Slashdot Mirror

There's a plethora of off-the-shelf password managers out there that support encryption but you can also create an easy, DIY distributed/encrypted solution with GPG, git and vim.

There's really no excuse to be storing sensitive credentials in office documents or spreadsheets.

Besides the KDE4 debacle many years ago, KDE Plasma 5.x has seen a lot of improvement, complete rewrites in some areas and delivers a rather nice desktop experience. Being an XFCE user myself, I opt to use only KDEs windowing/compositor with XFCE to spruce it up with a more modern theme engine, appearance and 3D effects.

By April 2011 you mean Gnome 3, right? Then continue using Gnome 2, it is called XFCE. There are also other equivalent "sane" DEs - like Cinnamon and Mate but I do not see there a difference, XFCE is a safe bet.

You can make XFCE look even better by using KWIN as the compositor

It's really come a long way in 5.x, and the themes and compositing are downright beautiful. I do feel it tries to do too much as with most current desktop environments however, or at least it's a bit too much for me. Luckily the KDE Devs made KWIN modular enough to be used with other more classic, lightweight DE's like XFCE - I prefer using KWIN compositing with XFCE. I can get all the theming, graphical enhancements and feel with the simplicity and speed of XFCE.

I've been unfortunate enough to garner a few IoT devices, including a Samsung Smart TV. With a little bit of effort and a decent Asus Router with Tomato firmware I've placed any questionable devices on isolated VLANs so they don't affect the rest of of my trusted network. I can also block or whitelist their outbound traffic if needed.

It's going to heavily depend on the functionality you need. You'd need to explain the needs and usage a bit more. Is there a reason you can't just let someone like wordpress.com run it for you? This alleviates all the headache of tracking down updates to 3rd party plugins, security errata etc. There's enough core functionality with the included plugins (they call them widgets) for most general website/CMS uses. You could try using the free option and if you want a custom domain and other stuff then pay for it.

Since others are mentioning it, on the topic of editors I prefer vim with a few plugins and tweaks.

WTF? I've been a happy t-bird usere since practically day one. I'd be curious to know what other unix/linux users are using for mail clients on the desktop. No, I don't do the web-mail thing and i'm not about to start.

I've been very happy with mutt with offlineimap and notmuch for many years now.

Why would you actually hook these up to a network that has Internet access? Of course you make a separate VLAN or network for your "security" devices and other monitoring, ^H^H^H^H^H IoT devices that can only talk to preapproved connections. That is what a firewall is for.

I put all my untrusted, sketchy IoT devices on their own isolated VLAN via Tomato "Shibby" firmware on an ASUS router. It's fairly trivial to do and worth the effort so they at least can't attack your internal trusted networks. You can also whitelist outbound traffic for an added level of protection.

I've switched back and forth to just about every *NIX Desktop Environment since I started using Linux in 1999, loved KDE 3.x, loathed KDE 4.x until it became stable and used KDE 5.x on and off. The good thing about KDE is that the windowing and 3D effects subsystem is modular.

I'm pretty much settled on using XFCE but I'm using KWIN KDE compositing/3D effects with XFCE for a nice compromise between a 'classic' desktop that's rock solid but with the nice themes, windowing effects and features that KWIN (KDE's compositor) brings to the table.

Have a look at mutt with offlineimap and notmuch.

You can use lynx to dump HTML into text for reading message from the miserable people that use HTML email as a built-in.

I use a combination of mutt + offlineimap + notmuch for mail, local archiving and a very powerful search.

I've been on this setup the past 6years or so. If mutt isn't your thing this approach is modular so you could simply sync with offlineimap and index/search with notmuch.

I've always liked Thinkpad (Lenovo) laptops, they generally ship Linux-friendly hardware and are tough and durable, it's the company default where I work. If you were unfortunate enough to procure the second to last model the touchpad needs some work

Regardless of the make/model you use, be sure to implement hybrid suspend so you'll never lose your work should you run out of battery while suspended. I'm currently using a Lenovo x240 on Fedora 22 with great results, regardless of the spyware shipped on the lower-end models I'll still stick with them for the excellent durability and hardware support until something better comes along.

I've always liked Thinkpad (Lenovo) laptops, they generally ship Linux-friendly hardware and are tough and durable, it's the company default where I work. If you were unfortunate enough to procure the second to last model the touchpad needs some work

Regardless of the make/model you use, be sure to implement hybrid suspend so you'll never lose your work should you run out of battery while suspended. I'm currently using a Lenovo x240 on Fedora 22 with great results, regardless of the spyware shipped on the lower-end models I'll still stick with them for the excellent durability and hardware support until something better comes along.

KDE5/Plasma5 has been very solid for me, but I use KWIN with XFCE only as the compositor/window manager.

A lot of the instability people discuss around KDE5 is actually an Intel bug which features in Plasma 5 seem to trigger on Intel chipsets.
If you're using an Intel chipset and have weird issues, artifacts or instability you might want to try switching to the older UXA driver instead of SNA that's shipped with more recent distributions.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Intel Graphics"
        Driver "intel"
        Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection