I have to balance School Work, IRL/Social Life (Such as talking with Friends), and Private Life onto it, it will be my only device until I get a a Google Pixel for GrapheneOS which is coming soon for the future.
School Work and IRL/Social Life are mergeable, but I want to be able to do those and my Private stuff PRIVATELY without them being connectable.
How can I do this? What should I do as soon as I get the Surface Pro and how can I utilise it to do what I need to do in my life?
Since you’re new on the forum, you may not want to display your email publicly here. I hope you are intentionally doing it and not mistakenly. But welcome to the forum!
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Okay. I don’t know how old you are but I recommend making use of different user profiles on your computer for this. So one for personal, one for school work, and another for your social life. The same can be done on GrapheneOS via profiles on there and set those up as you want.
Also, can I ask why you’re going to use Surface Pro? There are better computers you can buy if you’re in the market for one.
There are other ways to compartmentalize your use cases for which you need your computer and smartphone so if you share any more details on that from your end, folks here can potentially better suggest on it accordingly.
I get it but if you spend your own money on a surface pro instead of that money going to a Google Pixel or even a f***** samsung (mostly because DeX is decent experience but still point stands) is what I have a problem, unless it is provided by the school which in that case I would probably advise against putting private life things on it
If your device does not need to be configured or managed by your organisations, then easiest way to achieve this is to install virtualbox and run two seperate VMs for different purposes.
VMs are not an ideal option for beginners (OP). Though there are many guides online they can follow. But yes, VMs are a great way to go about this too.
It depnds on the subject you study, there is no tool to do/manage proper citations, professional translations, accounting software, IC/ circuit board design, structural engineering programme, CAD, etc.
it is much more managable than setting up dual boot on Surface.
As long as the device is not MDMed, OP would be able to setup VM, so even organisations require stuff like endpoint security installed, it can be contained in a VM.
I wonder what could be even more staightforward and easy than installing virtualbox and VMs
The device is also ARM based as far as I remember so that’s something to keep in mind. Not all Windows app still work on ARM. So it depends on what OP is going to use it for and how.
Seems unnecessarily hostile for a beginner post. I think emotional responses evoke emotional reactions.
The OP (Original Poster: Refers to the one who made the post, in this case @user55 ) should go to the profile page (accessed by clicking on the user icon) and change their display to something that is no their email.
For the advice part, it depends on what do you mean by “draw a connection” between you private and school actions. If your school mandates some app to be installed for monitoring, you should ideally use a separate device for private stuff, or at least create two different users on the laptop.
If it does not mandate any app to be installed, then I would recommend choosing what is convenient to you:
Look up guides that use default settings to reduce Microsoft surveillance
Popular windows debloat scripts like privacy.sexy
Reinstall windows from scratch and use enterprise or professional editions with group policies
Install Linux
Depending on apps you use, your phone experience level, and willingness for friction. Since you seem to be a student, I do not think there is a major cost if you start slow, since any effort to improve privacy helps when most don’t do anything at all, and then move up the ladder of complexity. I am sure the community can share relevant guides for each level of ladder. I left windows years ago, so this is the extent of help I can provide.
Yeah this is right actually, I was just not sure on how to even begin to advise them on compartmentalization, Ill wait for them to explain their current situation to help better advise.
But since they mentioned about buying a pixel and get GrapheneOS in the future after, I genuinely think it doesn’t make sense still, if you know you bought a device but then plan to use a Pixel after, for the money the device was spent could’ve gone to the pixel unless there’s something more to it.
It was given to me as a gift which slightly annoyed me since I was already searching for and even found something from Lenovo. But I thought may as well make do with what I have. People said “You don’t buy a laptop for privacy, you put privacy on what you have” on Reddit, fine by me.
By the way thanks about the email thing, it’s not my main email, or actually an email I use at all, but good looking out.
I have a school google account, many apps I have to use with that email. And I don’t want my real school account to be seen as being used on the same device or location or whatever as my private/anonymous stuff, kind of ruins the point. Thank you for your help, I wonder why linux comes last though, surely you want to get rid of windows as fast as possible?
The Surface Pro is a 2-in-1 Laptop and Tablet, a lot of my work is inconvenient to do on a small phone, a tablet with a pen and keyboard sounds pretty good for a lot of things, even if it’s not the best for what I want to do.