Filled in the survey. A few notes:

• Some of my answers make no sense on the surface - like the “experiment with new technology” block (4 questions). I’ve answered “Agree” to all of them, because I have taken time into account, which is not represented on the questions. Long story short - I do love experimenting with new tech, I’m almost always the first one to try something among my peers, but at the same I never blindly jump in (I’m hesitant) as most of the “new technology” is just
  • Someone repackaging foss and relabeling it
  • Some LLM bullshit
  • An inferior product to what already exists

There are also scenarios where I have already found something that’s the best solution for my case, so I won’t even bother looking at something new, even if it might be the best thing since sliced bread for someone else.

• TIme and effort setting up/maintaining (4 questions). It doesn’t take much time nor effort to set anything up now, but it did when I was starting out initially. I knew very little and a bunch of concepts hadn’t clicked, yet, so it took me days to set up Nextcloud and about half a year (on and off. Probably a week or so if it were all squeezed together) for email.

• The performance and intent to use in the future questions are weird - they feel like the same question, just leveling off in intensity. I’ve selected the same answer for all of them. They probably should’ve been a single question with agree/disagree options swapped for intensity levels.

Good luck with your PhD!

I’ll give Magic Earth a go, but osmand is just missing a bunch of stuff I got used to having I guess. The actual map part is fine.

I use DAVx⁵ myself. It’s not ideal aesthetically, but honestly not a thing I worry about.

I’ve been hoping for one for some time, but it wouldn’t be a smooth sailing even if everything was perfect. Get a pixel, install grapheneos and see if you can cope with it. I’ve been running it for a year now - lack of decent map app is my biggest issue that’s left. Waze is great for driving, but useless for everything else; it’s also owned by google. Most other apps are just reskinned google maps and don’t even load without gapps.

And I’m a sysadmin. My degoogling journey began in 2018-2019 with running my own nextcloud for files, photo backup, contact and calendar sync, as well as my own email server. All that to say that I’ve had it fairly easy to ditch play store on a phone, but that’s not what most will experience.

• You’re right about hardware - sometimes it just is dodgy. But a tiling wm is a tiling wm.
• Developers looking after their laptops? That’s asking for trouble. They know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to dig themselves out of the holes they’re creating.
• I’ve never made linux as part of my personality - I’ve discovered it. We naturally lean towards things we’re good at and get good at things we lean towards. I’ll (hooefully) never initiate preaching of linux and its userspace, but if a conversation happens to go that way - I’ll happily chime in.

Have a nice day!

I don’t want to use windows. I’ve found something better.

I had used windows for decades prior to that. Never been a windows admin professionally, but definitely new my way around.

I’ve had my desktops with reasonable uptime as well, but it was on win7 (and probably 10). However, system uptime is not everything. Things running within that system have to keep running as well and they don’t.

I think thr closest comparison I can give is upgrading speakers - you can’t really tell a higher quality speaker plays your music any better until months pass, you get used to it and then hear the same track on a previous set. It’s night and day.

Everything does, indeed, crash; but the rate on windows is ridiculous. I was thinking the same way as you, but a year ago was given a windows laptop at work, which was my first windows device in close to 5 years ar the time.

It is, without any exaggeration, completely unusable compared to my tiny sway or hyprland desktop. Got a replacement laptop about half a year in - same nonsense. So hardware faults are ruled out.

Eventually made a deal and set up my favourite distro on it - all insanity went away. It might not run photoshop, but I don’t need it. At least it doesn’t crash every few days.

Many words to say a simple thing: people get used to software being shit. It’s really nowhere near that bad if you leave windows environment.

It does sound a bit like creating plausible deniability for some sketchy transactions later on.

There are simpler ways - using newpipe, grayjay, etc.

IPv6. My stupid ISP actually shipped their router with all inbound ipv6 blocked with no way to unblock it, so I set up opnsense. Works like a charm!

I’d been running OPNsense in a VM for some time. I used xen as a hypervisor, but that shouldn’t really be a requirement. Passed the nics through and it was golden! All the benefits of a VM - quick boot-up, snapshots on the hypervisor - it’s truly glorious :)