Yeah, I had heard of this, but I kind of figured I could ignore it as I’m not dealing with tremendously important stuff. But then again it would really suck to lose it. I think I’ll keep a separate backup in my office at work, running locally from the docking station. :)

Thank you!

I would get a new hard drive, so the laptop would just be in charge of managing the backups. So if it fails it only needs to be replaced, but the backup itself wouldn’t be lost.

And yeah, this is why I’m a bit reluctant to set up SSH access beyond the home network, other than of course my lack of competence to do so. I am fairly certain everything going on inside my home network is safe enough for my risk profile (holiday pictures, half baked articles, and shitty R scripts, mostly).

But the not at home argument is of course a good point, and one that I knew about but somehow neglected. I want to avoid the cloud, but I think I will set up a separate backup at work. :)

Thanks for the comment - it’s a really good checklist of things to be aware of going forward!

Thank you! There’s a lot of useful advice here.

I don’t really need remote access, as long as backups are made when I’m home. I imagine it would be difficult, both because it seems difficult but also because I have internet through a 5G router rather than a more proper connection. But I’m also just happy to keep things more local.

The USB concern is a good point. I’ll probably still go for an external hard drive, but I’ll keep it in the back of my head while setting it up.

A NAS is probably not a good solution for me, also because I want to keep things tiny and lightweight. But just running a completely local solution might not be the worst idea - I was afraid I would forget/neglect to connect frequently unless it’s on the wifi, but if I channel it all through a docking station it would at least be able to back up every time I work at my desk. And if I set up the same system at work I can keep an external backup as well, which I somehow hadn’t thought about. Would solve the house burning down problem. Well, parts of it, anyway.

Thanks again! I always tend to come up with very half-baked solutions for things, which is fun, but with this in particular I appreciate the opportunity to run it through others before making any potential mistakes. :)

Yeah, I think you’re right, and I think that’s exactly why it’s a blind spot for me.

On several occasions I’ve also lent an old laptop to friends when theirs broke, and all of them ended up using Linux for months no questions asked. They later went back to Windows because of the Word grammar check, but other than that it just worked for them.

But of course, if you can’t get your drivers to work it’ll be a completely different experience.

If you’re ok Arch I guess it at least signals a willingness to learn! I would never dare to go there haha.

Yeah. I’ve double checked that my last few laptops worked well with Linux before buying them. But I don’t buy very flashy technology, so it was never really any question.

My printer is from Brother, and it’s just plug and play. At work it’s all web print and has been since I started working for pay, really.

A test could be to start by using Libre software on Windows.

Switch to LibbreOffice or some other alternative instead of Word. Gimp, Inkscape, and Krita for graphical stuff. Whatever proprietary software you use, check if it exists for Linux; if not, see if you can find an alternative you’re happy with.

For the people I know, Word is the biggest deal breaker.

Dumb user here. I completely disagree with this.

I was using Ubuntu for a few years, now I’m on Fedora. I don’t really know how to do anything. For my needs it’s just very easy.

Maybe my needs just aren’t sophisticated enough for me to encounter all those problems I’m supposed to be having. But I’ve been using it for years and my experience is that it really just works.

I can’t help but to read this as “guess the omitted variable”. There’s just no way of controlling for everything that might explain this, and it’s obviously not the grandparents’ time in educational institutions in itself that does the trick.

Thankfully, one of the authors summarized it well:

This opens up a myriad of possible explanations and will need to be replicated.

It’s easy to imagine ways this effect makes perfect sense, especially if it’s small. So the question kind of becomes what they have managed to successfully control for.

At least he seems to be enjoying it, embracing the creative process and developing whatever he’s interested in. Seems like a pretty healthy approach.

I’m super happy with my Fairphone 3 as well (I upgraded the camera to 3+), but the newer models seem to have made major improvements indeed.

Still, for anyone who doesn’t need anything too fancy but who insist on having a headphone jack, a used Fairphone 3 is a good option. Buy a new battery for it and it’ll be good as new. :)

One option might be to use Mycroft, the FOSS speech assistant. If I understand correctly you’d have to install support for playing local music - I found one such plugin, but it hasn’t been updated in a few years so who knows if it’ll work.