what exactly are you looking for? there are many guides for switching to linux, for example, arch wiki; has enough details for anybody. similarly, there are other distro wikis (fedora/debian/mint/…). But none of them are specifically for switching from windows (10). Most of them do mention that backup your stuff, or mount windows partitions for moving stuff.

If you need something to switch specifically from windows, that is hard. because the way people use windows changes a lot with people. My personal recommendation would be to just search “switch to linux” on youtube, find suitable videos (in prefered languages or target audiences, which are also suitabbly licensed(most linux youtubers release their stuff under some variation of cc, and youtube by default has also some cc license for all videos. you can check about licenses in youtube description.)). Video demos for people today or more approachable, and can also help navigate any issues that might occur during the move. Once they have some distro installed, they can look up distro wikis to build upon.

no (ish), what I meant there was i can manually click through all links in yacy’s index (a bit of a hyperbole). But as I had hinted, I have offline backup for a lot of pages (so it is not a index really, but it is searchable and i can just open pages). I have nearly 0.5 million articles. 90+% is wiki, then arch and programming books/docs, and hopefully more to come. And all of this requires less than 60 GiBs, and searching is really fast (my typing speed is the limiting factor)

I also did use yacy for some time, but problem is - index is too small. I could within weeks visit each and every page indexed by yacy, and that is not a good thing

Thanks for sharing. I have heard pretty crazy stuff, and this seems more believable.

off the shelf Wireguard or OpenVPN are immediately detected and blocked with no chance to get through at all

Is it possible for you guys to buy vps outside and somehow pay them (that would probably be the hard part) or maybe find some friends or diaspora outside, and have them pay for vps to set your personal vpns. You can make it somewhat obfuscated, and mostly hide it as some work related stuff.

Do you guys use tor or i2p? I would presume you are “allowed” but still have to hide it.

On average I have to spend 10% of my working time every just trying to get a good connection online.

that is really sad, sorry to hear about that.

Thanks for sharing. I have heard pretty crazy stuff, and this seems more believable.

off the shelf Wireguard or OpenVPN are immediately detected and blocked with no chance to get through at all

Is it possible for you guys to buy vps outside and somehow pay them (that would probably be the hard part) or maybe find some friends or diaspora outside, and have them pay for vps to set your personal vpns. You can make it somewhat obfuscated, and mostly hide it as some work related stuff.

Do you guys use tor or i2p? I would presume you are “allowed” but still have to hide it.

On average I have to spend 10% of my working time every just trying to get a good connection online.

that is really sad, sorry to hear about that.

In this particular case, have you tried checking out uncensored models, maybe trained primarily for west locally, maybe some mistral model. I am not saying western models would give you correct or better or unbiased answers, but if you use multiple sources, you can probably form some results yourself. you can possibly keep a combo of smaller quant of small models (8b should run reasonably if you have 16 gib memory, even 12-14 B models can work, and you can download 2-3 models from different providers)

Side questions: Are you allowed to use huggingface in china? similarly, is all your lemmy life through vpns, or is lemmy small enough not large enough to yet be censored. Also, if you do not mind answering, how is the infamous firewall implemented? is it a blacklist banning certain stuff, or whitelist allowing only selected stuff, or some combinations (like for example, (and I am not accusing china of censoring wiki here, I just do not know enough, and just trying to form a hypothetical example) ban whole wikipedia, but whitelist only certain articles, or whitelist all of wiki, and ban only certain articles, or something like ban english wiki, then whitelist some stuff, but keep all chineese wiki whitelisted and then possibly block some? Also, how is vpn usage treated by government? is it discouraged, or encouraged, or if you use it a lot, and possibly mix some irl activity and vpn activity, is it pursued in some ways?

Sorry for asking so many questions, but I was just curious. In any case, if you feel uncomfortable, do not answer any question. Thank you

This is one part of what I wanted to convey, but for example - bing has some results - they uprank sites they are paid by - then send to ddg - ddg again adds ads - sends to you. /you are effectively using bing with better privacy (I don’t mind ads, I can recognise/avoid them). And other problem with ddg is the thing that I brought up - bing is planning/already underway (depending on source of information) to scratch its search api, and mostly replace with a “ai powered api”. Most users of bing api would have to find alternatives.

