Is there an old AARCH64 laptop (sub-$100, preferably closer to $50) that can be picked up for a song for playing around with crap like this?

From what I can tell, there’s a lot of crappy old ARM Chromebooks; I wonder if they perform sufficiently faster than an RPi and work well enough with a Linux distro to mess with them. I do wonder, though, if any Windows-on-ARM ones are old enough to also be cheap used (and not be some sort of Windows RT terror or something).

Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.

Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.

As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.

If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.

If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.

If you don’t like bog standard Debian, you might really like Debian Testing.

It allows you to get decently new packages; I’d say typical lag is one week to a couple months depending on the popularity and/or complexity of the project.

I’ve been using it on my desktop for over three years just fine. It’s been quite stable while still getting new software versions in a mostly timely fashion.

Do note though that Testing means Testing; it’s not really concerned with being a rolling release distro, but with preparing for the next release, so there’s a few quirks:

• Sometimes, a package you’re using gets removed while its dependencies undergo a transition, forcing you to use the Flatpak.
• When a new stable release starts to get close (usually 6 months), they’ll start what’s called freezes, where they let in progressively less changes until release, after which things start speeding up again.
• As a general annoyance of anything rolling release-esque, software behavior may change over time, meaning a previously good config can suddenly break, and you have to fix it.

Personally, I’ve grown tired of Debian Testing and rolling release in general; while I still using Testing on my desktop, I’ve thrown Debian Stable on most things I’ve owned since then, and if I really need a newer version of software, I’ll just install the Flatpak or use a container.

Persistence should be near impossible; you most likely have a bad habit or other factor that makes you vulnerable. As others have said, check your router settings; make sure your router firmware is the latest to patch any vulnerabilities. Check devices on your network to make sure none are compromised.

My first guess, like others, is you’re doing something horribly wrong with your port forwarding, followed by you’re installing suspect software. Don’t go installing from random Github/Gitlab repositories without at least doing a bit of background research. Also, sometimes even legitimate open source projects get compromised. Ultimately, try to stick to the bare minimum, just stuff from the Debian repos, and see if it still happens.

If you still have the problem, then my last resort is to ask this (and this is really paranoid, hopefully an unlikely scenario for you): do you use your computer in a safe environment where only people you trust can access it?

I mostly ask because if not, maybe someone has physical access to your computer and is pulling an evil maid attack, installing the software when you’re not looking. Maybe it’s a jerk coworker. Maybe it’s a creepy landlord. A login password is not enough to defend against this; it may be possible for the attacker to boot off a USB stick and modify system files. The only way to prevent this is to reinstall and use full disk encryption, which I do on my laptop. You can try to use Secure Boot and TPM¹ to add further protection, but honestly, your attacker just sounds like some script kiddie and probably won’t perform a complex attack on your boot partiton.

1: Despite their obnoxious utilization by Microsoft, they can actually be quite useful to a Linux user, making it possible to set up auto-decryption on boot that doesn’t work if the boot partition has been tampered with (in which case you use a backup password).

What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.

However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.

Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”

As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.

Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.

Personally, I believe there barely is such a thing as “good AI” - I have a dislike of image and audio generation; while I avoid LLMs, I admit they have their occasional uses.

I mean, at least it’s not an AI slop Tux on a clickbait article that says, “Forget Windows 11 - [INSERT OBSCURE, BORDLINE USELESS DISTRO THAT WON’T LAST TWO YEARS] cured my cancer”.

Like, I love Linux, and obscure distros have their place (I’d be cool with a review), but then there’s those horrible articles that mirror the overall devolution into soullessness that the internet has become.

On another note, those same sites with articles like, “Forget Windows 11 - Windows XP 2025 Classic Edition Ultimate is what we need”, with UI mockups where I’d rather cut off my right hand with a circle saw than use them if they were real.

I wouldn’t call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.

I didn’t have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we’d gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a “dumb” TV.

Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I’m almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.