You can upload potential threats to https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload

There are/were vulnerabilities that are zero click, but in this case I imagine they are just banking on people clicking it in this case. If you’re not familiar xvideos is a porn site.

I think you are probably fine as you were running windows defender. It might be a good idea to do a manual full scan and perhaps refresh your browser.

Purelymail. Really good and cheap it all you need is email. No extra cost to bring your own domain.

I meant in the context of the VPN. It slows down the network for everyone on one which is run by donation. For commercial companies, it incentivizes them to further lock down what users can do or what speeds they get.

You can get into private trackers and trust them. Not recommended, but some do.

Generally speaking, the copyright trolls only target public trackers and DHT. There have been some instances of them making way into TL and others. Your ISP could also identify torrenting on private trackers if they wanted to, even with mitigations. In my experience and from what I hear, most ISPs do not go to these lengths.

So, there a risk doing the above. Whether or not it’s worth it until you can afford a decent VPN is up to you.

Aside: Please do not use a free VPN for torrenting (or tor, for that matter). They are either like RiseUp and run on donations for people who really, really need them, or Proton which is commercial and specifically try to block or slow down the traffic. Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.

Reading through the info on the main page is concerning. It sounds like AI slop, or someone writing in that style. No developer writes like that about their project.

If it actually does all the things it says, great. Let me know.

For most of them you can get 720p on Linux with basic stereo audio.

It was possible to play Netflix 1080p on Chrome, but I think those days are gone.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a user-controlled Linux system ever being properly supported in the current DRM / copyright paradigm. There isn’t really a solution that satisfies the “rights holders”, and even if there were, there is little to no incentive to implement it.

Follow up: this is the calculator I use on Linux. I didn’t realize it had Windows builds available.

https://qalculate.github.io/

I would check out Lapce and CudaText. They are both solid editors. If you are comfortable in the terminal, then nvim as well, of course.

cudatext as a notepad replacement. It’s closer to a full featured text editor, but is very quick to startup with no extensions installed.

I have no idea about replacing paint, but irfanview for simple viewing, cropping, resizing, swapping formats, etc.

For calculator stuff I sometimes just open the Python REPL. If you know the language (even a little bit) it does all the things and more. Every time I try to use the Windows calculator it annoys me trying to find the right button and them accidently putting another operator instead of equal or vice versa.

Like many others, I switched to Jellyfin years ago. It is way, way better for me. It does what it says on the tin, sometimes more, but not less.

That is a good idea. Think I have done that before but it’s been so long I forgot. These days I just have one windows machine that runs on separate hardware. Keeps everything isolated.

Really any distro should be fine. It’s more a matter of getting the bootloader setup correctly.

Do note that, depending on the configuration, Windows will randomly overwrite stuff and mess up dual boot.

If you can for your situation, I would suggest running a Windows VM inside Linux to get certain tasks done.

I’ve had pretty good experience with this. For the most part installing with Lutris and pointing it to the correct exe works. Generally games will not run due to actual compatability issues.

The real pain point is trying to install mods on certain engines/games where the modders assume a windows environment. Sometimes they ship precompiled binaries that will only work under specific conditions and it’s hard to debug.

Yeah they basically block all non-residential IPs now. Has been a thing for a while, about since they started selling their dataset for ML training.

I clicked on this because I thought it was a mouse with an interesting design and microphone.

The one thing I wouldn’t agree with is ffmpeg.

It does not do one thing. It does a thousand things. The way different functionality works is inconsistent. In some cases you need to read the source code to understand how or why something is happening, as it’s not generated in the already expansive documentation. To me, it’s the antithesis of the UNIX philosophy.

That said, it’s a brilliant piece of software.

Maybe one of the Fedora Atomic distros would be up your alley? https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/

I don’t think NixOS meets the bill. You’d be learning and troubleshooting a whole new language just to setup your system and modify the core configuration.

Arch on desktop/laptop because I’m very comfortable with it, and I can set it up the way I like.

Debian on servers because it’s stable and nearly everything has a package available, or at least instructions for building.

Same as OP, but I’m not likely to change them out. I’ve tried a lot of distros over the years and this is what works best for me.

MakeMKV is non-free proprietary software. It just happens to be free while in beta, which it has been forever. There’s not a lot of great free software solutions that do the same thing, in fact it’s the main (or only) way people extract 4k BDs with the FEL intact.

There is not, but I will add one.