Same with searx, you are more private (assuming you use a public instance), but it is not great for open web. the up/downranking done at source by bing/google can not be avoided (it can be done, afaik there are some scripts/extensions to hide results from certain sites, but you still can not uprank (can not uprank something that was not even sent to you)), and it hurts smaller websites, like articles or forums that are not big platforms or doing heavy seo.

One should most definitely use more than 1 search engine. You can even find interest specific engines.

I am not gaoing to say anything on ecosia here, since i do not know much about them. All I can say is, most of the ad revenue is going towards bing api pricing, then their servers and other costs of doing a business (for example, rent, electricity, regulations, etc), then their employees, then if they have some amoun of oney remaining, they would possibly use it to plant it. Most people doing business do not immediately want to use their profits, and generally invests parts of profits back to build some runway (ad revenue is not consistent), invest in employees (insurances or incentives), or payback any loans. Even if they have some vc funding or recieving grants, they would have to profitable by themselves, and then only can they plant tress. And keeping this in mind, my guess would be that they are not planting that much

I do not think it is a good idea to prepare a vm image and install it as iso. it can be done afaik, but not a great idea. Assuming he (your dad) already has a ubuntu system (presumably some lts, i am asssuming something like 1604, 1804 or 2004) then it is easier to just upgrade the system. I know you said that he has forgotten to upgrade, so i would ask him to somehow send you a photo of what he has installed right now (can be hard, but maybe just asking what animal is present on the wallpaper (if he uses the default one that ubuntu uses) can help. even look of top bar or icons can help to get the age. Afaik, ubuntu upgrade paths are relatively stable, so once you know what version he uses currently, then you can install that version, and upgrade it to newest install on your system and record instructions. This would be long and tedious task. I do not use ubuntu, so i do not know what jumps can be taken (i know you can jump from 1 lts to another, something like 1804 to 2004, but can you jump 2 lts versions? some ubuntu forum or wiki post can help regarding this). Once you complete upgrades, you can record instructions and send them.

This can be a easier for following reasons -

• he would not have to plug in usb and boot into installer mode - this can be hard if he does not know what key to press, or if he does not press it fast enough

• you would still be using some standard installation, rather than your “custom” iso - not a big thing, but upgrades are more certain in a standard installation

• ubuntu has snaps - I am not a big fan of snaps, but it is a good thing for likes of your dad, who would prefer to have there apps (like web browser) auto updated in background. Mint has flatpak, but by default stuff is installed as deb packages, upgrading them requires sudo password, which can be hard for your parent.

the virtual image is much larger than iso, because it is uncompressed. Isos are you compressed by something like squashfs, which prepares something like a tar or zip file, which is also mountable. Also your intial virtual file system allocated size might be larger (which would largely be empty, this would be “sparse” file). From my prior experience, you can sometimes have sparse file errors, which can cause errors at bootup, these can be benign, but may seem strange to your father.

Someone else mentioned, you can also possibly install it on a laptop, and then ship that to your father, or buy a prebuilt laptop with linux preinstalled. Nowadays, some big brands like hp/dell/lenovo also have options in there build configurators to select the operating systems, and there are also linux specific vendors (more expensive). But this option in general is expensive (because there is a laptop cost).

