i already using many alternatives for myself. but for work and hobbies, i still need some of those google apps or social media platforms

I dont really use critical apps on my phone and on some important apps, i cant use them until I update them. So theres not a big risk or danger for not updating them. still there are some apps i update often but for the big all, twice a year must be enough

Yeah, it’s an old laptop. She doesn’t have much money for a new laptop and since she won’t use it often, it’s enough to check mail, e-banking, … And we have some old laptops at home nobody uses, so we thought we could give it to her as a gift.

Eventually, she’ll buy a new ~400$ laptop later with some good specs but that’s not in the next few months. But thanks for the tips.

Wow… thanks for this detailed info & guide! I’ll probably use the HP laptop with Mint Cinnamon, cause I don’t like that old retro look of xfce. A friend told me to try Lubuntu too, so let’s see.

I didn’t know about that Chrome/ Firefox performance “issue” on old laptops, so thank you! Isn’t there a way to disable flatpak at all? Thought on my Manjaro I could disable it, so eventually there is an option there too. OnlyOffice and uBlock were my guesses too. I’ll probably set up NextDNS and KDE Connect too.

1. using an ad blocker. personally, i use ad blockers for years and when i work on a friends laptop im shocked how much ads there are actually. i cant count on a hand how mucn i told my father he should use ad blocker browser and extenstion. and he wont do it. recently, i changed the DNS server on a router level to nextdns, where it blocks ads and trackers. he told me its amazing how smoother the experience is now

2. password managers. as an IT specialist i have about 300 login details for many services, personal, work and clients. every login has its own password and eventually email too. and i know sooooo many people who forgot their passwords (they have about 3 very similar ones but ok) and try them all until they find out they had to creat a new for that specific service. and they are so unaware about the dangers (for example fishing, SE, …) with this method.

I’m using Brave cause I love and need Chromium. Firefox and Vivaldi are great options too.

You could use a PiHole or nextdns.io too as a DNS blocker against ads and trackers.

Had to do these to view some Twitter/X post a friend sent me: I don’t have an account and visiting the link redirects directly to login. So I created a new account with a temp mail. Then I had to solve 10 of these riddles. After the 10th there was an error message that I cannot use this email or so. I asked my friend for a screenshot afterwards. I had a loooong day and it was very late in the evening. I never ever do this again. Shitty SM.

I started using linux by setting up a dual boot: using windows only for things I couldn’t do at the time on linux. That were gaming and some apps only supported by windows After usig it for some time I now have everything on linux (or an alternative) and uninstalled windows. Still in the process of figuring out some very specific stuff like you with your Quest, but someday I just couldn’t have it with windows anymore.

There are a lot of ressources online and some distros are really great for gamers/ newcomers. Just give it a try and some time. You will have to learn some things like you had to with first using windows.

thats why i formated the windows partitions on my laptop last week

my laptop probably has very similar specs to your laptop. also, windows just uses more computing resources than linux in general.

i dont care about if its few seconds faster at booting or has few percents more resources availabe after hours of configuring.

all i need for my apprenticeship is just a windows laptop to work with office365 and a few specific apps, which dont need full resources. but it has to be windows because of domain policy from ADDS.

my apprentice will end in a few weeks and since i wont need these apps anymore tomorrow in a week, ill delete the windows partitions from my laptop.

id appreciate you helping me and others with articles how to get a bit faster windows system, if id asked for it, but i didnt.

i love that comment😂

my laptop is pretty good, its just windows using much resources. yeah i’d be able to but i only use it like 3h per week for one buggy app. its not worth it

similar here. im still ‘new’ to linux but have to use windows for my apprentice. also my father uses windows. so often i have to click a button multiple times, ads, or window not responding, ads, sometimes its slow af. did I already mention ads?

But does this also work for saved locations and not only the location of the device? Since the device location won’t be the car location most of the time, I need the saved location synced and displayed, not the device location.

Thanks for the reply! Although Mapstr wasn’t built for my use case, it provides all the features I need, thanks. I can create multiple locations and give them a tag, and they automatically get shared to others. I’ll test this app in the following days/ weeks and hope it is what I was searching for.

On Owntracks I only see the option for sharing the coordinates. They don’t get displayed on the map with an icon or something similar. I have to manually put the coordinates in google maps to see the location

I have 2 sharing options: via Link or file. But I need a sharing option where I don’t have to manually create and send to others.

Ohh that sounds great since I want to set up a nextcloud server anyway in the near future. I searched in the app marketplace of nextcloud for an app but haven’t found anything matching…

There wasn’t an app called osmplus, but OsmAnd. It is kind of what I searched, except I haven’t found a feature for sharing with my family. But thanks for your reply, it is the best app I tried so far.

Thanks for your reply!

ATAK may be a nice piece of software but the wrong app for my use case. It offers too many features I won’t need, and the setup for it to work is probably too complicated.

I looked into Owntracks (just the app, haven’t installed the server yet) and it looks more of what I was looking for. I tested the list of locations, but the location only gets displayed as coordinates and not on the map. Eventually, I will see some more features when having a server, but idk. Is there like a public server, so I can play around before putting too much time in installing the server?