I've been messing around on PC since the Counterstrike days in highschool. For gaming i never owned a console, was always into custom PC. I always enjoy learning new things regarding research, new hardware.
On GAW I have learned how to archive, meme, scrutinize more strictly and find better primary sources among many other things. I would like to learn more from my brethren here.
I will share a few. Keyboard shortcut basics:
https://prabidhi.info/en/keyboard-computer-shortcut-keys/
Clear cache/cookies manually:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/search?query=clear%20cache
We are all thirsty for knowledge!
If you're coming from Windows like most would be. The best I can possibly recommend is Mint Linux. Built off of Ubuntu, which is a very widely used flavor of Linux, so help docs are easy to find.
Mint Linux adds a bunch of "Windows like" features. A "start menu", similar UI and interface and relatively familiar windows. EDIT: I hate googtube as much as the next guy, but this is a pretty fantastic "mint linux getting started" guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUC9RbrS0q0
For a personal use, daily driver stay away from Kali Linux and Fedora and others unless you already have extensive experience in something else.
Also, if you really want to control your data even more, look into buying a Raspberry PI and installing Pihole. Once on your network, you can block adds and tracking links on a network wide basis. Meaning, when my browser or phone tries to ping totallynottracking.fedbois.gov ...the request gets dropped into a 0.0.0.0 IP address. Make sure you know how to access the admin panel and temporarily disable it, I find sometimes I am blocking "too much" which causes some sites to break. The docs and the UI have extensive ways on how to troubleshoot issues as they arise.
Additionally, stay away from store bought NAS devices. (Network attached storage) alot of the OS's on them are compromised or have spyware built in (pi hole cal alleviate some of that). But if you need extensive storage at home for pics, videos, whatever.,,,just build your own either with w/ a RPi or your own board and cpu build.
Most antivirus software is not really worth your money or is spying on you. I've been in IT in gov and civ, and the only way antivirus is beneficial is to stop users from making a stupid mistake and clicking on things they shouldn't. And think for a second...do you trust whomever is making the virus definitions that the blockers are trying to block? A lot of people here or PDW that post "the site is blocked now at work/the store/public place!!" well, the site is blocked because they have some kind of antivirus and the powers that define what is and isn't "malicious" updated the definition to include things you enjoy. So why use them? Educate your self on what to not click on, critically think about things online before you do them and you'll be better off.
What I don't see talked about enough is Password management. Lastpass is okay, but they are hosted in the cloud and thus vulnerable to hacks (there was a recent one). If you have the technical ablity, get BitWarden set up and going. Just as cheap, but open sourced and works alot better. you can also host your "vault" (encrypted password store) on your own servers should you have them. But do NOT give your passwords to your browser, and EVERY PASSWORD if at all possible should be randomly generated, long, and with special chars. If you have to have a "easy to remember" password, don't use any words you can find in the dictionary, make up your own words, and know that to a computer "H3ll0" is basically the same as "Hello" your l33t speak means nothing to a password cracker.
VPNs are kind of a tough topic, because they all have trade offs. I use express VPN for almost all "day to day" activity. I have other ways for the serious stuff.
Lastly, is your router spying on you? probably. If your router can handle it, look into openWRT. It's a router firmware that's open sourced and very powerful. Just really watch your steps or you can brick the thing. It's very easy to do if you have a compatible model and go slow. If you can afford it, buy a new router to do it on.
You can also use Pihole as a router and then but external wifi access points (ubiquity is expensive but awesome, good prices on lightly used enterprise gear online.)
Happy to answer any questions or clarify the above. Tried to just give people ways to get started doing SOMETHING to help their digital footprint.
Hey thank you very much for posting this info!
Haven't used any of the Linux distros other than Ubuntu that people have suggested on here but I've used Mint like 8 or so years ago.
Right now I'm on Fedora and it's good so far. Yeah sometimes unstable but that's what I get for using an OS that's constantly updating all the time. Fedora 37 seems to have fixed most of the issues I was having in Fedora 35 and I'm a late adopter -- I don't always upgrade to the latest version, but for this one I had to because I was actually having stability issues with 35.
