Curious to hear the setups of community members (main workstation, daily driver):
1-desktop vs laptop, brand, model - why?
2-OS, distro, environment - why?
3-some preferred apps, packages and preferred format.
I’ll go first:
1- desktop, Librem Mini - because of disabled ME, Pureboot
2-Fedora Sway - want to be Wayland-only, like Fedora semi-rolling updates, Fedora being cutting edge, and Sway speaks to me.
3-LibreWolf, Doom Emacs, NewsFlash for RSS, clamav, KeepassXC. I prefer Flatpaks when I can verify the maintainer and make it Wayland-only via Flatseal.
Looking forward to hearing about your setups. Thanks, in advance, for your replies.
1- a MacBook and a self-built PC, the Mac because someone gifted it to me and the PC for gaming
2- macOS for the Mac and Windows 11 hardened with the Windows Guide for the PC. I looked into Fedora for my PC, but some games I would like to play don’t work on Fedora which is a shame, and I looked into Asahi Linux on my Mac, but it seemed unstable for me and some apps are not available on Asahi Linux
3- Firefox with arkenfox patches applied, NetNewsWire for RSS feeds, Bitwarden, KeePassXC, LibreOffice, Anki for learning and VeraCrypt for encrypting my external drives for use on Windows and macOS
1- laptop, Dell 7480, wasn’t aware of linux or linux laptops then.
2-Linux, Fedora, Gnome, i don’t know it just felt like home.
3-flatpak, hardned firefox(no Arken.js), librewolf, fluent reader.
1 - Desktop (2 x HP ProDesk ex-business machine - cos it’s cheap and compact)
2 - Windows 10 (current main), Linux Mint (future main, working on full transition currently)
3 - Apps
-Firefox (main) and Brave (mostly for PWA) for browsers
-Brave PWA for as many app/services I can find (Discord, Element, Skype, Whatsapp, Apple Music, Notesnook, Proton services, etc.)
-Browser built-in PDF reader
-Bitwarden (main) and KeepassXC (for local backup)
-Picocrypt (for small files for transfer) and VeraCrypt (for external HDD encryption)
-Windows Defender (default) and HitmanPro (for nightly scans)
-LibreOffice (MS Office replacement)
-VLC Player (music and video playing)
-Deluge (torrents)
Laptop, Lenovo IdeaPad, it was a pretty good laptop at the time, though I am now realising it has a pretty terrible screen.
Chrome OS Flex, out of all the OSes I’ve tried so far it seems to work the best for me. I’ve detailed my issues with Windows and Linux distros on my blog: How to Make an OS.
Most of the things I use are web apps, and that’s the format I prefer, since they’re confined to the security and permission model of the browser (which is pretty good!). My most commonly used apps are probably VS Code, GitHub Desktop and Cinny (Matrix client).
I want to switch over to a MacBook at some point in the (hopefully near) future, but this is the setup I’ve found works best for me at the moment.
14" MacBook Pro: This is my daily driver which I use because I consider Apple Silicon to be more secure and generally better than Intel/AMD, it has the best battery life I’ve ever had in a laptop, and because macOS has support for apps which aren’t available on Linux. The microphone also hardware disconnects when the lid is closed. ThinkPad X1 Carbon: This is my backup laptop, I like it because it’s very light and has a 4K display which perfectly scales down to 1080p, because Qubes is normally terrible with HiDPI displays so I have to run it at a lower resolution. It also has a built-in webcam cover which is neat.
macOS Ventura (MacBook Pro): App support is the main reason, I also appreciate macOS’s security features like SSV, verified boot, and just generally a security-first approach to development. Windows 11: I run this in a Parallels VM on my MacBook Pro in case I need to run something on Windows. Running Windows in a VM on Apple Silicon is unironically better than running Windows natively on x86 so it works great. Qubes (ThinkPad): I dislike Linux desktop distros generally because apps sharing libraries and other system files tends to cause various instability issues over time, which is why I pretty much only use Qubes which obviously allows for app isolation. I also like Qubes networking in general, I find guaranteeing Linux is using a VPN 100% of the time to be difficult, and it’s much more convenient to just make a ProxyVM to make sure all traffic is directed there. Nevertheless, I’m still thinking about switching to Fedora Silverblue, because Qubes has some annoyances. Fedora: I run Fedora 37 for all my qubes.
Browser: I’m using Arc.net as my main web browser, because I dislike Brave and it is the only other Chromium browser which has a good privacy policy I know of. I occasionally also use Firefox on my MacBook Pro, and I always use Firefox on Qubes. Other Stuff: I mostly use a browser for everything, but I also use VSCode, GitHub Desktop, Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Signal, and the built-in Terminal app. I also really like Privileges on macOS for security. I use Tailscale extensively, not with Headscale because that has no iOS support unfortunately.
Huh, first time hearing about this.
Will have to try this out, since I don’t particularly like Brave either.
I wish Firefox would make PWA easier, then I’d just stick to it.
Edit: Welp, I guess Arc is only for MacOS for the moment. Will have to try it once it comes out for Windows or Linux…
1 - Acer Aspire A515-54G. It’s a decent laptop that was cheap and came with Linux out-of-the-box. I don’t use the NVIDIA card because I don’t want to deal with the annoyances and the integrated fits my needs.
2 - I use Fedora Workstation 37, I really like the semi-rolling thing. I was also looking on River and Sway, but I don’t have time to play with it right now. Also, Gnome is a really good DE.
3 - Ungoogled Chromium, KeePassXC, Tutanota Desktop, Flatseal (I review all the permissions before using any app), Extension Manager, Transmission, Okular, mpv (video, audio and image viewer because why not), LibreOffice (just to open files if needed), Signal Desktop, foot terminal, fish shell, newsboat, lf, bottom, ytfzf and some other cli tools.
That’s a good question. An attacker may need to determine what info provided here is actually accurate. That said, the content of this thread is similar to what a podcaster or blogger might share (ie - Michael Bazell who openly states he runs PopOS on a System76 Thelio, details his preferred apps/packages in his book and podcast, states he no longer cares about disabled Intel ME, etc).
Desktop: Windows 10 / Linux Ubuntu (I use both on my computer, 1 SSD reserved for windows and another SSD reserved for Ubuntu). Both are encrypted, the Linux distro is encrypted with LUKS and my Windows HD is encrypted with veracrypt. I use both operating systems for different reasons, when I like to work on my servers I change to ubuntu but this this is also a way to seperate my activities.
Ubuntu and Windows 10
Brave is my browser for both operating systems, I like brave. For encrypting passwords I use keepass.