I planned on letting them build cheap, old desktops in groups so they are not as afraid of opening their devices (I find this to teach a different relationship to your devices in general) and so they don’t inherently see computers as a black box.
Thank you for your recommendations!
Especially the “don’t be afraid to break and how to troubleshoot” part seem very important to me, I will definitely do that. Thank you!
Yeah, I will generally do a lot of “how to use the web correctly”, from basic privacy stuff (no, you don’t have to have something to hide; why care; no, it’s not too late…), ad blocking, using search engines correctly, evaluating sources etc.
I will have to teach some explicit security consciousness as well, basic and maybe not so basic stuff, maybe even spice it up a notch and do an intro to opsec to interest people (probably not gonna fit for time reasons, but will do basic security in any case)?
Yeah, I will definitely start with scripting first, although I think Python scripting or similar is better for getting used to actual programming/loops and variables are just better and more intuitive than in scripting languages.
I actually only have programming on the list because I felt like I somehow needed to teach it, which is definitely true, but not at the very beginning.
You’re absolutely correct about the PATH thing, I think I should teach about how filesystems work in general (like, most people use devices that only have “apps” and have never used a file system/directory structure)
I, too, don’t love the use of AWS/Cloudflare, while I get that you can simply replace AWS S3 with something else for backups, this server setup is innately based on using Cloudflare.
I like being minimalist about being a minimalist both in terms of humor and showing consistent goals.
Wikipedia will keep running, even if you don’t donate. The Wikimedia foundation (which runs Wikipedia) gets a lot of donations and fund a ton of other stuff apart from Wikipedia, so you’re donation will rather have a chance to decide if these keep running.
(In reply to the post) Actually, I’ve found my immutable distro of choice (Silverblue) to be a lot of fun to tinker in (not with), but you just have to accept that tinkering does work a bit different here, with toolbox/containers instead of your actual host system to install most stuff you want to try etc. on
Cool application, thanks for sharing
There was a race to the bottom for SSD prices that ended roughly in July 2023, leading to losses with manufacturers having to sell under production cost; this is why NAND/SSD prices increased since then and will probably only slowly start to decrease at the end of 2024. At the same time, there is very interesting technology in the making, I just read about SSDs with up to 1000 storage layers coming in the next few years. Same goes for HDDs, although less so and prices seem more predictable there; my focus for the next few years would be completely new storage methods competing with HDDs/SSDs, but I don’t think any of this will reach consumer markets at competitive prices until 2028. My prediction: HDDs will decrease like in the past years, SSDs will start really decreasing in price with the start of 2025 and it will take a few years for completely new storage methods to arrive.
Have you tried OnlyOffice? Their main selling point is compatibility with all of the Microsoft Office formats, so maybe that would suit your use case.
Translating can also be a huge help and often times there are very intuitive web interfaces for this
Normally I don’t really appreciate hosting suggestions as most of them are pretty similar, but this looks really interesting and I’ll definitely take a look at them.
I’m with you with (distribution) choice (that’s definitely stressful, especially when you aren’t used to actually having to choose what kind of computing experience you want) but driver/program distribution on Linux is less painful/easier than on Windows on average. If your hardware happens to be supported, everything should work out of the box without the need to install drivers; the biggest problem for more or less average users would be having to install Nvidia drivers if they have a Nvidia GPU. Installing software is generally as easy as opening your distribution’s software store, searching what you need and hitting the install button.
Logseq, it’s a lot like Obsidian as it also has knowledge graphs, tags, is markdown-based and self-hostable but, in contrast to Obsidian, it’s fully open source
I’m absolutely with you on the typing, the problem is (as far as I’m concerned) that learning typing takes a ton of time that I don’t want to spend just on that, so I’ll instead provide them with resources on how to improve typing skills if they want to.