Also, in Windows when you finally do run the program it just hangs with “Not responding”.

This may be due to manufacturers locking their machines down with Secure Boot and only installing the keys that allow it to boot Windows. It’s not something that could be fixed by the makers of the Linux install disk. They’d need to persuade the hardware manufacturer to preinstall their key.

I install Linux on many machines each year, and I can’t even remember the last time I had a problematic installation. Your experience sounds quite unusual. Are you using some obscure distro?

You could use any trustworthy sync service with automatic camera uploads, but they will all wait until the video has finished recording before uploading it. Ideally there would be an app that streams live to a remote server that’s recording. There used to be. A sync service might be second best though.

Do any dash cams stream to the cloud or a self-hosted server? If the police spot the dashcam they may just delete the footage.

You need something that streams to a secure server, so the police can’t just delete the video.

There are tarpits like Nepenthes but they use up your CPU resources and I imagine it would be pretty easy to update a scraper to recognize these generated pages, since they’re all structurally similar.

It’s the first rolling distro I have tried, and I’ve been running it for about 3 years now without any real problems. I think maybe twice there have been updates that cause issues, out of hundreds of updates per week. It’s surprisingly solid, and everything’s up to date.

Not everyone would want hundreds of updates per week of course, but it’s up to the user to decide how often to install updates. Unlike Windows, the updates don’t intrude, and they are fast.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed helps because you can create a btrfs snapshot at any moment and then roll back to it if you get in trouble. And it does this automatically whenever you update the packages.

The other type I see is people who complain that Linux isn’t usable, and it gradually turns out that the only thing they’d consider usable is an OS exactly like Windows.

Then I agree. There’s no safe place to hide from fascists. You have to disrupt and fight them.

Is that supposed to be an argument against protesting?

Windows feels less stable today than it has been for a long time. I spend so long, on every Windows computer, waiting for windows that have turned white and say “not responding” in the title bar. I use Linux for almost everything, partly out of principle, but largely because the Windows experience is so slow and frustrating these days. For the most part, the friendlier Linux distros do a better job of just working.

If it’s any consolation, my Dell XPS 13 with Windows 11 and a healthy battery gets about 40 minutes’ battery life and throttles due to heat when plugged in. It’s quite useless. Dell cares more about them looking slick than being actually useful. I also have an older XPS 13 with Tumbleweed and it runs cooler and lasts a bit longer, though battery life is still nothing special.

Not all of these mini PCs have a wifi card in them even if they have the antennas for it. You might start by opening it to check whether the wifi antennas are connected, or whether you need to add a WiFi card.

I think OPNsense would do what you’re looking for. I use it on a mini PC as my router, and it’s great, but I have not used it for WiFi (I run a separate access point). The limitation is WiFi hardware support. You will need to make sure your mini PC’s WiFi card has a driver in FreeBSD. Intel hardware is often a better bet than Realtek etc.

https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/interface_wireless_internal.html

Is that like the usual blockchains where every computer has to store a complete copy? That would get huge with the Internet Archive.

There are distributed filesystems with redundancy, but the last time I tried something like that, it was extremely slow for both reading and writing. For an offline archive it might be feasible, but you’d have to do a lot of redundancy and error correction to be sure you didn’t lose chunks. Plus, the Internet Archive is so big that even with the data distributed, each participant might have to store a prohibitively large amount.

Linux as your main OS with a Windows VM for work is a pretty decent arrangement. Windows works without activation so you don’t have to pay MS anything.

They do have categories, via the menu at the top:

https://openalternative.co/categories