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Device-wise, have you considered separating your project and personal computer? You could coreboot a small light Chromebook as a personal, ultraportable device, and get a hefty laptop or even a desktop for the hard stuff.

Chatwise, there's Matrix, XMPP and SimpleX at least. And Briar and Session. But Signal with its phone number registration is the easiest for others to jump to.

And yes, it's a constant balancing act between privacy and convenience... and the IA of the security triad, and open source principles. Just like with most things, there's no perfect solution, you just learn to live with the least bad ones.

To me the value has come mostly from "ok, so it sounds to me you are saying that..." and the ability to confirm that I haven't misunderstood something (of course with current LLMs both the original answer and the verification have to be taken with a heaping of salt). And the ability to adapt it on the go to a concrete example. So, kind of like a having a teacher or an expert friend, and not just search engine.

Like the last time I relied heavily on a LLM to help/teach me with something it was to explain the PC boot process and BIOS/UEFI to me, and how it applied step by step on how successfully deal with USB and bootloader issues on an "eccentric" HP laptop when installing Linux. The combination of explaining and doing and answering questions was way better than an encyclopedia. No doubt it could have been done with blog posts and textbooks, and I did have to make "educated guesses" on occasion, but all in all it was a great experience.

Yup! Even just LUKSing a partition is hacky. And I lose things often, so it's an important thing to me.

I didn't realise iodé supported relocking on FP4. I don't suppose it'd also happen to support microG in work profile only, deleted from the personal profile?

Because I'd love to return to ethical hardware from Graphene/Pixel, and the lack of FDE on Ubuntu Touch really rubs me the wrong way.

i was well on my way to Ubuntufying my FP4, and then realised there was no simple, update-proof method to encrypt /home. 😭 As I lose things a lot, and don't want to half-ass or possibly miss something about encryption, that's a dealbreaker for me.

So next attempt, PostmarketOS! After a detour back to Android to reliably update the startup splash.

TIL chemists clearly got confused by D(ex)/S(in) and R(ight)/L(eft).

Yes, please and thank you!

Don't get me wrong, Graphene would still be my choice for privacy & security. But what started out as a quest for privacy has somehow morphed to include FLOSS idealism, even AOSP derivatives feel "too google" now and I feel bad carrying a Pixel.

Eh, users can still learn a little, and fiddle with their personal stuff. My little "corebooted Chromebook running Q4OS Linux looking like Windows XP, with background from Apple and the start menu labeled as Finder" brings me joy every time I use it. It was and is pure fun.

And the great thing about enthusiastic devs is that they tend to be happy to spread the joy of their own personal projects and help, unless they get overwhelmed by help requests.