 2011, but it’s undeniable that the name has a very strong undertone of white supremacy.

Moving away from the incumbent social networks is our chance to create a new culture without that baggage.

Honestly, you’re not going to have a lot of luck with recent games. The sandybridge i5’s were great back in the day but their time has come. I had a 2600 for a looong time but it’s been out to pasture for a couple years now.

Check out the “patientgamers” communities, they like to play older games that would run a lot smoother on your hardware.

If it was installed with tasksel that would be a good way to remove any dependancies like lightdm as well.

Fwiw, I’ve had great results with upgrading Debian derivatives. A machine in my closet has been upgraded from version 8 -> 12 without any major issue. Usually, upgrade problems come from custom or third party software in my experience.

That would never happen, no maintainer would open themselves up to that kind of liability.

Why not Debian? It’s a fantastic distro on its own, without the need to bolt on vendor’s stuff if you already know what you’re doing.