[rustcleaner]

Maybe for OpenBSD. These days I am parano... savvy and prudent enough to not trust security swiss-cheese software bare metal, and so I box it all up into qubes with Qubes OS. For Qubes, it's always best to max out RAM, core count, and GPU count (AI). Libreboot laptops don't cut it if you want to run seven isolated chat/social profiles on seven separate VPN/Tor connections while also running LM Studio in an offline GPU-passed qube, to obfuscate cross-profile lexical correlations.

[SoftTalker]

> seven isolated chat/social profiles on seven separate VPN/Tor connections

Bravo for you, but surely you realize that almost nobody does this? Hardly relevant to an article about getting some more useful life out of an old laptop.

[devops99]

You actually don't have to dig too hard to find places where hundreds if not thousands of people are doing exactly this.

[red-iron-pine]

download tor, run tor, go to darknet forums of any kind.

that's about the only use case I can think of for this approach, as well as where to find the few hundred people doing it.

that said, wearing walmart pants and hoodies, a face mask, and using a $200 laptop you got off of gumtree or kijiji or craigslist or FB marketplace at coffeeshop probably works just as well. bragging and laziness gets you busted, not a lack of local LLMs to check lexicon.

[devops99]

Common use cases, are, "as a Developer / DevOps practitioner, I want for":

  - a client (company I do contract work for) sees a different source address that is different than the source address I use for casual browsing+posting.

  - two SaaS used for purposes of servicing agreement with "client" don't see the same source IP address as used for other clients.

  - a bank I use, and PayPal, always sees the same source IP address dedicated to my VPN account only and for this purpose.

  - the tunnel (VPN) provider I use for casual browsing+posting does not see the destination IP address of my client's VPN.

  - whatever first-hop ISP I use sees one single Wireguard tunnel and nothing else ever.

  - the first-hop Wireguard tunnel is paid for with a pre-paid debit card, but any outbound TOR traffic is encapsulated by a secondary tunnel paid for with crypto.

  - the TOR circuit used for browsing purpose A is not also shared by browsing purpose B.

  - any arbitrary outbound tunnel is specific to the container or VM I intended to use but doesn't carry, nor has any risk of carrying, any of my other traffic.

Tor is important to me because I have a right to read.

There is no crime within Common Law for any of the above. Nor is there any violation of any statute for which any of the above is, per doctrine of minimum contact (such as with a pre-paid debit card), within jurisdiction of statute.

Perhaps some users do operate with some concern of being "busted", but most users that do outbound network path management do not operate with this concern.

[terramoto]

Still, hardly relevant to an article about getting some more useful life out of an old laptop.

Its like saying, not good enough for video editing 8k.

[devops99]

In response to the comment further above (so not just the article), outbound network path management is not uncommon. However we often see it presumed to be uncommon by those who haven't thought of it, or have thought of it but the ability to do it is out of their reach.

Qubes makes outbound network path management easy enough but it's not too hard to do on Linux and FreeBSD, so it can also be done on machines with modest compute resources (which may or may not be subject to the machine being an older machine) as well.