The Arch Wiki is probably the sungle most useful documentation for any Linux user; I don’t even use Arch and it’s still extremely helpful.

I could see the benefits of using Arch just so almost every function my system has is near-perfectly documented in Arch Wiki.

As for the distro itself, it has the newest packages, and often good repos with interesting packages that Debian and others may lack. It also expects you to choose and install the components you want, whereas the Debian installer will usually just install defaults; you can use Debootstrap for a minimal Debian install, but that’s not as well supported for installing Debian due to the way tools as set up on the install medium.

The reason I choose Debian over Arch is because if I don’t use a device for several months and have to install updates (like my school laptop over the summer), Debian Stable is more likely to survive that than Arch; I’ve destroyed several Arch VMs by trying to update them after not using them for months. I’m sure I could have salvaged them if I tried, but I’d rather just make a new VM.

That’s precisely why secure boot and TPMs exist - the TPM can store the keys to decrypt the drives and won’t give them unless the signed shim executable can be verified; the shim executable then checks the kernel images, options, and DKMS drivers’ signatures as well. If the boot partition has been tampered with, the drive won’t decrypt except by manual override.

The big problem is Microsoft controls the main secure boot certificate authority, rather than a standards body. This means that either a bad actor stealing the key or Microsoft itself could use a signed malicious binary used to exploit systems.

Still, it’s at least useful against petty theft.

TPM sniffing attacks seem possible, but it looks like the kernel uses parameter and session encryption by default to mitigate that: https://docs.kernel.org/security/tpm/tpm-security.html

It looks like NetBSD and OpenBSD might be good OSs for 32-bit; the next FreeBSD version is dropping support. I don’t use any BSDs, but I think a BSD is probably the best-supported modern Unix operating system for this kind of hardware as the last of the major distros drop i386.

Linux distro support is really thinning out for x86_32, so for this use case; I’m sure the distros still exist, but they’re often niche projects. Gentoo may do the trick if you want to; I can’t tell if they compile their newfangled precompiled packages for i386 though, so if they don’t, you’ll probably have to set up a cross compiling setup from a more powerful x86_64 machine, which you’d need to use every time you update.

I just want a Lower Decks Vol 1 vinyl reissue and a Vol 2.

That joke’s so funny, it’s making me a bit wheezy…

Didn’t Debian drop i386? Are you running Debian Bookworm?

Personally, Super Star Trek is my favorite terminal game.

Wasn’t necessarily suggesting 11 LTSC; just my personal choice.

Not really.

Ampere’s for servers; if you have the cash to blow, you can get a fancy workstation, but not a laptop. It’s really a shame; I think Ampere might be able to do well in the consumer CPU market if they wanted to face Qualcomm (and assuming they can get their single core performance up). A lot of their hardware seems to follow standards pretty well.

Graviton is only used internally inside Amazon and not sold to customers.

The only semi-decent ARM laptops you can get right now are Snapdragon ones, some of which kind of support Linux but with a lot of caveats and obnoxious quarks.

I have to have Windows for my university’s test-taking spyware, so I just have a barebones 11 LTSC installed on a secondary drive.

puts on a fourth, solar-system scale tin-foil hat The Taelons from Earth: Final Conflict are actually using their skrill to puppeteer Talosiankind into puppeteering Vulcankind into puppeteering humankind to remotely fulfill their agendum, as of 3 years ago when they came. Among this pupeteering chaos, William Boone is searching for the truth… until he gets killed off, upon which weird half-human alien baby who instantly grows into an adult, who I think then searches for the truth? I don’t know much after that - masochism can only get you so far in that series before you turn it off.

(This is how we say “Same” on the This Might Be a Wiki Discord server, since the artist of this album is on that server and we have an emote in his honor.)

Thanks for the warning, but to make the the warning, can edit this and put “[NSFW]” in the post title, please?

Heck, if you want the stickers, you can easily print them on a good inkjet.

I just looked it up, and it seems a lot of the pre-Apple Silicon MacBook had swappable airport cards that used a completely standard mini PCIE slot. From a cursory google search, it looks completely possible to swap in something like an Intel Wi-Fi card that is supported natively by the kernel.

A mini-PCIE Wi-Fi modem can be had for not too expensive, around the $30 range; in fact, if you have a good stack of old Wintel laptops, one of those might have a card that works well. In fact, I did that with my sister‘s laptop (although she was using Windowd) – her Realtek Wi-Fi card was causing endless misery, so I ripped the Intel modem out of an ultra book from circa 2016 and put it in her laptop. No more issues.

The 2023 IDW Star Trek Annual’s plot was basically all the holodeck programs on the USS Theseus read “Photons Be Free”. Luckily, Tom Paris happened to be there and understood what the phrase meant, and Captain Sisko dropped off holographic Spock, Janeway, Stamets, HMS Enterprise Picard and Riker, Sato, etcetera with their holographic equipment to settle on a planet.

Don’t you mean that that you like PADDs with 3.7% deeper bevels?

Exactly. Luckily, back in high school, my IB History class spent a good couple months just learning about authoritarian rulers and their tactics.

I especially like pulling out Pinochet because he’s a clear and relatively recent example of right wing authoritarianism, manipulation of existing religious structures, and US government support of authoritarian regimes that help contextualize its trend towards authoritarianism.