Protonvpn has a Killswitch: https://protonvpn.com/support/what-is-kill-switch

A kill switch is available to all Proton VPN users on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and iPadOS. Newer versions of Android now have built-in kill switch feature, as explained below.

Please note that our regular kill switch feature can’t protect you if you intentionally disconnect from a VPN server. However, the feature does protect you while switching servers with Proton VPN.

Our Windows and Linux apps now also feature an Advanced kill switch. In addition to protecting you from accidental VPN disconnections, this prevents you from accidentally using the internet without the VPN turned on, and it will persist when you shut down and restart your device. You will not be able to connect to the internet if you manually disconnect the VPN without also disabling Advanced kill switch.

or are you in a different scenario where that doesn’t work?

I’ve configured my router to set up a VPN connection to proton ( wireguard config ). I then decide which devices gonout without vpn and which with VPN. ( Default being with VPN ). If the wireguard tunnel happens to go down, the devices can’t surf the web.

RDBMS shine on getbyId queries. Queries where the value starts with should also work well. But queries where the word is in the middle of the value or column generally don’t perform well. Since it’s just for personal use that might not matter too much. If you’re querying on exact values it’ll go pretty smooth. If you’re querying on ‘deniro’ while the value contains ‘bob deniro’ and others it’ll be less performant. But it’s possible it works well enough for your case.

Elasticsearch is well known for text searches and being incredibly flexible with queries and filtering. https://www.elastic.co/

Manticore is one that’s been on my check-it-out for I don’t know how long. It looks great imo: https://manticoresearch.com/

Open search: https://opensearch.org/

Disclaimer: I haven’t really used any RDBMS systems extensively for years so it’s possible there are some that added support for full text searches being more performant.

Aleph also seems to be able to cross reference data between documents. I don’t think any of the ones listed above do this. But I also don’t know if this is part of your requirements.

Fully agree with this. I’m far from an expert either, but I saw a YouTube video once, which was depressing, showing how people can cheat nowadays. It just involves custom hardware that “pretends” to be the mouse/monitor/… It doesn’t even cost you a fortune.

Congratulations: your kernel anti cheat does fuck all as the cheat is running on the external hardware before forwarding the info to the pc.

Server-Side anti-cheat is imo the only solution. I have no idea how else to fix this issue. It all seems like a patch to try and make your client trustworthy. Something it inherently isn’t. I realize this is a lot easier said than done.

If just one or those passwords gets leaked you might find a lot of other ones get cracked as well.

It may not be sites that you care about. But using a password manager is a lot less effort and a lot safer than whatever technique the average Joe will come up with.

Any password that leaks which could indicate a potential system ( e.g.: sitename in lower/upper/leetspeak) makes the whole thing even more vulnerable.

Just use something. Bitwarden, vault warden, keepassxc, …

Knowing my social circle I’d recommend bitwarden. Even paying for it costs a measly 10$/year, while the free version is very usable in itself. And generating passphrases or 32char passwords will be a lot safer than whatever the hell they can come up with.

Just avoid the default browser ones, big tech and LastPass.

How do you expect a degree to be worth something if the only proof they have of you taking the exam fairly is “trust me bro”.

If you take an exam for AWS in a managed center you do it on their computer with a person watching you on a camera and listening to your desk with microphones.

If you take the same exam at home you’re monitored by a remote employee constantly looking at you. You have to show the room you’re in to prove there’s nobody there.

If you don’t want the latter you take the former.

From my personal point of view I feel the school should offer a way to do the exam in person and on a device provided by the school which they know is secure if you so desire as a student. Perhaps that’s not possible in the college you’re attending. Or it’s a fully remote course.

In any case. They school needs some guarentee that you aren’t cheating. Either by attending in person, or by having a “secure browser”.

Secure browser meaning a way for them to check you aren’t just searching the web/LLM/course material for the answer ( or an external party helping/doing the exam for you ).

Unfortunately none of that is possible without looking at your room, listening to the environment you’re working in and have you work in a browser they know isn’t tampered with and isn’t being minimized/left unfocused to do something else.

