• 13 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle









  • Based on my understanding, primary uses:

    • Read research papers (PDFs). Annotations functionality is a must (includes highlighting, commenting etc).
    • Write university essays, including formatting, academic citations etc. I’d personally stick to Libre Office but realistically, they’re gonna use the MS Office suite. So I’d like to either have MS Office offline on the machine, OR let them use the on-line version easily.
    • Listen to music fairly regularly, so Spotify is a must.
    • Easy access to banking, finance etc.

    Secondary uses:

    • Streaming-wise, they occasionally use Netflix but mostly stream via one of “those websites” if you catch my drift
    • They also like to use a VPN, which I can help set up (I’m planning to use my own OpenVPN instance)
    • Social media, i.e. Gmail, FB etc.

    So yeah, I think the ideal situation would be one that easily allows:

    1. Using MS Office
    2. Using Adobe (I’d have used Okular personally, but it’s annotations are utterly inaccessible if I share my Okular-annotated PDF with an Adobe user and vice versa)
    3. Browser for everything else (I’ll likely give them Brave)





  • Does this require fiddling with software?

    Depends. Libreboot replaces your processor’s firmware with fully libre software. Most importantly, it gets rid of Intel Management Engine, which is a firmware-level spyware that all modern laptops have. Almost all laptops are stuck with this firmware – the sole exception are ~10 machines, mostly Toshiba, from 2008-2012ish. With these, you can completely eliminate the Intel ME by flashing your firmware with libreboot.

    Now, in most cases, this requires tinkering with hardware. If you’re lucky, you can find a ThinkPad model that you can flash without having to gut the whole machine first. So in most cases (to my understanding), librebooting a machine is heavy on having to disassemble your laptop.

    Does it work out of the box?

    If by ‘out of the box’ you mean ‘works without issue once installed’, then yes. Once you’ve done the fiddling and set everything up, you don’t even have to think of libreboot again.

    Some motherboard bios will give overclocking(OC) options. Does Libreboot give OC options, RAID drivers, or boot security options (encrypted OS)?

    This is mostly beyond my expertise, but I recommend going through libreboot’s extremely informative official website.

    If i wanted to take my current Franken-desktop and switch out the BIOS/UEFI and keep the OS, could this do it gracefully?

    Almost definitely no. Libreboot only works on a select few devices, all of which have been out of production for about a decade (usually more). It’s a great option if you’re 1) Willing to tinker, AND 2) Either have one of the compatible models lying around, OR 3) Are willing to find one off of eBay auctions or local marketplaces.

    You can find the list of compatible laptops on the libreboot website – if you’re lucky, maybe you have/can find one of these. If not, I’m not fully sure this has been of much help to you :')

    The main appeal of libreboot is that you can truly create a 100% libre laptop with it. No blobs, no proprietary software, no invasive surveillance even at the firmware level.



  • Yep! The main caveats are:

    • You can only create a community on the instance you’re signed up on
    • Some instances (e.g. Beehaw) don’t allow community creation

    But in general, most instances do allow it. One possible workaround if you’re “stuck” on Beehaw might be to sign up on another instance, create your community, and then make your Beehaw account a mod on it. This way you don’t have to ditch you Beehaw account if you’re keen on creating communities.

    Alternatively, if you’re still quite new here, maybe creating an account on another instance might not be a huge loss to you just yet.


  • One of the lesser-known scandalous from American history (there’s many to choose from) is John Muir’s campaigning for the National Park Service, which is often celebrated as a great victory of environmentalism. What they don’t tell you is that Muir saw the indigenous people of California and the Pacific Northwest as ‘savages’. The NPS meant that thousands of people lost their lands, lands which they had tended for centuries, but which appeared to White observers as merely ‘virgin forest’.