Small-time dictators, shorely.

Absolutely. The 8-hour sleep is probably just a marketing invention, related to modern electric light. In pre-modern Europe it was common to get up and do housework in the middle of the night.

I can get on board with that.

I share your suspicions but I’d go further. The bed industry has always struck me as an obvious scam that plays on people’s nebulous health anxieties and also on the tempting cognitive fallacy that, since an 8-hour night is the same amount as an 8-hour workday, the exact physical makeup of your bed is somehow as important as your career or something. It all strikes me as almost completely irrational. People slept for aeons on straw and somehow survived. A bed is a soft flat object, any other abstract properties are just marketing IMO.

As a regular traveler I have slept in a lot of beds. Maybe 300 (sic) in the last decade, of all quality levels. For me it makes all but no difference to how much sleep I get, the only thing that bothers me is when the springs are literally sticking out. So this is all completely anecdotal and I do respect your own anecdote. But I can’t help noticing that I see it repeated in lots of bed adverts.

So nobody has any agency and we’re all just helpless puppets on strings?

Trying very hard not to come to the conclusion that if you waste 2000 bucks on a connected bed, you have only yourself to blame.

Seriously. Unlike dumb TVs, dumb beds are not going away. Buy one for 400 bucks and donate the remainder of your bed-buying fortune. Your body won’t notice and €1600 can do a lot of good.

Incorrect. A Nazi is a person who sincerely believes that there should be no individual freedom and that whole races should be exterminated. This, by contrast, was a standard-issue millennial ignoramus who said some silly things and then regretted it. There is a difference.

An almost exact question was asked here about 3 days ago, maybe begin there.

Almost any Windows machine with an Intel sticker on it will work so it really depends on your priorities:

• ethics - buy from a Linux specialist like Tuxedo to avoid paying Microsoft
• safety (no surprises) - buy whatever your big-box retailer is selling at your budget
• bang for buck - buy a Lenovo ThinkPad second-hand

Laptop yes. But no desktop environment, just a window manager, Sway.

Desktop environment? What desktop environment?

Firstly, yes, what OP wants is absolutely feasible in principle. I’ve used fanless low-powered laptops as my only device for years now, for same use case as OP - terminal plus browser. First was an 11in Asus netbook, right now a Celeron-powered model with fully 8GB ram. Neither have been “slow” at all, in fact probably faster than some of the Windows machines I’ve used in the past for work. HD video runs flawlessly, which is as much as I’ll ever need. For both of them I paid as little as you’d expect - in the low hundreds, new. To be honest I often get the feeling many people are buying super overpowered laptops. If you’re on Linux and not gaming or doing CAD it’s a complete waste of money to spend 1000 bucks on a laptop. That’s my opinion, backed by very deep experience.

In response to the question, the problem is that the netbook niche is now occupied by Chromebooks. Which are a PITA to get working with Linux due to the bootloader lockdown - although OP seems to have the secret for making that easy. Otherwise you need to go up to around 350 bucks for the lowest-end Wintel devices which are not bulky with horrible fans, or else buy second-hand as others are recommending.

Been using Mailbox for years without any issue. German reliability. But the fact that one of Proton’s directors revealed that he agrees with 75 million Americans does not mean that a whole company, based in Switzerland and with many other stakeholders, has “gone rogue”. I’m not getting into a new fight about this here but I really think American progressives need to drop this religious approach to dissent and heterodoxy and just relax a little. It will be okay.

Good job. But don’t worry if you have to look up answers. I’ve been at this for 20 years and I still have to look up and double-check basic syntax like the classic find -exec one. No big deal if only takes a couple of seconds.

This is definitely the sort of thing that LLM AI tools can help with, in theory.

Sure, perhaps it was the hardware, perhaps I just got unlucky. But Ubuntu worked flawlessly and thank goodness. Unfortunately this is not the kind of experience one forgets.

I don’t see any reason to use ubuntu over debian

I do. The last time I tried it, Debian’s installer crashed and left me with a white screen. Imagine telling a newbie to wipe their disk before that happens. Linux has lost a user for life. Debian’s site is still completely archaic, so the pre-installation funnel is going to be a challenge in itself for most people. No way.

To be clear, I used Debian for years, I love their mission and I want it to be the reference FOSS distro. But beginners need hand-holding and Debian is not ready for that yet.

I’m gonna push back against your Ubuntu disparagement. In terms of “pushing” things, Ubuntu’s abuses are really very marginal. Compared to Windows, the difference between Ubuntu and any other distro is vanishingly minimal in this regard. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is undeniably a solid and dependable distro with a 20-year track record behind it. For a beginner that should count for something.

Absolutely. There remains the small issue that Graphene only works on devices made by a certain purveyor of mass-surveillance spyware.

Nobody should be using a bank which requires a mobile app in the first place. iOS is proprietary closed-source software and FOSS Android-based OSs likely won’t work because of the the SafetyNet lockdown.

We do not currently have decent privacy on mobile, period. If you can’t do everything on the web, change bank.

BTW I did just this myself. Opened a Revolut account and then closed it after discovering that the web app was not fully functional. Here in Europe at least, I believe Revolut is exceptional in its obnoxious attitude to user privacy.

Sure, I understand the arguments. I’ve had this debate plenty of times, virtually and in person. I’ve even lost a couple of friends over it. Some people see things my way, some people see things yours. Your way is in the ascendant, it’s undeniable. But you must know that there are other ways of interpreting the same facts, that people - yes, even good people - have different values to you. For me you are selling a creed of victimhood, of fragility, of hypersensitivity, in which people are incentivized to find offense, where everyone comes out a loser. Again: you seem to be a decent well-meaning person, you’re not throwing insults around like others here, and I hear the points you make. I’m sure you’re intelligent and I completely respect you. But I fundamentally disagree with your analysis. Good night.