utopiah

I forgot the exact number but while installing Debian (Bookworm and Sid) this weekend I was shocked by how small the base install, with a window manager ("big" one by your standards, i.e KDE), was. Maybe 2Gb, definitely less than 4Gb. It all worked fine, I could browse the Web, print, edit rich text, watch video, etc.

I installed a ton more stuff since, e.g Steam, Inkscape, Python libraries for computer vision, etc and it's still not even 10Gb.

So... my suggestion is the same as I shared earlier in https://lemmy.ml/post/20673461/13899831 namely do NOT install preemptively! Assuming you have a fast and stable connection I would argue stick to the bare minimum and all add as you need.

In fact... if you want to be minimalist I would suggest to do another fresh install (it's fast, less than 1hr and you can do something else at the same time) and stick to the bare minimum right away.

TL;DR: don't get rid of, just avoid adding from the first place.

Ironically enough just 2 days ago I posted this https://lemmy.ml/post/20691536/13906950 namely how the 1st thing I do after installing NVIDIA drivers on Debian is disabling Wayland to rely on X11 simply because it doesn't work.

Sadly that's relevant here precisely because if we are talking about Valve it's about gaming, if it's about gaming one simply can't ignore the state of NVIDIA drivers.

So... it might run on 50% on Linux desktops but on mine, which I also game on, it never worked once I had drivers for gaming installed. Consequently I understand "how people are complaining" because that's exactly my experience.

No "if", no "would", we are millions of gamers using our (portable) PC with SteamOS running on it for few years now already.

As others have pointed out already, the SteamDeck is exactly that. I even travel with it, use desktop mode with my BT mouse&keyboard with a USB-to-HDMI adapter and work on large screen and do my presentations with video projectors.

If they were to sell a desktop too... well I have a Corsair ONE already, naming a gaming desktop (2080Ti) with a very small footprint and relatively silent. It is not easily upgradable due to how compact it is (but can be done) so if I were to have an equivalent of it from Steam and they were to keep on contributing to FLOSS it would probably be an even easier buy because I trust their RMA and I imagine I wouldn't pay a "Windows tax" with it as it would "only" come with SteamOS.

TL;DR: I'd prepare my credit card.

FWIW I installed Debian few times this weekend, both Sid and Bookworm, with a 2080Ti and iirc following the official documentation, e.g https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_12_.22Bookworm.22 was enough, nothing exotic needed namely :

• adding contrib and non-free, updating, install drivers
• rebooting and sticking to X11, not Wayland (which for me with KDE Plasma didn't work)

Another "trick" I use is having an ~/Apps directory in which I have AppImage, binaries, etc that I can bring from an old /home to a new one. It's not ideal, bypassing the package manager, and makes quite a few assumption, first architecture, but in practice, it works.

I did more than 5 installs this weekend (for ... reasons) and the "trick" IMHO is ...

Do NOT install things ahead of actually needing them. (of course this assume things take minutes to install and thus you will have connectivity)

For me it meant Firefox was top of the list, VLC or Steam (thus NVIDIA driver) second, vim as I had to edit crontab, etc.

Quite a few are important to me but NOT urgent, e.g Cura (for 3D printer) and OpenSCAD (for parametric design) or Blender. So I didn't event install them yet.

So IMHO as other suggested docker/docker-compose but only for backend.

Now... if you really want a reproducible desktop install : NixOS. You declare your setup rather than apt install -y and "hope" it will work out. Honestly I was tempted but as install a fresh Debian takes me 1h and I do it maybe once a year, at most, no need for me (yet).

It's... Debian?

Ubuntu is based on Debian which doesn't have snap by default AFAICT from bookworm/unstable. In fact it's precisely why I switched back recently. Going from Debian to Ubuntu and now Debian again due to excessive bloatware and "worst" ways to deliver it IMHO.

It's a tricky situation to navigate.