I have yet to install PiHole because my router keeps changing the IP addresses every time I set PiHole up so maybe I'm doing it wrong but then again, I'm using a shitty router, despite it being "top of the line" back then. It's not even compatible with OpenWRT... :(
Antivirus is one of the many reasons why I switched over to Linux because it's bloatware and slows your computer down due to it constantly scanning for everything you do online as well as offline.
Yeah Ubiquity looks nice and all but very expensive. I was also looking into using pfSense but I don't have what this video recommended getting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzSsX4T4WQ
It looks like I may have to drop ~$800 to get everything what I need to use pfSense to manage my network...?
As for VPNs, I still haven't found one as I'm not sure which one is the best one out there and reasonable priced as well. Not sure about ExpressVPN, MullVad, BearShare or something like that. Just saw some people recommend SurfShark (At first I thought they were talking about WireShark lol). Anyways, I'd like to use a VPN service sometimes soon but it's hard to decide on which one, like you said, as they all have trade-offs.
For me, I avoid all password managers. Don't 100% trust them completely and I have complicated passwords anyways.
Anyways good info here. Thanks for sharing!
Fedora is nice, but I find Debian much more stable. Then again, Debian isn't exactly cutting edge, with updated, non-security packages being added later than other distros.
Yeah I just like to have some stuff now rather than waiting later but when I upgraded to 35, I saw what a lot of people were complaining about instability. Decided to finally upgrade to 37 and it's now mostly stable.
Haven't really used Debian but I've used Ubuntu so I got a good idea of how Debian can do and I'm sure it's lots better than Ubuntu. But I like Red Hat/Fedora because I used it first when I was in college, majoring in I.T. and loved it since.
For you Pi hole issue, you should be able to set a static IP either in the pihole or in the router.
Routers, (pfsense would be a router as well) use something called DHCP to assign IP addresses if some device comes to the router and says "gimmie IP" . Devices can also say "this is my IP I want, can I have it?" I used to do everything on the device (so setting a static IP on pi hole in your instance). but somewhere around 10 different devices it got too hard to manage so I moved everything to the router(I have a lot of servers on my network, this isn't typical). Look for a "DHCP" setting in your router, or sometimes in the advanced setting under "local network" or "LAN".
Thing about Pfsense if you can install it on quite a few things. Ideally you need at least 2 ports (WAN and LAN) but really cool setups have more ports (for multiple LAN ports). I personally buy most of my hardware off of ebay, cause I don't care about cosmetic damage from use. I have seen them on old enterprise firewalls (Watchguard XTM series, needs some work to flash, but man are they cool!), raspberry pis, or even an old PC tower, and then add on a network PCIE card. If I was in your boat and just trying to get started I'd look on Ebay or locally for a used HP or Dell workstation, make sure the motherboard and CPU can handle an external Ethernet card, and start there.
I prefer express VPN personally. Enough podcasters I listen to have a code from them, and I like the ease of setup on linux machines (uses openVPN spec so it's easy)
Yeah I'm in I.T. so I'm familiar with how DHCP distribute IP addresses and setting static IPs.
The thing is, when I set up the static IP for my PiHole, the LAN IP changed to a number up above the former one, i.e. 192.168.0.1 got changed to 192.168.0.2. I didn't change that, the router changed it by itself.
I followed this guy's explanation on how to set PiHole but I know he's using a Ubiquity router so I managed to get all what I needed to set up per his instructions but at the end, the PiHole is listening and scanning but because my router and the Pi-Hole are on two different networks (192.168.0.1 for PiHole and 192.168.0.2 for my router) so nothing is coming through the PiHole and I lost internet connectivity on my router.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X6KYN1cQ1Y
Had to reset router because I couldn't even get into the router's interface (don't know what it got changed to because I can see it by its IP address but whenever I try to get in the web interface via its IP address, it keeps giving me an error). Did some changing and all, but it took up pretty much all night for me and my child had to be in school (remote learning) and I had to have the router back in working order so my child can attend class via zoom.
Since then, I've been busy but yeah I'll try to look around and read some more on PiHole to see what I did wrong.
I'll look at eBay again. Last time I went hunting on eBay was when I was trying to find a working Cisco 2950 router so I can set up a home lab but there weren't any at the time or they were selling at a crazy price, like $1,000 for one when I saw it going for around $50 but got quickly sold.
Thanks for the info!