imagine KDE would actually run well as it doesn’t need all the bells it offers and is actually a well written performant DE.

RAM usages on a 8GB system, 4 hours after boot.

• plasmashell: 312 MB
• kwin_wayland: 165 MB
• akonadi_* summed: ~2 GB
• kded5: 130 MB
• kalendarac: 119 MB
• xdg-desktop-portal-kde: 107 MB
• kwallet5: 103 MB (unused)
• kaccess: 103 MB
• kiod5: 103 MB
• polkit-kde-auth: 101 MB
• X, Xwayland combined: 202 MB
• org_kde_powerdevil: 48,5 MB
• kactivitymanagerd: 40 MB
• startplasma-wayland: 39 MB

There’s also various other things too. Now obviously, looking at the total used counter, these cannot be just summed up, there must be some overlap through shared libraries and such, because if I close my web browser and all I have open is Konsole, total memory usage drops to 2,35GB. 3rd party programs, like opensnitch and syncthing, only contribute 400 MB (opensnitch is surprisingly fat, but it’s UI is not efficient with the CPU either), so the system itself needs around 1,9 GB, but that’s a lot when all you have is 2 GB RAM.
Then, my system uses an additional 2 GB for cache purposes. Such an old system will probably have an older, much slower storage (unless upgraded, fortunately that’s often easy), and won’t have nearly any capacity to keep a filesystem cache.

I’m only using a single widget on the desktop to periodically run a command and display it’s results. Other than that, the taskbar panel has the default widgets.

I think you can disable most of the toolbars in the main screen if it helps.
You can do that in the “Docks” menu in the topmost bar, unticking any you don’t need.
I think you can freely hide these, maybe more: stats, audio mixer, scene transitions, sources (after you have set up your capture source), scenes.

Then if it’s still a lot, you can untick these in the View menu besides Docks: scene/source list buttons, source toolbar, status bar.

At that point you only have the controls dock, the preview, and the thin top bar.
Don’t forget to reenable the sources dock and the audio mixer if you want to change those settings, though.

What do you mean by bloated? Isn’t it 2 clicks at most after the one time next-next-finish setup?

Thanks! :)

Yeah you’re right, I even needed to use my distro’s live system (which is also the installer) a few times to reinstall grub after something overrode it, so that too.

What’s your use case for the gparted system, though? Systemrescue also contains gparted, and it also has a better quality environment (easier to switch keyboard layout, I think correct display resolution from the start, fewer questions on startup)

I can’t tell you what I would do for a remindme bot now to know to check back later

Systemrescue is a pretty fine live system for such tasks. It’s mostly centered around data recovery, and recovering a fucked up distro by having firefox, keepass and such. It starts in a text terminal, but it only takes a startx to start a graphical environment.

It’s certainly possible, if not else than with the use of FUSE. But I did not see such a project yet that can do this.

It’s the equivalent of idiots posting that wall of text on Facebook a decade or so ago saying they don’t give Facebook permission to use their pictures, posts…etc.

I think it’s quite different. On facebook, you have accepted a ToS telling that facebook now owns that data. Also, that “movement” was against facebook, the platform itself.
Here you haven’t accepted a ToS that wants to use your submissions for whatever they please (or did you?), and also, this movement is against outside parties, not the platform provider.

Did they talk about what features and improvements are planned?

If they do that, nearly no one will find it, though. Are there larger non-federating servers?

I think the problem with this approach - read: the reason I don’t do this - is that you’re blocking communities from ever appearing again, and if your interests change, you still won’t see them. I think this is more likely to result in creating an echo chamber.
What I do is subscribe to communities that I found interesting, and then scroll all once in a while to see if there’s something else I like

I’m mostly reading my subscribed feed, and sometimes switch to all and if I find an interesting community, I subscribe to it too. The only communities I have blocked are either porn related or operating in a foreign language, which I see even though havening set my language preferences.

I don’t consider myself to have a lot of tech knowledge. I’m not working in the field, and there’s lots of things I want to do better than now.

If you don’t yet know about what is systemd and how does it work, it’s fine. The documentation of the unit files is a bit more complicated than warranted, like, it’s structure is not that readable, but the syncthing documentation helps in what you need to do

Attempts to remove datamining, disallowed from installing microsoft proprietary extensions.

but within five seconds of reading syncthing’s install instructions even I basically just said, “yeah…no.”

Install instructions: download tarball, unpack, run. Done.

Did I miss something?
Autostart at system startup can be done with the basic utilities of the OS.
Windows: scheduled tasks. Systemd/Linux: they have a basic service file that you just have to drop in the right folder, and run 2 commands (start, enable).
Piece of cake. Not telling this because I already know how these work, but because as I remember, these steps are documented.

Telegram just claims to be private, but they can’t prove it with technical means, instead they rely on the narrative that they are not data brokers. All the while they have strong connection with suspicious parties like the UAE, and from time to time publish weird announcements like the tucker carlson interview that is also said to have contained a far right dogwhistle

If you run it on a container, it should be enough to just make a copy of the set up volumes, right? (with permissions and all the metadata kept of course)

Definitely ddrescue. Unlike traditional dd, it can deal with failing drives, it’s operation is resumable, and has some other features that’s helpful. I would recommend using it even if your drive is fine.
What it produces is a byte for byte copy just like dd.

If you want to invent and maintain your wheel then go ahead… but I think we have better things to do than maintaining half the code of an operating system.

Udisksctl has a variety of relevant features, and it works good, kind of.