> You know that moment when you’re chatting with a friend about needing new sneakers and then like magic, every app you open is suddenly plastered with shoe ads?
It’s like having a guest room in your house. The app can visit, but it doesn’t get to rearrange your furniture or go through your mail.
Yep. I came here to say "Well hi there chatgpt, I recognise your writing style anywhere &emdash; it's like a bad metaphor that hasn't been thought out. The LLM can predict likely text but that's not the same as making sense."
Having tested dozens of privacy focused devices over the years, from GrapheneOS phones to Purism’s Librem 5. I can tell you that hardware based privacy switches are the gold standard.
You've tested "dozens" of privacy-focused phones, but you're writing about Jolla as if they're brand new and haven't been around for a decade? How did you miss Jolla until 2026?
yeah, fair. There is a big learning curve for an entire desktop environment. And that's before you start getting into trying to do super-custom things and replicate exactly what you had on windows.
I've always held that switching to Linux is hardest for the most technical people, because you know how to do everything already - figuring out how to do X in Linux might take you literally hours, or you can just reboot into windows, where you know how to do it and it will take 5 minutes. It's hard to make that investment in learning the new stuff when you just want to get stuff done.
(But IMHO it's well worth it - For >15 years I've always been appalled every time I've used windows about how inflexible and unconfigurable it is. There's a thousand things that I've been doing forever that I'm just so used to, e.g the ability to make any window always on top, or to use my mouse wheel to roll them up so that only the titlebar shows. There's lots of things like that that I use every day without thinking about it, and the lack of those things makes windows extremely frustrating for me)
> I'll also create a feature request for resizing/stacking of rows.
That's the spirit! Please do file feature requests with the docks that you think might be close to what you want. A lot of foss projects are pretty receptive to feature requests.
Keep in mind that in the foss world you're not a customer - the people doing the work will be donating their free time to build a feature you're asking for, so please be nice and polite to them - the worst thing you can do on a feature request is have an entitled tone, or insinuate that their software is crap because it doesn't quite do what you want :)
Someone else suggested that adding 2 xfce panels might accomplish something pretty close to what you're after. I had a bit of a play around and agree with that. I didn't replicate your request exactly (because my panel is very different and I didn't want to break my setup too much) but depending on where your priorities lie I think you could probably get something pretty close.
Options that are similar:
a) If you really want the 'start menu' button to span both rows, use a single panel and set "row size" to e.g 48px and "number of rows" to 2. The con of this method is that the task list (list of programs) will span both rows, which is not what you have.
b) If you want to replicate your preferred setup more closely, you might not be able to have the 'start menu' button span both rows. To accomplish this I would add 2 panels of e.g 24px and put them both at the bottom of the screen. In one you'll have the task list and in another you'll have icons.
The media player controls might be an issue in xfce. I'm not sure if anything like that exists. However you definitely can have a systray icon for your media player which pops up media controls when you click on it.
There are other docks with more customisable widgets that will give you media controls like those, but I can't really make a solid recommendation for you unfortunately. The one I used to use was called cairo-dock, but I think that might be dead. Before that I used one called avant-window-navigator. There's also a couple of others that I'm aware of, e.g tint2 and wbar.
I'd be a little bit surprised if there are zero docks out there that can do what you want. The thing is you might have to try screwing around with the config for 20 different ones if you insist on replicating that layout exactly :/
I think that this is probably the most realistic / sensible suggestion here if you want to preserve digital data for as long as possible.
(and assuming you don't have millions of dollars handy to put towards this goal - I could probably build you something pretty OK, but the cost might get into tens of millions or more depending on how many nines you want on that "chance of it existing in 100 years" figure)
I also agree with others who say "print out multiple redundant copies and put them in filing cabinets and/or bank vaults". This is probably the most reliable way to have a high probability of it lasting that long without spending a lot.
The core issue that you're going to have is that it's impossible to predict whether any institution you might trust to hold on to the data will still exist in 100 years. Having multiple copies on multiple redundant hosts gives you a higher chance, but it's still not possible to say what that chance is. And that's before we start thinking about things like climate change and the water wars everyone loves to predict.
I'm in the top 5% of all seti@home contributors. I'm in the top 2000 overall and I'm in the top 50 in Australia. According to boincstats I Accumulated more credit than 99.90166% of all SETI@Home Users - 28.91 quintillion floating-point operations. I think that's a lot.
I was sad when seti@home shut down. My CPU fans were not.
May I suggest Xephyr, which will give you the X11 sandboxing that wayland people like to claim is impossible under X, using tech that's been around for about 20 years.
And you won't even need to replace your entire software stack with incompatible beta-quality software.
2. Being able to switch it back on if I need to access a network for some reason.
(not that you're wrong about leaving it at home being a good option)