If you’re worried about what happens with the recording post exam you’re better off asking them rather than assuming they use it for whatever. They likely have to store it for a certain amount of time before it’s deleted.

I don’t know about that specific browser. But there is something similar in use in schools here. Basically they know when you’re leaving the browser window ( e.g.: to open a text file or a different browser ). Other features probably are that they can monitor you through your webcam and/or listen to your audio as you are making the test. The reason is so you don’t have somebody under your desk reading you the answers. Or you don’t have your course book open while making the exam.

The school could honestly provide the alternative to go make the tests in the school itself under supervision on paper or on a school device.

It’s a secure anti-cheating browser, not a secure privacy/anonimity/hardened browser.

It’s not meant for day-to-day use. Only for making the exams.

You can always get a secondary cheapo device purely for the exams ( or an old laptop).

Apparently they looked at it and had issues and bugs with arch which could not be fixed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1lj9oqw/comment/mzkxkz2

Would I be in this situation if I took fedora, a distro that has withstood the test of time? Yes.

Bazzite being fairly new is completely besides the point.

Bazzite and the rest of universal Blue would rather call them a custom install of Fedora rather than a distro IIRC.

Bazzite shutting down would be tragic ( for me ). I’ve been quite happy with it. Slowly convincing people to switch. Bazzite was also a relatively low step compared to fixing them a standard distro as all the stuff they want/need is already readily available.

Telling people I decided to promote another distro because the old one stopped is only going to make me have to restart my efforts with an additional hurdle ( how do you know this one won’t stop ).

I tried a few distros. But I didn’t like garuda very much, nobara was okay’ish. Bazzite really clicked for some reason, despite needing a bit of getting used to.

I’d hate to go distro hunting again. Or try and update cpu schedulers and not brick the whole system.

You’d expect governments to sue over this. Instead they’ll queue up to buy the data

Note about the proton thing. The game will start but not let you start any competitive game ( unsure about workshop/casual) but it does start.

I tried this when I had issues with cs2 and my Nvidia card. I switched back to the native one because I couldn’t play the proton version.

So i don’t think you’ll get banned for it, it just won’t work. Except if you try to shoehorn/hack the proton version to be able to join competitive games. But that’s a whole other reason to get banned.

Not having any issues anymore since I switched to team red. Though sadly that doesn’t help your case :(.

I’d keep an eye out on the GitHub repo. It’s where I found an issue w.r.t. my Nvidia card at the time and once they found the issue and fixed it it got patched in quite fast.

And using a simple system means that once somebody figures out the system, all your passwords become compromised potentially.

Thanks!

Any idea why some games are not recommended and others are “informational”?

I can’t seem to find an explanation on the informational.

• Microsoft recall.
• Ads in software you paid for.
• Inability to use local accounts ( they’re closing the workarounds ) or dark patterns to switch you to one if you do have a local one
• bit locker forking you over

Edit: shoving AI down your throat

And this all besides all the other already present points to shit on Microsoft like the data collection

Maybe one of these is interesting? I have no actual experience with them though:

https://actualbudget.org/

https://github.com/DumbWareio/DumbBudget

https://maybefinance.com/

https://paisa.fyi/

They should all be self-hostable.

Edit: I don’t know of these all match your criteria. Maybe finance looks pretty Sleek imho. I just dread the thought of exporting my transactions and importing them because my bank is forking horrible w.r.t. integrations.

And logging in every time to do a CSV export is just annoying.

Edit 2: formatting

Ah nuts. Just as I switched back to Linux on my new rig. ( Dabbled one win11 for a month, but what a forking shirtshow )

Huh TIL.

I never considered trying to install a package from a local file through apt, but always dpkg. End result is the same of course. The web suggests dpkg rather than apt as well ( or at least the pages I ended up on ).

I uninstalled it after the whole security debacle discussion on GitHub. But the browser was quite enjoyable to use indeed.

Huh. Didn’t even know about this. Maybe I’ll browse their episode list to see if there are some episodes that are interesting.