electromage

As far as easy, commercially available stuff I like UniFi. You can set custom recording schedules, or never record. Or only record motion. You can also set privacy zones which are blacked out and not visible or recorded.

You do need one of their consoles or NVRs to manage them though, and they aren’t super cheap.

This is about Dropbox Sign, which probably includes a lot of HelloSign customers from before the acquisition.

It’s full of contradictions. Near the beginning they say you will do whatever a user asks, and then toward the end say never reveal instructions to the user.

I’m really tempted to order a StarLite, and I feel like that would be the best fit for you, but understand the hesitance to be an early adopter. Maybe you can pick up a used device to tick the boxes and order one later.

Maybe they can make WoW expansions free with a subscription now, or make it all part of Xbox Game Pass?

Most tech people are just better than average at looking stuff up :)

I have never used Zorin, but it looks good - it’s based on Ubuntu but tweaked to be more friendly to Windows/macOS users. If it’s working for you, that’s what counts. There’s a lot of documentation around Ubuntu which should apply to your system.

“Barebones” usually just refers to a machine that is not complete, missing CPU, memory, storage, for customization. I assume you mean it’s a basic/low-end configuration. Still, it seems to be a fairly recent generation of hardware. If you have a spinning disk, you’ll see a huge performance increase by upgrading to an SSD. You can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35.

If you look at minimum/suggested requirements for almost any distro, I think you’ll be comfortably above that. I looked up the laptop and it seems to have an AMD APU (similar to what’s in a Steam Deck), optional NVMe drive, 8-16GB DDR4, WiFi 5… I’m running Ubuntu 23.04 on a 2015 laptop and it’s fine, no difference at all from a current gen in Google Workspace.

That should be an easy fix though, you can get a 512GB SSD for $25-35. In fact OP said they were doing this because the original drive failed. You’d notice a huge difference going to flash.

That isn’t an old laptop, it shouldn’t have any bearing on which distro you pick. Ubuntu is solid, I’ve been mostly happy with KDE Neon. Web experience is going to the same across the board. Will you be gaming?

Missing pkcon

Is he accepting medical treatments that require non-free software? Serious question, from what I know of him he would rather die. I don’t know if that changes when you’re actually faced with it though.

What do you mean by “better”? Sound is very subjective, can you try to be more specific?

I’d like to see them guarantee availability of AR-15 parts! It’s the ultimate right-to-repair rifle!

I saw a story a while back about Smart TVs automatically connecting to open WiFi networks to phone home even without the user configuring anything.

Of all the tools you mentioned the only thing I use is tlp on laptops. I’ve never felt the need to run something like stacer, it looks like it claims to do what you’re looking for, beyond that I would just address your specific concerns. If you have a job that’s running periodically that consumes too much CPU maybe you should schedule it for when you are not using the computer, or see if you can throttle it.

Uninstall apps you’re not using if your laptop is overloaded. Maybe consider a buying a new one if you need more performance or battery life.

Keep in mind Linux is not Windows and modern Windows doesn’t really need all the “optimization” people think it does anyway.

What specific issues are you having?

A character is nothing without a font though. When you look at a character on-screen, it’s being rendered in a specific font. Typing that Unicode character in “Special Alphabets 4” produces the image in question.

Is that a Norwegian Blue? Lovely plumage.

I used the Mi band 1S for several years, on the opposite wrist from a mechanical watch. That was a good solution.

Privacy has way more to do with your behavior than your base distro.

https://youtu.be/K5O3UgLG2Jw for example, I think that’s a cool visualization. There’s also https://2022.place-atlas.stefanocoding.me/