There is the technical aspect, namely is it actually feasible, but itself wrapped within an economical and political context, as I've highlighted in another thread on this post.

On one hand we learn from Snowden's leaks about an entire surveillance apparatus, we might also have a conceptual understand of limitations via articles like "On trusting trust", plain incompetence and shortcuts for large companies, so all that and more invite us to be very prudent. Those are actual justifications for questioning what hardware, if any, can be trusted.

Yet... one can't go from those justifications to speculate. Yes there might be flaws, intentional or not, in both the design or the production or both of chips. Still, it's not because it's conceptually possible, or even that it happened before, that it does happen today and at scale.

Your System76 is an interesting example and it's a bit like my Banana Pi tinkering, or even more limited (yet exciting IMHO) the Precursor. Namely it's a very costly trade off today to "work" with hardware one can (at least try to) understand better, hopefully itself leading to better privacy and security. In the end most of us believe the trade off for more affordable performances trumps that deeper understanding.

I must express myself quite poorly. It is not a point about technical knowledge, in fact if you were to know more about the topic than I do, I would expect you to even more be upheld to higher standards and thus not promote a bad solution, even more so assume it's the only one. I can't imagine that even a PhD student who is supposedly at the frontier of knowledge in their very narrow field would assume no alternative is possible, or will ever be. This even more the case without having both a complete understand of the landscape but also about OP's actual needs, which is probably hard to express clearly and thus leading to a lot of assumption. Here maybe a simple loud alarm from a BT speaker going out of range might be enough.

My whole point is that abandoning hope, and leading others to do so, is worst than actively finding for a barely OK compromise.

Anyway I don't want to invest more energy on this discussion unfortunately so simply wishing you the best, thanks for the clarifications.

I imagine it's like everything else, you can only realistically verify against a random sample. It's like trucks passing a border, they should ALL be checked but in practice only few gets checked and punished with the hope that punishment will deter others.

Here if 1 chip is checked for 1 million produced and there is a single problem with it, being a backdoor or "just" a security flaw that is NOT present due to the original design, then the trust in the company producing them is shattered. Nobody who can afford alternatives will want to work with them.

I imagine in a lot of situations the economical risk is not worth it. Even if say a state actor does commission a backdoor to be added and thus tell the producing company they'll cover their losses, as soon as the news is out nobody will even use the chips so even for a state actor it doesn't work.

They asked for an alternative to airtags. I provided one.

And even though I'm not OP I'm genuinely grateful for that.

Doesn’t matter if they were compromised because like I said, everyone is eventually.

No! That's the whole point of this Privacy community! If someone is using, using home automation as an example, Apple HomeKit or Roomba or Google Home they will eventually get compromised BUT if they are using something local, e.g Zigbee with HomeAssistant they WILL never get compromised because by the very local only architecture of that solution no data is leaving the home and thus can NOT be compromised.

The ENTIRE reason d'etre of this community is not to say "Oh well... the default solutions are imperfect, we have to shrug and accept the statu quo" but rather provide genuinely alternative.

I understand a lot of people can enter into a learned helplessness mindset imagining that only poor solutions exist and thus, better pick the least worst one, but by doing that we are giving power to Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, etc.

Please do NOT say that "everybody gets compromised" when you actually mean that "the vast majority of people who accept to use a popular solution with trade offs that are not good for privacy". It sounds like a finicky difference but it's actually totally different because it shows that it's not inevitable.

By taking shortcut in your language you limit what's conceived as possible by others who are asking for help, again, in a Privacy focused community.

True yet still not OK.

That's also why a lot of us do try to avoid, as much as is realistically feasible, to provide any data to any company that should store it. Hence why a lot of questions here are about self hosting, no cloud, etc. It's not paranoia, it's because companies cut corners and as you correctly point out, fail to keep us safe. So it's not about Tile specifically, they are just yet another poor example. Let's not defend them nor this kind of practices. If people in the Privacy community are OK with that, we have a rather deep problem.