piefedderatedd

Is this where the source code is supposed to be ? https://github.com/ProtonMail/inbox-desktop

My guess is that a 2015 Macbook Air is probably not going to run a MacOS version that is still supported by Apple. That would be yet another reason to simply install Linux. Before you do so you can go for https://rescuezilla.com/ and do disk cloning to an image that you save to some storage like a USB disk. If you do the same after your installing and tweaked Linux installation, you can have the best of both worlds whenever you need it.

Nice that you are using FSearch :) I would put more excludes in it when you really want to index / In fact, apart from /home I would not index anything else than /etc /usr/share/doc and maybe /var/run/media or /media (depending on which Linux distribution you are using, for example Arch Linux will use /var/run/media and Ubuntu will use /media for removable devices).

Pacstall is for Ubuntu. I am not sure it can work well for Debian. Yes, sure, it is possible that some Ubuntu users see value in having AUR alike repositories to install from. Actually PPA for Ubuntu (PPA does not work well on Debian I’ve read) is kind of like AUR. The Personal Package Archives are uploaded by someone and provide newer versions of software, or provides software which is not in the main Ubuntu repositories. A good example of that is the PHP packages from Sury : https://deb.sury.org/

So the thing with Debian and any Debian based distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint is there is no big centralized software repo like the AUR.

There is https://pacstall.dev/ the AUR for Ubuntu. It has a Lemmy community https://lemmy.ml/c/pacstall And there is PPA for Ubuntu. With the Arch AUR anyone can just upload something, and it is up to you to check whether it is uploaded malware or not. Sure, you can check how many others upvoted an AUR package but that is still no guarantee it is safe.

If you like the idea of Qubes OS and Tails, maybe Whonix has something similar to offer : https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Features

For the OP : By careful with rsync. A trailing slash in a path name of a rsync command can make a huge difference with rsync. rsync is a fantastic tool for local and remote copying but mind your steps :)

Here, as root, I would prefer option 2 to be sure to not mess up permissions :

1 rsync -av /home/user/ /home2

2 rsync -av /home/user/ /home2/

Linux is usually very flexible. /home is just the standard, but you could configure for example your user A to use /home/a/ as home and configure your user B to use /home2/b/ which you have saved on a USB drive that you normally will not connect. You can check this for yourself by looking at the /etc/passwd file with a text editor. Your user C can e.g. have its home in /var/lib/my-fancy-home/c/

Years ago some Linux howtos or Linux distributions during their installation recommended to have several different partitions (I believe some of the BDSs like OpenBSD still offer such an option during installation). One advantage of that for /home is that you can have different mount options like noexec for preventing the execution of files inside your home directory which can be a good security measure. But I am not sure what the impact is for KDE and GNOME desktop files as launchers. These need to be executable files.

The dmesg command via either sudo or root can show a lot of that output. If your system did not have rsyslog or the syslog-ng packages installed any more then you’d only have systemd journal but you can, depending on your Linux distribution, install these logging applications. Back in the days when Linux users would not always use a graphical display manager, you could actually use shift and page up and page down to scroll through the kernel boot up messages.

If you had adb debugging already enabled there is an app to have the phone display on your desktop computer :

• https://github.com/srevinsaju/guiscrcpy No longer maintained, Flatpak, and Windows exe downloads

• https://github.com/barry-ran/QtScrcpy Windows/MacOS/Linux