For documents I started learning Typst and LaTeX a while ago and now I greatly prefer either of them over LibreOffice. Being able to write comments that don’t render in the PDF is also very useful (i.e. when I do my homework in LaTeX/Typst I’ll put class notes there as well)

I used to never close tabs and they would accumulate as I kept doing more web searches and other activities. Now when I need to do stuff I usually open a new window instead for different tasks and if I need to free up RAM then I start closing other windows for tasks I’m not doing anymore so it closes all of the related tabs at the same time

There’s a lot of fake versions, the real one is on Telegram and YouTube

Good thing InstaFlow exists

Nowadays with Apple, the bigger issue is the ARM Linux ecosystem being neglected in terms of support rather than the hardware compatibility (that is for M1/M2). The hardware for the most part works except for USB-HDMI and fingerprint (which didn’t work on my HP laptop either).

The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you’re able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they’re worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you’re going to need to trust something somewhere unless you reinvent everything on your own).

For instance, in the US if you’re a middle class cishet white male citizen who ignores politics, you’re biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it’s convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you’re working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you’re a minority, there’s not really much that can be done that doesn’t severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you’re being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you’re an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn’t touch anything else you own and doesn’t cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other “paranoid” security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you’re trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.

The point is to protect national interests, not reject free contributions from normal people for non-security critical but useful software projects which is just idiotic

Proceeds to use open source tooling with numerous contributions from US-based software developers

How the fuck is banning people in certain countries for something they don’t have control over from contributing to small projects like this doing anything but shooting the FOSS ecosystem, which already has a severe shortage of developers, in the foot?

By your logic developers in the US shouldn’t be allowed to contribute to free software either, after all the US is committing genocides and threatening to invade other countries

Personally I use a Guix template I made (Typst, LaTeX) which downloads necessary software/libraries and the LSP and pins the software versions, and I use the Helix text editor for editing. Not sure what the more common methods are. Also Typst’s package management is weird.

If you’re a nerd, also check out Typst and LaTeX. Being able to format your documents with pure code is awesome, and you can also define functions for different things, import libraries to generate graphs, and write comments that don’t show up in the document.

it increases your chances of getting accidentally added to confidential group chats

There’s also Kiwi Farms targeted harassment involved as well

I have a friend here in the US who is on a visa and is planning on leaving the US after undergrad and doing grad school in Europe somewhere

Street Complete lets you walk around and answer questions that go to OSM

lemmy.ml federates with almost all instances most of which aren’t leftist, the admins are leftist as is a lot of the local userbase, but the moderation varies between communities and this one tends to be one of the more permissive ones. If you want one that’s more exclusively leftist you’re probably looking for Hexbear or Lemmygrad.

Lemmy, Reddit, Instagram, local communities on Signal and Discord

Alternatively they could decompile it

Helix because it’s simple and works without tweaking it.