As a sidenote here I have a different issue where handing people your CC info is basically handing out the private keys to your bank account to a third party.
I’d really like it if a credit card would use a public key system where you can verify that I have the funds and that the payment originates from the payment provider instead of getting my full CC details. I don’t really see why it’s necessary for a business to know who I am instead of just getting a green light from Mastercard or Visa to make the payment.
Physical security is more important than software security on laptops. In a public space it’s enough to have a shit password as long as there is one.
For ssh ports or remote desktop connections that don’t use pairing you definitely need a strong password. For local WIFI connections it’s not as important as your WIFI security though.
That’s assuming that a human will ever see it. People cracking passwords either have all of them and then use an automated tool or hack a person specifically by decrypinc a password hash which will take an immense amount of time and electricity.
Still since that’s a concern I can modify the formula. By splitting gmail into g and mail and sticking g at the front.
gcatmail-Dog5
I use a password pattern. I have hundreds of different passwords all stored in my head and all between 10-20 characters long. The trick is to have a deterministic formula for picking a password.
Example: short word + First 6 in url + symbol + short word capitalised + number
Let’s say the first word is cat and second is dog, symbol is - and number is 5 and you have a Gmail it would give you
“catgmail-Dog5”
https://www.passwordmonster.com/ gives it 61 years to crack this one but if you use longer words you get better times.
The problem is not having the monopoly, it’s exploiting it’s qualities. Google for example exploits the fact that they know how much ad revenue each site makes them and thus can rank them higher. They also can rank their own products such as YouTube or Chrome. Another exploitation of their monopoly is that Google is the default search engine of Chrome instead of giving the user choices
There is no issue with YouTube, another monopoly, since it’s business model is driving engagement and making money from ads but not exploiting its position.
Valve is another monopoly but it doesn’t block people from putting their own launchers onto their platform. It doesn’t block you from installing another store like Apple does and in general is nowhere near as all-encompassing as Google.
It might take a bit to wade through the BIOS settings to get it up but I’d recommend a process of elimination based on “Doesn’t sound relevant to the boot sequence” to figure it out. I have a recent HP laptop and I installed KDE Neon on it.
Searching for “How to install Linux on [your BIOS and version]” might also help.
I usually go on protondb and try whatever people tried until it works. Right now I’m playing on nvidia geforce 1050 ti with proprietary drivers on Bazzite and somehow it just works. For games that run badly natively on Steam I switch to Proton.
You might have a different experience than I do since I only play games that are at least 3 years old and never online competitive games.
I think crypto has a lot of potential in this space. You can effectively have a wallet with cash that requires 2 factor auth to make the transaction that is anonymous in both directions.