Also, where does your father live? If he lives somewhere maybe close to me or someone you know who can go and upgrade / install new system for him. This can be hard for logistaical reasons, or you may not be able to find someone trustworthy.

posteo is what i am using. Upsides - reasonably cheap (12 euros per year), downsides - no custom domains

that explains it

lemmings.world or pifed.social both are general purpose, and relatively small

thanks, appreciated

I made a new community today !stupid_questions@lemmings.world. It is a simple community, appreciating absurd questions (not in my community, but the recently asked question 100 men vs gorrila also fits in it). Due to nature of community, it can actually be more interlinked with other communities, for example the gorilla question would be also fit in a biomechanics community ( i do not think we have one yet) but maybe biomechanics community does not have any (or many) subscribers, then stupid_questions folk can also join them. This somewhat happened (to soon to say much about this, all hypothesising) with first post, about brand new sentences, which is now cross posted to linguistics community. I think this can plug in a “humor” “hole” for many communities. General asking communities definitely do appreciatie humor, but may not be “nerdy” enough (i do not like using this word, especially on lemmy, where i could practically categorise everyone using lemmy to be a nerd, if you have a better one please do tell) to willingly subscribe to a “absurdism” community. My guess would be that people who appreciate absurd stuff, might have a stronger correlation with those who are interested in academicc disciplines. Maybe it is a wrong hunch, but my time on internet for however long i have been on it suggests that.

I do not have any other program to add (the only options i know are already commented by others), there is one more, you can use a keepass (and/or -xc) database as a folder, and dump files, it is not visible in os file manager, but still cross platform and simple enough, but because of nature of how the encryption is done for a keeepass database, for each file added, whole database is updated (if you have a large folder, then that would be a large file saved, and encrypteed, so it can get slow). I do something handrolled, where if i use a regular folder, but all the files added to it are encrypted by pass (that is gpg), this way, files are encrypted, but saved atomically. But this has some downsides. due to simplistic nature of pass, the output file is not given any fancy unidentifiable name like cryptomator (they also do some atomic file encryptions only, but also do file chunking (split file in multiple parts, and encrypt them seperately, helps with prevention of identification of file by its size) and maintain a map (which, well, maps the file to a unidentifiable name).

But what i can say is, it is not much of “added” protection. If you are leaving your system unlocked, and then fear someone will come and check files, then it can potentiall be of help, but if system is locked, and yiu use a secure lock (many systems have locks which either power machine off after certain attempts, or in case they crash (all programs eventually crash), then they also take system down(and this is good, as system is not left unlocked at any point)) or not powered, then normal disk encryyption is enough, even with against a state level adversary. almost no one is breaking encryptions.

the behaviour definitely checks out as american. I did not know this (not an american, and do not know much of american black history). Thanks

It takes more than top soil, but heart is in the right direction

then i know even less, what and how do they do?

Mandatory - snapshots are not backups - they are snapshots - if the underlying fuile system crashes or corrupts, or something else happens - snapshots will not work. Use them in conjunction with a robust backup, and use snapshots to fix a stupid rm -rf * like thing.

Don’t take what i say in the wrong way but what is listed does not really work any better than police. And before i go further, I also live in a place where police is lazy corrupt and racist to some extent, but first 2 are also a result of the fact they are not paid well.

• Teach everyone self defence - that is good in principle, but it is double edged sword - you are also possible training a future criminal, and it would most likely still be a net benefit

• organise your local communities and do community patrols (I don’t remember much about how it is done in wakanda, only saw the first movie and also a long time ago) - there are 2 possible ways - either we cycle through the population - then the quality of patrol would “vary” to put it gently, if we make a small subset of people who are nominated for the job - then you have made police again - they can still get corrupt

• Handle conflict mediation without a racist incarceration system that doesn’t work? - it is spoken in a self fulfulling prophecy way - it assumes (1) conflict mediation is always possible and (2) and you do not want a system which is racist. (2) is fine, but (1) is not easy. We do not a systematic framework (constitution) and people who understand it well. Not everyone can be put in burden of understanding the law (everyone should have basic understanding, but most people already do, but most real world crime is not that easy)

What is written, mostly works for a small community (of the size of a village (< 1000)). This may also justify living in smaller self sufficient communities, but this is not efficient (in sense of resource usage) - too many people would be constantly reinventing wheels. Also, the “quality” (read threat level) of criminal would vary from village to village, and if a criminal goes on village hopping rampage, these disconencted villages would be at a disdvantage, they can act like fediverse network - share the “post” with federating “communities” but if they are not federating with a community (either intentionally, or they have never come across yet) then the “post” would go unnoticed.