If you can accept 11” the old intel macbook airs are what you’re asking for.

They’re in the free - $50 price range now.

Some distributions have that. Some have it built into the tools like arch. For some you just boot your installation media and run only the “install bootloader” step.

About the only universal way is to boot usb, pivot-root or chroot to switch to the installed system you wanna run and do grub-install, although you need to understand a few things about your system to not make errors.

Once you pick something to stick with, go ahead and look up its process. Think of it like practicing changing a tire in the grocery store parking lot before you actually need to do it on the side of the road.

Yeah wouldn’t it be nice…

But the most considerate thing for the user is to help them use what they want to use. There’s also a real benefit to keeping ahold of that windows because people often have their own ways of doing things and it may be more expedient to boot back into 10 than to figure out how to complete some task in Linux.

I was gonna say pit vipers but they’re American.

You should get some vipes anyway, they make a safety rated ballistic pair.

Once I had a pair bought from someone on eBay break on me and they just wanted to confirm there was a joke written on the frame before sending a replacement pair for free. I think I had to pay shipping or something but standing behind an eBay purchase from a third party is cool.

Learn cacti

If the op has their information in emails and doesn’t want to move it somewhere else then pgp is a good way to at least secure those emails a little.

I don’t think it’s a panacea, but as methods of encrypting email go it’s widely supported enough that a person whose private information is stored in email will be able to figure something out.

How much does torque come into play when you’re carrying your bike upstairs?

It seems like I’m not being clear. The goal is to get 100% on to encrypted chat.

Right now in America, about sixty percent of the phones are running ios. ios has imessage by default. The application which those people use to do imessage is called messages (very unconfusing!) and also does texts. When you’re using imessage in messages the text bubbles are blue, rcs and sms are green. Imessage is an encrypted chat.

If a person running android wants to use imessage they need to bridge it to their phone from a mac (messages and imessage are available on mac) using the bluebubbles application.

So three out of five of the people you know are already using encrypted chat. If you, the op, can get on their level then you only have to convince the other two to use some other chat thing that they can do. Maybe signal or something.

So the cost of running a mac computer as a bridge so you can use imessage through the bluebubbles android app is for you, the op, to get on the encrypted chat application those three out of five people are already on. You’d still need to use xmpp or something for everyone else but now you only need to worry about two out of five people.

I’m pretty poor and a hundred bucks isn’t a terrible price to pay for being sixty percent there. If I could have done that with pgp back in the day (when a hundred bucks was worth something!) I would have jumped at the chance.

Just avoiding having to explain to people that email was transmitted in plaintext and what that meant and not either have to talk them down from taking a pickaxe to their computer or convince them that it doesn’t matter that they have nothing to hide would have been worth it back then.

It’s also a completely hypothetical cost that assumes you don’t just stumble into an old mac and won’t trade your phone in for one running ios to save that cash.

What specific data?

You can’t keep information you put on their platform or your habits of use on that platform “safe” from it.

That will* work.

*actually figure out what you’re trying to maintain privacy from and set up your icloud account appropriately.

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with you, my comment was intended to add the context that might help English readers understand how the natural conclusion they would reach after learning that the app name directly translates to “little red book” isn’t necessarily true.

For me, as an American English speaker the natural conclusion would be that it’s an application designed by maoists in order to discuss Maoism when it’s actually designed for integrated ecommerce.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/(your drive)

You can do status=progress if you want like someone else posted and if you pick a block size go with either the physical block size reported by the disk in smartcontrol or some multiple of it that coincides with a big even division of your controllers memory. The drives physical block size will be “easy” for the drive, bigger blocks are faster.

People saying physical destruction are operating in a different world than you and people saying urandom or shred are operating off old (>30 years) information. The same technology that makes ssds unrecoverable black boxes was originally developed and deployed in spinning drives to eek out speed gains because the disk itself can be expected to know better than the operating system where to put shit and makes techniques (which were postulated but never actually implemented successfully in the wild) to recover overwritten data infeasible.

Alternately just reformat it and don’t worry. No one doing drive rmas cares about your data. They’re already on the razors edge with feedback and customer trust, you think they’re gonna burn their above board bread and butter to run a harvesting operation for a few bucks on the side? That’s usually the purview of your local pc repair shop…