I agree with your general statement, but in theory since all ChatGPT does is regurgitate information back and a lot of chess is memorization of historical games and types, it might actually perform well. No, it can’t think, but it can remember everything so at some point that might tip the results in it’s favor.

Don’t worry, Microsoft is bringing semantic search to Windows too. That way you can have the worst of both worlds.

Yeah, I’m already running opnsense on an old PC with an added network card. Then I use Unbound DNS with various blacklist filters on my outbound traffic.

It honestly seems good enough because I monitored it for a while when I set it up. But I don’t monitor it continually and I don’t have specific blocks that I set up myself, just the published blacklists. If something new is phoning home I’d be unaware until I check it, which is what I like about your setup.

Smart. Right now I just rely on various blacklists that seem to block everything I need to. I might do something like this at some point though to be sure.

This was my thought too. Seems easiest to me to DNS block on the firewall side (and be network wide).

I would highly recommend this as I did something similar. I ran Linux on an older machine separate from my main machine. I did so for about 10 months. Plus I built out a gaming machine for somebody and set up another old machine as a media center, both with Linux.

I finally made the 100% switch just a few months ago. I bought a new M.2 drive and swapped out just like you are planning. I really needed to make sure I had no hitches for work purposes. I haven’t even considered swapping back (though in full transparency I have Windows running on a VM for some apps that I can’t get in Linux)

As somebody who has in recent years changed habits like this, I agree with you. But its a harsh change at first.

Turning off most notifications is a key step. It changes your mentality from reaction to your device to a proactive action at a chosen time. It’s a huge shift and well worth it.

Then I started turning my services off at times. No, I don’t need to take a call while driving or check messages in the store. That stuff can wait.

My overall logic is that I don’t need to make myself available to any and everyone at any and every time.

Sure, sometimes it bites me in the butt as far as convenience, however my quality of life has improved overall. I am very protective of my time and mental attention now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I highly recommend taking small measures to test the waters. Then increase as you acclimate to it.

I like that idea bit it’ll never fly. That software is an asset. A bankrupt company needs every asset to be sold to cover as much percentage of their debt to their vendors as possible. I’ve been in a company that went bankrupt and I’ve been the vendor of a company that went bankrupt. Being the vendor was the harder experience.

I’m fully in support of LibreOffice and the fact that it can do a lot for free. However it is far from an enterprise product.

I’m still waiting for anybody to make a true competitor to Excel. There’s some decrnt spreadsheet software but there’s really no comparison to the functionality of Excel. Even Google sheets is a distant second.

My point is, when there are power users involved LibreOffice just won’t cut it.