There is no verification and there is no surveillance: You can enter whatever value you want, or no value at all.

It’s exactly like the other personal information (full name, location, phone numbers) you can enter, when you create an account using standard tools on Linux

That’s a lot less likely to be the case; I am aware of just one example of what you describe, and that’s the example you give, whereas I’ve “sped up” my own code many times, by accidentally breaking stuff.

Rather than assume the presence of backdoors, the rational thing is simply to work out why you are seeing a difference in performance, and to determine if you fixed something by accident, or (the more likely scenario) if you broke something by accident

Ignoring /boot, what is the benefit of putting everything else in different subvolumes? As opposed to just one subvolume for / and one for /home, which is what I currently have. It just looks to me like it’d be extra work, but I’m probably missing something

I also saw a 4.5 second boot time speedup from installing mine. I have NO IDEA how, but it’s happened.

If I saw a speedup that I didn’t understand, then I’d worry that I had accidentally broken something. It’s easy to get speedups by not doing things correctly

Typst’s biggest weakness is that the ecosystem is still young, so you may not be able to find equivalent packages to those you’ve been using in Latex. But for me, personally, it has been a joy to use

Hopefully nobody tells the corpos that they can just use BSD if they want a MIT licensed kernel and user-land

Thanks! I've personally been using NTFS drives for stuff that I've wanted to share between Windows and Linux, which (when I set it up) was a lot easier than finding stable drivers for Windows for Linux filesystems

As another European, I can say that it must depend on the country: Just last year, our politicians were discussing changing the telecom laws to require consent, before information is published on the (online) white pages. Though I've been able to opt out of sharing my information through every phone company I've used

What does reminding Windows involve? I also dual boot btrfs, but Windows never sees my btrfs since it's on a LUKS encrypted partition, so I am not familiar with needing to do this

To be honest, they didn’t make it easy to find

Logic gates are hardware, not software

While WinRAR is pretty great, it has also had several severe security vulnerabilities over the years, including one last year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinRAR#Security

Which isn’t quite what you’d expect from “perfect” software