I can’t say that I’m surprised when a privacy-focused company has a dose of unfounded or biased paranoia. For me, this is not reason enough to distrust them.

I also don’t fault them for doing away with SMS when most of the populated world had already moved away from SMS by then too. As a North American relying on SMS for about half of my messaging needs at the time, I wasn’t happy about it either. But I don’t fault them for making that decision, and ultimately it did push me to rely on more secure options, which I see as a good thing.

Since adopting a Flatpak and containerized workflow, the choice of distribution matters a lot less to me now than it did 10 years ago.

The majority of apps that I use everyday can be run from any host. And I can install fedora, arch, debian, or whatever I want as a container, whenever I want it, without any thought to my host system.

Ideally, Flatpak’s UX will continue to improve, and upstream app devs will continue to adopt it as an official support channel, which will improve overall security and confidence of the platform. Image-based, atomic distros will be further streamlined, allowing for even more easily interchangeable host images. At that point, traditional distros will be little more than an opinionated collection of command line tools and programming environments.

Your fstab file can remain unchanged and still fail, if the drive or user identifiers have changed unexpectedly. It depends on how you’ve configured your fstab entries, which is why it’s helpful to share them. In future, no one will be able to offer much assistance without seeing the entry details. Either way, glad you were able to get it sorted!

Can you read/write to the disks as root? If so, then something has likely gone sideways with your fstab entry. For example, the device name, order, or UID/GID may have changed, depending on how you’ve configured the entry.

It’s difficult to assist much more without seeing the contents of /etc/fstab.

I used DDG for the first link, but then searched Google with a portion of the error message in quotes. Either way, I’m glad it sorted itself out!

Sounds like a server-side issue to me. Found something similar from 6 months ago…and another here.

Mullvad VPN provides a variety of blocklists, including ads, trackers, malware, gambling, social media, and adult content.

Hah any time, man! Your work and YT vids are what really got me hooked me on Silverblue and the cloud native workflow! I’ll never look at computing the same way again lol.

The biggest hurdles are unavoidable under stock Android, but it really depends on your needs. What are you trying to protect against?

Hah nice, I’d never heard of this one but there’s been plenty of times I’ve wanted to make a quick loop and didn’t want to fuss with it in ffmpeg directly. Will definitely check it out!

I still haven’t taken any of the uBlue images for a spin, but I sincerely appreciate what they’re doing and Jorge has been the perfect champion for the project.

I like to use upstream as much as possible. Partly to minimize breakage and complexity, but also for the increased security and overall focus of resources on a given project. That said, I have no doubt they’re awesome builds and have helped win a lot of folks over to this way of computing!

I totally get it as I’m a tinkerer too, but these days I spend most of that energy on webdev, house projects, thrifting/restoring stuff, etc. If only there was more time in a day lol.

There’s plenty of freedom to tweak local themes with atomic distros, as your home dir itself is entirely mutable and can be changed to your liking.

As to why Fedora/Arch… I love Arch and have used it daily for almost 20 years. I was an Arch dev once upon a time (Judd/Aaron era), and I designed the logo and web branding in use today. The project means a lot to me.

The inherent benefits of atomic systems caught my attention a couple years ago, and Fedora’s implementation won me over.

My hope is that Arch eventually (and officially) adopts a similar approach as these image-based systems become mainstream, at which point I’ll happily be the first in line for testing!

Fedora Silverblue (atomic GNOME) and Kinoite (atomic KDE) have been solid for both work and gaming. System maintenance is largely seamless and automatic once configured. I still use Arch daily, but only in the terminal (distrobox and containers).

Going AMD is so worth it too, I have zero regrets swapping my RTX 2080s for RX 6800 XTs. Secure boot, Wayland, no fuss updates. Couldn’t be happier.

You mentioned needing customization…not sure what you’re hoping for there, but the atomic distros allow for plenty of userspace tweaks. It’s the system-level stuff, like boot and greeter themes, that require a bit more work to implement. My time is too precious to fuss about that stuff these days.

Any offline or disconnected smart TV, pi 4 with Kodi (LibreElec), Steam Link, blu-ray player, AVR, and a Logitech Harmony remote to tie it all together. We have a huge disc collection that we’ve ripped and we also grab media from the library.

There is no one-size-fits-all, but for fits most, you’re looking at KDE’s Konsole or GNOME’s new Terminal (formerly Ptyxis). Everything else is going to be niche, with special use cases. What are your specific needs?

Glad you found something that’ll work!

Nice writeup, thanks for sharing. For your music woes, have you tried plain old VLC? It’s what I use for music (and Mpv for video) and it’s been fine. I like that I can keep my mp3 folder structure the way I like it and still be able to browse and queue albums without relying on metadata.

Just replying to my own comment to say that folks should think very carefully about switching to a personal domain name for email, for the very reason mentioned by the OP.

What if your domain registration lapses and someone else grabs it? What if you can’t afford the cost five years from now? What if you just don’t like the domain name someday? All of these reasons will be problematic and some can result in identity theft and significant fraud. It’s definitely not a decision to be taken lightly, particularly if you have a lot of online accounts.

No, once you delete a Google account it can never be used again, by anyone (link).

I use a password manager (KeePass XC/DX) to track all of my accounts.

In your situation, I would update whatever accounts you do know about to the new email address you intend to use. Set Gmail to forward emails to this account too, and then stop using Gmail for everyday mail. Leave your Google account active for a year and see if any issues crop up.

I do this as well and for the most part it’s been fine. It’s handy to have options and, even for apps that do run under Windows, it’s often less hassle to just fire up the VM.