My advice: run a server (any server) or three, and keep your important / personal stuff there. It can be as simple as a Raspberry Pi with a big external SSD. The PC you use as a desktop environment should be easily built / configured from the base distro into whatever customizations you want, and you can either work with your personal files on the server, or mirror copies of them to your desktop system as appropriate (things like "living documents" should be primarily stored and backed up on servers, things like photo collections etc. can be stored on the server, but copied to the desktop for easy access like rotating wallpaper or whatever.)
If (when, really) any one of your systems goes down, it shouldn't be a big deal. If it's a server, restore from another server mirror / backups. If it's your desktop, install a new desktop and get your customizations off a server.
Of course this is an ideal, but keep in mind that SSDs are not "forever" devices, they do wear out and each single copy of your data will be corrupted some day. Spinning rust is even less reliable, in my experience, although I have one 2TB hard drive that has been online for more than 10 years now. It's mirrored, twice, on SSDs.
snap pushed into the default distro, long before it's a net-positive (and it's still not a net positive, IMO)
You want this security update that somebody else published? Yeah, we want your money.
I've used Ubuntu heavily since 14.04 through 24.04... my new system installs are going Debian 12 with XFCE, and yes - I did evaluate Xubuntu, I'm actually typing this from an Xubuntu machine right now that's planned to be getting Debian if it ever needs a re-image.
Ubuntu wasn't a bad choice, still isn't a terrible choice, but if you're going to have to strip out snap by hand and deal with security updates by hand after 4-5 years and install a "niche" desktop version to get out from Gnome's rather inflexible view of things, might as well just go to Debian and be done with whatever "new deals" Canonical comes up with in the future.
I have a collection of about 8 machines around the house (a lot of Raspberry Pi) that I ssh around to from various points.
I have setup scripts named: ssp1 ssp2 ssba ss2p etc. to ssh into the various machines, and of course shared public ssh keys among them to skip the password prompt. So, yes, once you are "in" one machine in my network, if you know this, you are "in" all of them, but... it's bloody convenient.
There's no such thing as pure democracy in anything larger than an ancient Greek city-state, possibly today's HOAs - and you see how well they work.
What passes for democracy in todays' nations of millions (and even the HOA we chose to leave 12 years ago) is elected representative government where the voters trust their elected representatives to represent their interests - to varying degrees of success and failure.
What's lacking in, for instance, the US government for some time now is actual representation of the majority of the peoples' interests - unless the majority of the people actually enjoy being on the poor end of a growing wealth gap. Those voters who continue to elect representatives who perpetuate these policies are: getting the government they deserve.
The US and UK are populist democracies, as such both had sizeable minority support for Fascism in the years before WWII - I believe it was Churchill who was leaning heavily towards it as a "great form of government to consolidate popular support." But, those movements ultimately did not gain full control and once war was declared on the Fascists, it had a strong damper effect on support for it in the US/UK.
Nobody is harmless, and no nation is made up of people who agree 100% on all questions. Fascism attempts to manufacture the appearance that lie is true, which is one of it's many drawbacks: allergies to reality.
they’re not precise at all unless you consider also killing their families and potentially an entire building full of people to be acceptable “precision.”
No matter where you are on the scale, you could always get better (just killing the intended target) and worse (low yield nuke somewhere near the building.)
The saddest part is when they calculate that the collateral damage is "beneficial" to their cause. That's the kind of calculation that tends to become more and more inaccurate over the long term.
It's not about Nazi or any such thing, it's about abilities. They didn't draft the whole German army, just the ones they thought would make them stronger.
I have mixed feelings - Gaza clearly shows a "worse way" to do warfare, but that doesn't move the needle on how bad it is to say: "Welp, there's a 90% chance that somewhere in this building is somebody associated with a group that we don't like, so take it down tonight while everyone is home sleeping."
Security cameras will do it, and the Pi5 doesn't have hardware decode for h.264 the way the Pi4 does, so that becomes a big drain, particularly if you don't drop the frame rates. I run a separate Pi (5, unfortunately) with a HAILO 8 hat (fortunately) for 5 video streams on Frigate - it needs some airflow to stay cool, but is only running about 30% CPU utilization for my streams.
Yeah, I'm running home assistant with 43 Zigbee devices, 20 Wifi connected devices including about 150 channels of medium-high (once a minute) data logging (temperature, humidity, signal strength, sensor positions, radar occupancy info, etc.), and a Music Assistant instance, and while it's streaming net-radio I've only got 98% idle on my Pi's CPU, feeling the squeeze already /s.
Your Zigbee hub will run out of capacity long before the Pi. Solution: run multiple Zigbee hubs when you get to that point.
Not just ad blocker, but tracking blockers too. Also, if you've got a simple little device like a WiFi controlled outlet switch, and through PiHole you notice it "phoning home" frequently even though you're not using it.... that's a clue that you might not want to be keeping such things inside the same network where you check on your 401(k) account...
PiHole is a pretty light load, as are Home Assistant and Music Assistant. Frigate starts to make some heat, so don't expect to get a full blown video classification / recording system.
Nah, the good ol' days were when websites provided value to their users. The only competitively sustainable business model is the reverse: where users provide value to the website owners.
My advice: run a server (any server) or three, and keep your important / personal stuff there. It can be as simple as a Raspberry Pi with a big external SSD. The PC you use as a desktop environment should be easily built / configured from the base distro into whatever customizations you want, and you can either work with your personal files on the server, or mirror copies of them to your desktop system as appropriate (things like "living documents" should be primarily stored and backed up on servers, things like photo collections etc. can be stored on the server, but copied to the desktop for easy access like rotating wallpaper or whatever.)
If (when, really) any one of your systems goes down, it shouldn't be a big deal. If it's a server, restore from another server mirror / backups. If it's your desktop, install a new desktop and get your customizations off a server.
Of course this is an ideal, but keep in mind that SSDs are not "forever" devices, they do wear out and each single copy of your data will be corrupted some day. Spinning rust is even less reliable, in my experience, although I have one 2TB hard drive that has been online for more than 10 years now. It's mirrored, twice, on SSDs.