Correction: It updates every second Tuesday of the month. (Not including any potential "Preview" updates which might get released. Those are all optional updates, though.)
I'll also plug SmartTube, an Android TV app that has many of the more widely-used functions ReVanced has (blocks ads, supports SponsorBlock, etc.) among other things.
I remember I used to have an add-on (at least I think it was an add-on; didn't Spotify officially support those at some point?) that synced the lyrics of a song to the timestamp. It used user submissions to figure out the timestamps and edit the lyrics. It was pretty cool.
Honestly, I have Windows working just the way I want it right now (and I do know enough to be able to wrangle it to do just what I want it to do), but I could do without so much spyware. That's the main reason I'm looking into Linux. Any way you know how to get rid of Windows' built-in spyware without impacting security at all or breaking anything too badly?
On a different note, I have actually been looking for a new antivirus, preferably a free but very good one. Norton (my dad subscribed to it and got like 10 license keys years ago and shared with the family) has become too much like adware for me in recent years. Your comment has been helpful with that.
I think I've tried Ventoy before, actually. I didn't know it did persistent installs.
Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to enable my PC to boot from a USB device. It uses the most recent version of the MyAsus UEFI, the one that looks like this picture I pulled from online (minus the red outline, obviously):
You don't happen to know how to enable booting from a device from there, do you? All the guides I found online were for an older version of the Asus UEFI settings.
Not OP, but I feel like every time I come across a thread like this, someone is recommending a different version of Linux. It makes it really difficult to decide, and I can't exactly just "try out" Linux on my computer the same way I could try out other programs.
Yes, I could install it on a thumb drive, but that's not persistent, so I couldn't try it out for more than a few hours. Takes longer than that to decide to completely switch OSes.
My university used something called Lockdown Browser. It was free to download for students. On Windows (can't remember if there was a Mac, and it definitely wasn't available on Linux), it could only run after a UAC prompt. It used the webcam and microphone on a computer to record the student. It also used facial detection. I'm pretty sure it also recorded the screen, at least inside the browser window.
It also had options that instructors could enable that had us students have to record a video of our immediate surroundings and have to take a picture of a photo ID with our name and picture (preferably our student ID).
If you did the three-finger touchpad swipe (which I've done accidentally before) to change to a different window or minimize the program, it'd refocus itself immediately, a warning would pop up and tell you that, if it happened a second time, the exam would be closed and the instructor would be notified.
If it detected certain applications running (ex. Discord, WhatsApp, Xbox Game Bar, etc.), it would ask to force close them or it wouldn't run.
Barring a situation in which cheating was possible (ex. the three-finger swipe mentioned above), the browser could not be closed until the exam was submitted.
If instructors chose to use Lockdown Browser, students wouldn't be able to open the exam unless they were using that browser.
So it was still possible to cheat (not that I did, but I'd heard of people who did and how they did it), but still difficult.
The IT admin: https://youtu.be/5l6l9T2w1DQ