Glad to hear that :)

Does your family welcome you back?

Some stuff are just ridiculously tedious to service due to their design.

Asus laptops are notorious for this. I remember having to take apart everything including the mainboard just to replace the RAM module.

On a similar note, in car context, I’ve read about instances where one needed to take out the whole engine just to replace the spark plug. I think it was Mercedes A series, as well as some Wuling.

The fact he needs to clarify is ridiculous

I mean, he doesn’t even have anything to do with either project. Why would anyone take this seriously

It’s a good thing they think about this. With that said, the tires can wait. Let’s start with the low hanging fruit. It’s a crime that critical components in home appliances break so easily and are so hard to fix.

I can’t think of any device with hardware decoder for AV1. I think it’s mostly by CPU with some GPU accel.

I never play anything in 4k simply because my eyes can never tell the difference lol

Are they that heavy?

Open Source

us02web.zoom.us

Honestly, that already says a lot…

Or AV1

You’ve never been outside of your country, have you?

There’s nothing stoping you from gutting your distro and installing new kernel, libc, package manager, toolchain, and all the other components. The GUI should be trivial as people have change back and forth among different ones (within the same distro) anyway, assuming your package manager.

Of course, this begs the question: why the fuck would you do that instead of just installing a new one fresh?

Got 403 Forbidden

Mint: consistency, versatility, having all the Ubuntu’s benefits (being industry standard, somewhat) without the drawbacks (Canonical’s opinionated bullshit like snap)

Debian: stability, predictability, leanness

Gentoo: customizability down to compile-time level

Some even had replaceable CPU & GPU!

Not exactly beginner friendly, but you needn’t solder all those fragile components.

Relax, it’s just turd.

Of course they are!

501 - Headrush

Purity Ring - Stardew

That narrows it down a lot. To be honest, I’m not familiar with that. However, with that specific of a topic, it shouldn’t be that hard to look up for articles to follow and come up with a course of action.

The reason why OSes aren’t ‘hardened’ by default is because it would be a real pain for users trying to set things up or use it for daily operation. If you take it to an extreme, they wouldn’t be able to access anything they want. If you’re a sysadmin, you’d be faced with your whole office pissed off because they wouldn’t be able to do their work.

Last but not least, what does ‘hardened’ mean anyway? You can have something as ‘hardened’ as an airgapped workstation in a faraday cage with an off-grid power supply. Are you running away from a government agency? I wouldn’t think so. So a firewall blocking unused ports and mindful practice should suffice.

Oh hell no!

What does that even mean? What kind of exploitation are you talking about?

Every use case comes with its own risk, and every risk needs to be handled differently. People jokingly said that if you wanna be sure, don’t connect your computer to the network at all; and if you wanna be surer, don’t use a computer. While that was a joke, there’s truth in that.

If you’re just going to use it as a workstation, then firewall to make sure some randos don’t ping you should suffice. If you’re sharing this workstation with your tech illiterate mates, then perhaps something to prevent executing random stuff like SELinux or AppArmor would do. If executing random stuff is just what you do, then set up VMs or some other ways to isolate that execution environment.

If you’re sharing files directly from your computer to the internet (e.g. with SMB or NFS), then you’d need to make sure only the right people have the access, and the auth can’t be brute-forced (i.e. with rate-limiting and lock-out policy). Same goes if you allow remote login (i.e. thru SSH). Some people use custom port number to obscure their stuff, and you can do it too, but do keep in mind it could make your life (or your mates’ lives) harder.

If you’re running other outward facing services like SQL database or HTTP, that would require different ways to address. If you’re on such level, you’d want do some serious readings.